Việt Nam’s pharmaceutical industry faces many challenges

Associate Professor, Dr. Lê Văn Truyền, former Deputy Minister of Health, speaks at the seminar. — VNS Photo Thanh Hải

HÀ NỘI — Việt Nam’s pharmaceutical industry still faces many challenges and difficulties in the context of increasingly deep integration with the world, participants heard at a seminar in Hà Nội.

The seminar, entitled ‘Việt Nam pharmaceutical industry and the journey to participate in globalisation’, was jointly organised by the Saigon Economic Magazine and Newtechco Group.

Speaking at the event, Associate Professor, Dr. Lê Văn Truyền, former Deputy Minister of Health, said that Việt Nam’s drug market reached about US$7 billion in 2023, while average consumption was at $70 per capita, ten times that compared to 2000.

“Our country’s pharmaceutical industry has had a high growth rate in the past 10 years with a compound annual growth rate of 7.3 per cent. However, the pharmaceutical industry is still facing many challenges and difficulties, as Việt Nam’s context is increasingly integrating deeply with the world economy,” said Truyền.

The first challenge of the domestic pharmaceutical industry is that the material-technical-technology base is still low. Việt Nam currently only has 17/250 factories achieving advanced GMP (EU, PIC/S, JAPAN, TGA). More than 200 factories meet WHO and GMP standards, but no factory has been pre-qualified by WHO (WHO pre-qualification), according to Truyền.

“Pre-qualification is an important step. With this certificate, Vietnamese drugs, such as HIV drugs or malaria drugs, will have the opportunity to bid and supply drugs for WHO programmes around the world,” said Truyền on July 31.

Truyền added that Việt Nam does not have concentrated pharmaceutical and bio-pharmaceutical industrial parks with an ecosystem including research and development centres, bioequivalence and bioavailability testing, clinical trials and pharmaceutical and packaging factories.

Regarding financial capacity, most domestic pharmaceutical companies are small in scale, have low sales and do not have national-scale pharmaceutical corporations. Besides, digital transformation is also a big challenge for many pharmaceutical businesses. Associate Professor Truyền predicts that the change in pharmaceutical market structure from chemical drugs to biological and biosimilar drugs will accelerate rapidly in the coming years. Due to population ageing and shifting disease patterns, these drugs will account for about 40 per cent of the global and Southeast Asian pharmaceutical market.

Therefore, Việt Nam needs to make efforts to improve research capacity and technology application in drug production, aiming to become a centre for manufacturing, processing and technology transfer; and proactively produce specialised drugs, special treatments, new drugs, original brand name drugs, vaccines and medical biological products.

Truyền suggested that each business needs to consider, adjust and change its medium and long-term development strategy to suit the State’s guidelines and the international and domestic business environment, thereby improving the competitiveness of Việt Nam’s pharmaceutical industry.

Panelists at the seminar. — VNS Photo Thanh Hải

According to Vice President of the Vietnam Pharmaceutical Business Association Trần Thị Thư, Việt Nam’s pharmaceutical industry, is a key industry and needs to focus resources on promoting development.

On October 9, 2023, the Prime Minister signed Decision No. 1165/QD-TTg, approving the national strategy for developing Việt Nam’s pharmaceutical industry for the period to 2030 and vision to 2045 to develop Việt Nam’s pharmaceutical industry on par with advanced countries in the region, ensuring people have access to medicine at a reasonable cost.

Domestic businesses need to take advantage of internal resources to thrive. Small businesses should focus only on key products, avoiding duplication with other businesses that have strengths and more modern production lines, according to Thư.

“Newly established businesses/EU-GMP businesses can target the ETC market segment (drugs distributed to hospitals), with specialized drug products, specialised drugs, generic drugs, vaccines and biological products and medicinal ingredients,” added Thư.

Thư also suggested that businesses should take advantage of FTAs ​​to cooperate with foreign investors, thereby producing pharmaceuticals with high technical content.

President of Newtechco Group Võ Thị Tuấn Anh said that in the context where most pharmaceutical enterprises have low financial potential and scattered resources today, building an ecosystem from product research, applying new technology to the production of pharmaceutical products and developing widespread distribution channels is essential.

Accordingly, the group has devoted financial resources and invited international investors and technology experts to invest in the pharmaceutical and biological industrial park project in Thái Bình Province.

This will be the first project in Việt Nam dedicated to the development of the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry, a gathering place for experts in biotechnology and pharmaceutical chemistry, production investment, technology transfer, training and incubating start-up businesses in the Vietnamese pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry. — VNS