| By Linda Yao, Asia Manufacturing Pharma |
| Friday, 30 May 2008 |
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A source at the 60th API China, China's leading exhibition for the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector covering the complete spectrum of products from raw materials, intermediates and ingredients to processing and packaging machinery, said that the growth |
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rate of the country's active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) exports has held at over 20 percent for several consecutive years. This production growth rate is higher than that of the entire pharmaceutical sector.
Though products featuring a high production volume and a wide range of applications in addition to export advantages have entered a rising price cycle, excessive competition that these products are faced with is taking shape.
Statistics show that inventories across China’s pharmaceutical sector |
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increased 21.2 percent between January and February 2008 compared with the same period of last year. The reason for the increase was the excessively high prices, which brought about a wait-and-see attitude taken by some buyers.
However, as there is some rigid demand for APIs, China’s exports of APIs when measured by value is growing faster than the exports measured by volume.
As to its API export markets, China has a complex relationship with India. On the one hand, India is China’s largest API export market. On the other hand, India is China’s biggest API rival. Customs data show that, during 2007, China-made API products exported to India accounted for 14 percent of China’s total API export value, second only to the value of those exported to the United States. More than 70 percent of some API intermediates made in China, including CGLE, were |
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exported to India.
Most pharmaceutical companies are upbeat about the status of the API market during the second half of 2008, according to the source. Looking into the future, many of them expect raw materials to be in short supply in the second half of this year for a variety of reasons while the domestic market expands because of the country’s policy adjustments.
Analysts indicated that China’s new policies on environmental protection combined with the appreciation of the yuan will take a toll on the country’s API production and exports. However, new policies on rural cooperative medical care are expected to fuel the domestic market’s demand for drugs, the analysts said.
During 2007, a number of pharmaceutical companies suffered losses and the total losses grew 19.4 percent year-on-year.
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