Indian Pharmaceutical Industry: Strategies, Trends and Opportunities

Indian pharmaceutical industry is undergoing fast paced changes. The Indian Generics market is witnessing rapid growth opening up immense opportunities for firms. This is further triggered by the fact that generics worth over $40 billion are going off patent in the coming few years which is close to 15% of the total prescription market of the US. The Indian pharmaceutical companies have been doing extremely well in developed markets such as US and Europe, notable among these being Ranbaxy, Dr. Reddy’s Labs, Wockhardt, Cipla, Nicholas Piramal and Lupin. The companies have their strategies in place to leverage opportunities and appropriate values existing in formulations, bulk drugs, generics, Novel Drug Delivery Systems, New Chemical Entities, Biotechnology etc. The industry ranks fourth globally in terms of volume and in terms of value, it is ranked thirteenth. The industry has thrived so far on reverse engineering skills exploiting the lack of process patent in the country. This has resulted in the Indian pharmaceutical players offering their products at some of the lowest prices in the world. The quality of the products is reflected in the fact that India has the highest number of manufacturing plants approved by US FDA, which is next only to that in the US. Multinational companies have traditionally dominated the industry, which is another trend seeing a reversal. Currently, it is the Indian companies which are dominating the marketplace with the local players dominating a number of key therapeutic segments. The market is also very fragmented with about 30,000 entities and the organized sector consisting of about 300 entities. Consolidation is increasing in the industry with many local players building a global outlook and also growing inorganically through mergers and acquisitions.