The power crisis brewing in China may throw the Indian pharma market off gear if the situation continues for a few more months, feel sources in the local industry. Indian players roughly import 66-70 per cent of their bulk drug requirements from China.
 
Already, prices of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), raw materials to make drugs, have gone up significantly and there are delays in shipments to India.
 
Sudarshan Jain, secretary general of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA), the umbrella organisation of big pharma players in India, said prices of APIs have started going up. “Prices of Penicillin-G from China have gone up from $14 per unit to $26 in just one month,” he said, adding that India does not have large capacities to make such fermentation-based APIs.
 
IPA members account for 60 per cent of the domestic market and about 80 per cent of India’s exports of pharmaceutical products.
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