Pharma industry seeks urgent price hike for 262 drugs amid rising costs

The Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association (PPMA) said the cost of producing medicines had risen sharply due to the depreciation of the rupee, inflation, and higher utility and raw material prices.

"The revision in prices of these medicines had become highly essential as the last time such an increase had been allowed by the government the value of the dollar was less than Rs 200," PPMA chairman Mian Khalid Misbah-ur-Rehman said at a press conference in Karachi. “In addition to the phenomenal increase in the dollar exchange rate, the production cost of medicines has increased manifold due to record inflation.”

Rehman warned that more multinational drug producers would be left with no option but to wind up their businesses if the government unnecessarily kept on delaying the decision to allow an increase in the prices of medicines whose hardship cases had been pending with the authorities for long.

“The number of multinational pharmaceutical companies in Pakistan has already significantly decreased over the past many years as any further reduction in their number will go against the current efforts of the government to attract foreign investment to Pakistan,” he said.

Rehman said over 100 essential drugs were already unavailable in the market as any further increase in the number of missing medicines would be a serious disservice to the patients in the country.

“The patients in such a scenario rely on spurious and smuggled drugs when the locally produced medicines aren’t available in the market.”

He said that the sustainability of the local pharmaceutical industry, which had been meeting up to 95 percent demand for medicines in the country, would be seriously threatened if the government didn’t review its drug pricing system.

“We have been constantly calling upon the government to pay heed to the ground realities affecting the drug producers in the country as the long-pending hardship cases of medicines should be expeditiously disposed of as per the law,” said the PPMA chairman.

He said the drug producers like any other industry in the country had been facing the serious challenge of constant increases in the cost of doing business due to phenomenal hikes in electricity, gas, labour, and raw material rates.

“The Pakistani medicine producers couldn’t produce any more medicine whose maximum retail cost has been frozen for the past over two years.”

Rehman said the pricing system should effectively work in the case of the local pharmaceutical industry as up to 95 percent of raw materials of the medicines were imported whose prices increased with the devaluation of the rupee.

He said that annual pharmaceutical exports of Pakistan stood at around merely $300 million as it could be increased to $5 billion but for this, the government should consistently implement favourable policies for the drug industry allowing it to adopt state-of-the-art production technologies.