In a year of “unparalleled economic and healthcare shocks,” Informa’s Global Pharma Insights says the pharmaceutical industry is still healthy even as “COVID-19’s implications for pharma growth, revenues and the supply chain are still emerging.”
CPhI’s Pharma Industry Rankings & Annual Industry Report 2020 shows how pharmaceutical executives from across the globe assess the state of the industry, ranking the major pharma markets on a range of indicators including growth potential and innovation.
The overall industry index, which is a compilation of the scores across each market, fell for the first time in four years. The index reflects the accumulated scores in five main areas: growth, API manufacturing, finished dose manufacturing, competitiveness, and knowledge of professionals.
While the report doesn’t specifically explain the decline in the overall index, it’s apparent that China’s sharp decline in several categories was a key factor.
“It is China,” the report says, “That has suffered the biggest score decrease of 5.80%, which sees them fall down the rankings into 10th place.” China’s role and its lack of transparency in the early months of the pandemic “has negatively impacted the Chinese pharma market’s reputation in nearly all major sub-sectors,” notes the report, reflecting the views of the survey’s 550 respondents.
However, the report predicts that the effects will be short term. “China’s fundamentals remain too strong. We expect a dramatic bounce for China in 2021.”
Despite the decline of 7 of the 10 countries detailed in the rankings, the report says “many of the leading pharma economies have scored strongly in knowledge and pharmaceutical quality statistics and much of the fall on 2019 results reflects reduced confidence in growth rather than quality.”
The United States fared well, coming out on top in the CPhI Pharma Index with a score of 7.41. Japan and Germany followed in 2nd and 3rd place. In terms of market growth potential, India was the big winner, coming out on top in rankings for the category for the first time. The country, like China, has long benefited from the outsourcing of high-volume production. This year, as Big Pharma and smaller firms sought to de-risk their global supply chain, India became the primary beneficiary of this rebalancing.
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