Seeking to end reliance on China, Indian pharma firms go local for APIs
Executives at India's Cadila Healthcare, Cipla, Sun Pharmaceutical, and Biocon said on Tuesday they were aggressively working on reducing the dependence on the richer rival for raw materials.;
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New Delhi: Indian drug companies are looking to local makers of so-called active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) or trying to make them in-house in a bid to end their reliance on China as ties between the two countries soured after a deadly border clash last June.
Though India is known as the pharmacy of the world for its massive production capacities of both generic drugs and vaccines, China accounted for half of its API needs in 2019 from nearly nothing three decades ago, industry data shows.
Executives at India's Cadila Healthcare, Cipla, Sun Pharmaceutical, and Biocon said on Tuesday they were aggressively working on reducing the dependence on the richer rival for raw materials.
Disruption to supplies from China due to the Covid-19 pandemic was also a major factor, they said, as early last year many of them had to scramble for ingredients to make important drugs sold worldwide.
"Because of the anti-China sentiment ... most of the companies are working towards de-risking themselves in terms of making it clear that their supply chain linkages with China are limited," Gaurav Suchak, supply head of Cadila, told the BioAsia conference organised by the southern state of Telangana.
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