Pakistani drug companies rarely bring innovative products to market. Ferozsons broke the mould

The Pakistani pharmaceutical has its fair share of issues: a lack of innovative products that the industry blames on regulatory bottlenecks and price controls and depressed profitability as a result. While there are quite a few domestic companies that are doing well, in the industry, there are few stars and fewer still that have performed well financially by bringing access to innovative products for Pakistanis.

Ferozsons Laboratories is the exception. The company signed an agreement in 2014 with American life sciences company Gilead Sciences to introduce a breakthrough drug for Hepatitis C in Pakistan. Sovaldi, the drug to cure Hepatitis C, was introduced in Pakistan in 2014 by Ferozsons. Previous treatments for Hepatitis C only treated its symptoms and assumed it was a chronic disease a person had to live with. Sovaldi changed that, making it a curable disease. 

Following the launch of Sovaldi in Pakistan just a few months after it first launched in the United States itself, Ferozsons made a killing: revenue swelled to a high of Rs11.3 billion in 2016, from Rs3.8 billion just two years earlier. While the increase in revenue from that drug did not last, the company is hoping that it can continue to rely on Gilead’s innovation pipeline to provide new products to Pakistanis who need them.

In 2020, for instance, the disease ravaging the whole world is Covid-19 and one of the most effective drugs against it is Remdesivir. Like in the case of Sovaldi, the partnership again is with Gilead Sciences for production of Remdesivir in Pakistan by Ferozsons. And once again, the drug might be a lifeline for the company to improve revenues and profits.

The pharmaceutical industry in Pakistan is highly regulated, with the government fixing drug prices. Consequently, margins have remained relatively thin for the entire pharma industry, with many companies exiting the market completely due to high costs of production and insufficient profitability. In such a market, partnership with Gilead has come handy for Ferozsons.