Keynote Address by Mr. Ranga Iyer, President, OPPI, & Managing Director, Wyeth ‘Globalization – Leveraging Opportunities in Pharmaceuticals’
Pharma World Expo 2009, February 13, 2009, Mumbai


Talking about globalization of the Indian pharmaceutical industry is like carrying coal to Newcastle, as the English saying goes. I’d say it is like carrying sandalwood to Mysore! The pharmaceutical industry is among the most globalized industries in India. Statistics show that globalization is accelerating with each passing year. Indian companies have filed more than 240 DMFs with the US FDA – more than any other country. India has more than 100 FDA-certified manufacturing plants – the largest number of FDA approved plants outside North America. US FDA now has its office in India. There was a time when globalization meant exports out of India. That was only the baby step in globalization. India’s ambitious entrepreneurs have invested more than $ 2 billion in recent years in outbound mergers and acquisitions, creating Indian-owned multinationals.
Chances are that some of the generic medicines you may purchase anywhere in the world today may have an Indian connection. Exports of harmaceuticals today are equivalent to the total domestic sales.
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Most of the multinationals increasingly prefer China over India. GSK is making big ticket investment in China, betting that the future of drug development will be led by China. In his keynote address titled “From Made in China to Discovered in China” at the China Trials 2008 Global Clinical Development Summit in Shanghai, Perry Nisen, senior vice president, cancer research at GSK,emphasized the importance of China with regard to GSK’s global strategy. He said that if GSK’s China initiative is not successful, it is going to hurt the company because it has invested so much there. GSK is not the only Big Pharma to set up R&D centre in China. It is followed by Roche, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Novartis and Ely Lilly.
The Big Pharma is increasingly more comfortable in China than in India. Much of that comfort comes from an increasing trust in China’s patent laws which have been getting stronger. China moved late in 2006 to protect the intellectual property of Pfizer’s Viagra, while Novartis lost a patent case in India over a cancer drug on the ground that it was only an incremental innovation. ……. Henry Kissinger said that a nation has no permanent
friends or enemies -- it has permanent interests. It is in India’s interests, and in the interest of the patient, that we seize global opportunities in pharmaceuticals to emerge as the choice destination for the world’s leading companies – Indian as well as foreign – to conduct
research and manufacture in India for the world at large. Let us capitalize on the opportunities thrown up by the global recession.