THE Philippine Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PPMA) said it is targeting to increase the share of the local pharmaceutical industry to 60 percent in the next 10 years.
Higinio Porte Jr., PPMA president, said the local pharmaceutical industry is doubling down on making the industry competitive locally. It is also eyeing to increase its supply to the Department of Health (DOH).
“Right now we are expediting the implementation of the pharmaceutical roadmap. The objective is from the current 32 percent, in the next 10 years the share of local Pharma industry will rise to 60 percent,” Porte said, partly in Filipino.
“And then from the current 5 percent supply to the DOH to 50 percent in the next 10 years,” the PPMA chief added.
The pandemic, he said, paved the way for the Philippines to realize the need to boost the manufacturing of local pharmaceuticals, noting that the country lost supply amid the pandemic when India, one of the countries the Philippines is importing Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) from, stopped exporting as it grappled with a deadly Covid surge. This caused disruptions in supply to Filipino patients.
The Philippines, he said, imports 68 percent of pharmaceuticals and majority of these come from China, India, and the European countries.
The imported APIs, Porte noted, include “excipients,” which he described as ingredients that render tablets thicker, thinner or more adhesive.
As for the contents of pharmaceuticals that are being produced locally, he said, “the only local [used here is sugar, which has been having its own problems] in the past few months.” Alcohol is also local, as well as herbal pharmaceutical material like lagundi, sambong. “But the rest of the synthetics are all imported, we don’t have local manufacturing of API.”
The PPMA head said the high production cost of medicines in the Philippines can be attributed to the lack of “economies of scale,” which in turn springs from a relatively small requirement.
“But if we have economies of scale like simvastatin, active—if you buy 100 kilos of simvastatin versus 1 ton of simvastatin, the price is just one third. But where will you use the 1 ton if your market is small?” Porte asked.
He said that a lot of Filipinos are taking Statin and Sartan medicines. With this, Porte said the government should source these medicines from the local manufacturers. The head of the local pharmaceutical industry said if there will be economies of scale, the cost of production will be cheaper.
Meanwhile, Porte said the local Pharmaceutical industry is currently building its production capacity.
“Currently [for the supplies needed] immediately ng government, we have…like Pascual Laboratories, our capacity utilization is about 50 percent right now. We can double our production without investing so much in the facility,” he said.
However, Porte said the capacity is not being “put to use” as the local market cannot level the playing field with competitors such as China and India.
“They have their own APIs, they have full support of the government in terms of manufacturing cost. They are subsidized,” Porte stressed.
Still, Porte hailed the incentive program in the Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentive for Enterprises (CREATE) law which he said provides incentives for local manufacturers.