Indian pharma industry may turn into global sourcing base

Hyderabad: Even as the Indian pharmaceutical industry is grappling with the product patent regime in force, the domestic companies could leverage the emerging opportunities in the changed scenario to evolve into the global pharma outsourcing capital in the immediate future.

While suggesting so, the leading pharma consultant, Dr D.R. Tatke, however, said the domestic pharma industry could attain the coveted status provided it adheres to the intellectual property rights and conform to the global manufacturing practices.

Addressing a round table conference on `Regulations in the pharmaceutical industry' organised by SQL Star and Oracle India here, he said the market for off-patent drugs is expected to be of the order of $60 billion by 2010.

'The emerging huge opportunities could be effectively tapped by the domestic pharma industry if it concentrates on supply of generic drugs to developed markets, enter into marketing alliances and contract manufacturing arrangements with the global drug majors and also exploit the opportunities in clinical trials,' he said.

Dr Tatke, who is also Director of Synthone Laboratories and Consultants Pvt Ltd, said the global pharma market that had seen business of $534 billion last year is expected to grow to $767 billion by 2010, a major portion of which would be contributed by the regulated markets such as the US, Europe and Japan.

The domestic pharma market, which is currently at around $4.5 billion, is expected to cross $25 billion in the next few years, he said.

Speaking on the occasion, the Granules India Ltd Managing Director, Mr C. Krishna Prasad, said process improvement has become a mandate upon most growing pharma companies faced with a situation of an exponentially growing market, fast emerging global opportunities and importance of time-to-market.

Enterprise Resources Management and Business Process Reengineering is no more a desirable objective for all organisations, scale notwithstanding, but has become a necessity.