ISLAMABAD / LAHORE: The health ministry has notified new prices of paracetamol, a generic drug for reducing pain and fever that disappeared from the market after manufacturers said they couldn’t make paracetamol-based tablets and syrups amid rising production costs.

The notification, issued on Thursday, came almost a week after the finance ministry gave the go-ahead to pharmaceutical companies to increase paracetamol prices by over 25 per cent.

Before that, on Oct 21, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare Pakistan Ltd suspended the manufacturing of its flagship product Panadol, which uses paracetamol as raw material, saying it had become unsustainable to produce the over-the-counter medicine on negative margins.

On Thursday, the Pakistan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PPMA) welcomed the increase in paracetamol prices but demanded the government also increase the prices of other medicines whose manufacturing has become unviable in the face of rising production.

Pack of 200 tablets of 500mg to cost Rs470; OICCI says leading pharma firms leaving Pakistan amid delays in ‘fair compensation’ for cost hikes

According to the notification, seen by Dawn, the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (Drap), with the government’s approval, has fixed the maximum retail prices of paracetamol and allowed its sale at new rates.

It said a packet of 200 paracetamol tablets (500 milligrams) would be sold for Rs470, translating into Rs2.35 per tablet. Besides, a packet of 100 tablets of paracetamol plus caffeine (500mg/65mg) will be sold for Rs275, or Rs2.75 per tablet. Paracetamol’s suspension (160mg/5ml) having a 120ml bottle will be sold for Rs117.60.

PPMA Chairman Syed Farooq Bukhari welcomed the price revision and hoped it would ensure paracetamol’s uninterrupted supply and end its sales on the black market at exorbitant prices.

‘Leading firms leaving Pakistan’

Meanwhile, the Overseas Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry (OICCI) has said that long delays in fair compensation for cost hikes had led two leading multinational pharmaceutical companies — Sanofi and Bayer — to wind up their businesses from Pakistan, something the chamber said would adversely affect the foreign direct investment (FDI) coming into the country.

In a recent letter to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, the OICCI said its members in the past 10 years had invested over $21 billion in Pakistan from their own resources to promote the country as a destination for FDI, considering it was getting less than one-third of its potential.

The foreign investors in Pakistan who are members of the OICCI found it difficult to smoothly run their operations due to “prevailing uncertainty in the business environment and lack of timely decision making by various government authorities”, OICCI President Ghias Khan explained in the letter.

“Pharmaceuticals and oil marketing companies, in particular, have genuine concerns which … need to be addressed on priority so as to boost the confidence of leading, existing and potential, foreign investors in Pakistan,” he said.

The OICCI said that denying “legitimate price increase” to global research-based pharmaceutical companies represented in Pakistan — such as GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott, Novartis and Pfizer — was one of the most critical issues for foreign investors.

These companies, according to the chamber, also wrote to the health ministry and Drap to seek a one-time, across-the-board increase in drug prices to mitigate the severe impact of the rupee’s devaluation and rising inflation on the industry.

“Given that medicine prices in Pakistan are the lowest in the region, the long delays in fairly compensating for cost increases have led some of the foreign partners, like Sanofi of France and Bayer of Germany, to announce their exit from Pakistan and others may also be considering a similar course of action,” the letter reads.

Published in Dawn, November 4th, 2022