Country's pharmaceutical export for the 2006-07 fiscal year is believed to have crossed 100 million-dollar mark as the quality standards have been maintained by the local companies, which helped to secure import orders from the international market, industry sources told Business Recorder on Saturday.
Though the official statistics of 2006-07 have not yet been released, the exporters believe that the country's pharmaceutical export, which, according to provisional figure, stands at 85 million dollars, but they are optimistic of a jump of at least 15 million dollars when the final statistics for the 2007-07 fiscal year are released.
"The quality standards of our (pharma) manufacturers have been improved and they are following international standards for manufacturing their products," said former Vice-Chairman of Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PPMA) Zahid Saeed.
"Since the government is following two basic international standards, ie the United States pharmaceopia and British pharmacopoeia, our products do not face any difficulty in the international market," he said. Industry sources said that out of 450 billion-dollar world pharmaceutical market, the share of Pakistan is negligible and could be calculated in decimals.
They said that the procedures of initiating the export of pharmaceutical products in any country were quite typical as these took at least three years to understand and get into the country. "For export to any country, we have to register our products there after which a team comes to the importer's country to check the quality standards, besides other procedural matters," Zahid Saeed pointed out.
He was of the view that efforts of the last four years to explore more avenues for export had now been actualised and this was the only reason behind increasing pharma commodity export from the country. He said the United States was the largest pharma commodity exporter in the world, followed by some European countries and Japan.
Elaborating the utilisation aspect, he said the United States was the biggest consumer in the world as some 250 billion dollars worth medicines were consumed annually, while 70 percent population of the world, residing in Asian and African region, hardly consumed medicines worth 30 billion dollars. Sources said that some 25 export-oriented industries were operating in an organised manner across the country.