India’s pharmaceutical exports has registered a negative growth of 4 percent during the first five months of the financial year 2017-18, mainly due to increased regulatory issues along with pricing pressure in global markets. Udaya Bhaskar, the Director General of the Pharmaceuticals Export Promotion Council of India (Pharmexcil), has said that the pharma exports to other countries declined by 7.9 percent during the April-July period, while recovered to 4 percent in the month of August leaving the overall growth at minus 4 percent till August this year.
Bhaskar has pointed out that pricing pressure is one of the factors for decline in exports. He also noted that factors such as import alerts by US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) on Indian plants, regulatory issues and currency fluctuation, also contributed to downward growth. However, he hoped that the overall exports will recover and come into positive zone for the full year as exports are expected to take an uptick from September.
Pharmexcil’s Director General further said that initially, rollout of Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime also created some confusion among the manufacturers leading to stoppage of production by some companies, but now they are seeing some growth. According to statistics, India exported $16.90 billion worth of pharma products during 2015-16 and the same was slightly declined to $16.64 billion in 2016-17.