CPhI releases findings of Indian market report

CPhI has released the findings of its 2017 India Pharma Market Report, identifying improved international repute of India but an urgent call for government support for investment in active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) facilities.

The report highlights a two-tier manufacturing market in the country and predicts that acquisitions by Indian companies will increase. However, the opinion of the respondents was that more investment by the government needs to be made in API sites.

Opinions from 500 domestic and international companies were incorporated in the report, which revealed four main areas of investment for Indian pharma companies. These included raising funds for ‘commercial scale and scale-up facilities’, ‘continuous processing’, ‘biologics’ and ‘aseptic/sterile’.

However, over the next three years, the report found that there will be an increase in the number of companies planning to invest in biomanufacturing facilities and more expensive facilities and capabilities needed for continuous processing and biomanufacturing are being added to India’s traditional base of commercial-scale finished-product facilities.

Additionally, a little over a third (36%) of Indian pharma companies are planning acquisitions with a fifth of those looking at facilities in the US and Europe and 7% looking at options in the rest of the world.

Furthermore, the report highlighted that the international reputation of India on ‘data integrity’ has improved greatly with nearly everyone agreeing that the CDSCO certification programmes and initiatives are helping increase compliance. Half of the international respondents, also stated that they believed the CDSCO is becoming comparable with the regulatory standards of the EMA and FDA.

A major concern from Indian companies revealed in the report was that there is currently an over reliance on Chinese ingredients in the finished formulations sector with most believing the government should support the Indian API sector to secure the generics market share.

Finally, the report demonstrates that biosimilars and the biologic sector is new hotbed of national innovation, which will lead it to see above-market growth in the country. As more biologics come off-patent, opportunity for increased profits in this sector is growing.

“CPhI India has seen dramatic changes in the last couple of years as increasingly all of world pharma is attending and domestic companies are investing in new types of manufacturing equipment and even biologics,” said Rutger Oudejans, brand director, Pharma — UBM EMEA. “It is an extremely dynamic market with standards and its global reputation catching-up with the on-the-ground realities. This year we anticipate an enormous 40,000 attendees and we expect the number of multinationals and new innovations emerging out of the country to accelerate. Frankly, we were taken aback by the overwhelming positivity of our report’s findings, with only supply chain ingredient concerns identified as a potential drag on growth.”

CPhI India will be taking place between 27–30 November in Mumbai.