Prospects for China's pharmaceutical foreign trade this year

In 2014, the economic recovery in Europe and the United States was slowly recovering, and the international regulatory environment was further tightened. The pressure for appreciation of the renminbi remained. The devaluation of major competitors such as India will seriously weaken the competitiveness of our pharmaceutical products. The development of China's pharmaceutical foreign trade is facing a severe test. However, with the transformation and upgrading of pharmaceutical companies in China, we have entered the reform of deepwater areas, and our pharmaceutical foreign trade opportunities outweigh the challenges.

(I) The traditional bulk bulk drug exports will enter the long-term downtrend channel. My traditional bulk bulk drug will continue to face severe tests and export prices continue to decline. The growth of traditional APIs in the US and European markets is weak, and the pace of exports in emerging markets has also gradually slowed. Judging from the current domestic raw material distribution, if there is no particularly significant news, bulk API exports will continue to decline for a long time to come.

(II) The transformation of pharmaceutical products will be further accelerated In 2013, the upgrade of the new version of GMP has come to an end. Some new manufacturers of the formulation manufacturers have started production this year, and the export of our preparations is expected to grow rapidly. In 2013, China's biopharmaceutical research and development scale was about 10 billion yuan, China ranked first in the Asia Pacific region with a compound annual growth rate of 32.8% in biomedical R&D investment, and with the recent development of antibody deployment by multiple domestic companies, it is expected that my biologics will grow in the future. Exports will grow faster. Although western medicine preparations and biological preparations are one of the growth points of foreign trade of our medicine, the growth in the short term cannot compensate for the decline of raw material medicines and has little effect on the promotion of the overall pharmaceutical foreign trade.

(III) The export of small and medium-sized medical devices and equipment will grow steadily. China has become a global supplier of small and medium-sized medical devices, complementing high-end medical device exports from developed countries such as Europe, the United States and Japan. At present, quite a few domestic enterprises have certain capabilities in improving application technology, process design, production chain management, and cost control. In 2013, the export value of our hospital's diagnostic and therapeutic equipment was US$8.482 billion, a year-on-year increase of 9.52%. We expect this year's steady growth in the export of small and medium medical devices and equipment to continue.

(IV) The situation of deficits in Chinese patent medicines will continue to be affected by the “EU Directive on Registration of Traditional Chinese Medicines”. In 2012, there was a deficit of 3.97 million US dollars in exports of proprietary Chinese medicines. In 2013, the deficit of Chinese patent medicines expanded to US$27.36 million. It can be foreseen that the implementation of the ban on the sale of proprietary Chinese medicines in the United Kingdom in 2014 will further hurt the export of proprietary Chinese medicines that I have already faced.

(5) The pace of internationalization of enterprises will be significantly accelerated. In 2013, the internationalization of Chinese enterprises will reach a new level. Chinese companies and foreign companies adopt strategic alliances, complement each other, and develop together. With the increasing innovation capability and R&D capabilities of domestic companies, more Chinese pharmaceutical companies will be recognized in the world in the future. Chinese pharmaceutical companies will take a new attitude to participate in international competition and compete for global market share.

On the whole, the growth rate of China's pharmaceutical import and export is expected to remain at around 10% in 2014, and the total volume of imports and exports will advance to the 100 billion US dollars mark.