Bitter pill for Big Pharma

By Bhupesh Bhandari

A committee headed by Planning Commission member Arun Maira, the former head of The Boston Consulting Group in India, wants all acquisitions of Indian pharmaceutical companies by foreigners to be scanned by the Competition Commission of India or CCI. The report will now be sent to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Prime Minister Singh is expected to take a final view on the matter after he meets all stakeholders on October 10.

The Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance or IPA, the lobby group for home-grown pharmaceutical companies, has been vocal for a while about the need to review the policy that allows overseas drug makers unrestricted entry into India. The health ministry supports the view because such acquisitions can raise the prices of medicine in the country. IPA has also found support from the ministry of commerce and industry. But the department of economic affairs in the finance ministry has opposed it because it would amount to rollback of the liberal policy on foreign direct investment.

The multinational lobby, of course, will have none of it because it is a journey back to the Middle Ages — the days of protection. Mr Maira too doesn’t want to change the rulebook but wants to ensure that such acquisitions do not lead to any price rise or other restrictive trade practices, hence the suggestion to refer all acquisitions to CCI.

So, is IPA happy with what it has got? Not really, because price rise was never at the core of its campaign. Its argument, and the Planning Commission is well aware of it, is that Big Pharma (the collective of large transnational drug makers) wants to acquire Indian companies and thus kill competition in the generics (off-patent medicine) space across the globe. There is evidence, IPA Secretary General D G Shah says, that Indian companies that got acquired by Big Pharma have scaled down their patent challenges in the West.

Also, they have slowed their “compulsory licence” business. (Developing countries often give out licences for patented medicine to cheap producers; Indian companies have been the main beneficiaries, but it hurts the patent holders real bad.) This is the reason why, says IPA, foreigners have paid huge amounts of money to acquire Indian companies in the last few years.

There is fear that most acquisitions will pass the CCI scanner because the Indian market is very fragmented – about 50 companies share 80 per cent of the market, though the share of the top 10 has gone up from 10.5 per cent in 2004-05 to 19.1 per cent in 2009-10 – and hence the charge of market dominance may not stick. On the flip side, argues ChrysCapital Managing Director Sanjiv Kaul, since there are hundreds of brands for every molecule, it’s not easy for one or two companies to collude and raise prices.

All told, there are almost 20,000 pharmaceutical companies registered with the government, almost 300 of these are of a respectable size. Also, Indian-owned companies take decisions quickly and have lower overheads, unlike the foreign-owned ones, so it’s not easy to out-price them.

IPA wants foreign investment in Indian companies to be vetted by the Foreign Investment Promotion Board which can take a holistic view of the proposal; all investments into new production capacity should, it says, stay on the automatic route. Foreign investment in the sector, IPA says, has focused on acquisitions. In the 15 years from 1995 to 2010, it has told the Planning Commission, overseas pharmaceutical companies have contributed only Rs 3,022 crore in gross fixed assets, as against Rs 54,010 crore by local companies. So what IPA has got from the Maira committee falls way short of what it has been demanding.

IPA may have a point in its arguments. One, the acquisition of Indian companies does not seem to be driven by their ability to produce inexpensive generic medicine — it can always be sourced from them. At the moment, the Indian pharmaceutical industry is producing at only 40 per cent capacity; so, most companies are desperate to recover their capital costs and hence ready to sell at rock-bottom prices. It’s a buyers’ market.

Two, it is not driven by India’s ability to produce new drugs at low costs because the new drug pipeline of most companies looks pitiable. Three, generic medicine from low-cost producers in India, Israel and China is a serious headache for Big Pharma. It has challenged their validity in various international forums. Most large global companies now have a generics arm, and many like to go with authorised generics sourced from friendly companies.

But killing competition through acquisitions may not be the only reason why they are acquiring companies in India. The world pharmaceutical market at the moment is around $800 billion and is growing at four per cent per annum. Out of this, emerging countries like India contribute $225 billion, or a little over 28 per cent, but this market is growing at 12 per cent per annum. So, in the next one year, of the $32 billion additional sales, emerging markets will contribute $27 billion, or over 80 per cent. This is a good enough reason for Big Pharma to pay crazy valuations for Indian companies.