Innovative drugs accelerate internationalization, generic drugs need to break out of the era of meager profits, investment heat or fade...



2021 is the first year of the "14th Five-Year Plan", standing at the starting point of the new cycle, China's pharmaceutical industry has entered an adjustment period, drug supervision has accelerated the internationalization of the advanced stage, new drug approval and listing has accelerated, and the fourth terminal has been born upward. In the face of changes, how to carry out stable and long-term?

On December 27, at the 33rd National Pharmaceutical Economy Information Conference hosted by Pharmaceutical Economic News, Lin Jianning, Party secretary of the Southern Institute of Pharmaceutical Economics of the State Medical Products Administration, Wang Yiting, head of Jingdong Health and Medicine Division, and Geng Hongwu, a special expert of Pharmaceutical Economic News, made a comprehensive review of the development of the pharmaceutical industry in 2021. The trend of pharmaceutical economy in 2022 is analyzed and prospected.

Lin Jianning: Four highlights of the operation of pharmaceutical economy in 2022

Lin Jianning pointed out that "in 2021, China's pharmaceutical economy has rebounded significantly after experiencing a low period affected by the epidemic last year." The International Monetary Fund forecasts that China's GDP will grow by 8% in 2021. The growth rate of operating income of pharmaceutical manufacturing industry was stable and moderated. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that from January to October 2021, the operating revenue of China's pharmaceutical industry was 2,352.98 billion yuan, an increase of 22.8%, and the total profit of the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry increased by 76.7%.

"This is a welcome increase, but there are concerns." Lin Jianning analysis, the main driving force for the high growth is the decline in sales of hospitals affected by the epidemic in 2020, and after the normalization of the epidemic prevention and control this year, the hospital operation has returned to normal, so chemical agents, traditional Chinese medicine, and biological products have rebounded sharply. Although the medical device industry is still growing at a rapid rate this year, the quarter-on-quarter growth rate has fallen and gradually returned to normal. Overall, the operation of the pharmaceutical economy in 2021 continued to recover, and the growth rate showed a steady slowdown.

When looking forward to the operation of the pharmaceutical economy in 2022, Lin Jianning believes that there are four main highlights:

First, China's innovative drugs are accelerating internationalization. On the one hand, the research and development of Chinese pharmaceutical enterprises has become a new international force; On the other hand, the State Food and Drug Administration was re-elected as a member of the ICH Management Committee, and China's drug supervision accelerated the internationalization of the process, making it possible for China's innovative drugs to enter the world and achieve synchronous research and development.

The second is the breakthrough exploration in the era of meager profits of generic drugs. After several rounds of collection, generic drugs have entered the era of low profit, and the internationalization of generic drugs is a topic that must be considered. Although the road is still difficult, but generic drugs to break through the difficulties, must reconstruct a new ecosystem.

Third, the fourth terminal continues to advance. Data show that from January to October 2021, online prescription drug sales were 15.711 billion yuan, an increase of 201.9%. The fourth terminal will inevitably become the important terminal of drug sales in our country.

Fourth, epidemic prevention and control products serve the world. In 2022, China will continue to contribute to the global epidemic prevention and control, and the export of related products is expected to continue to thrive.

Although the development of the pharmaceutical economy has many bright spots, it will inevitably enter a period of adjustment in 2022. Lin Jianning said that the pharmaceutical industry is mainly facing three major pressures:

The first pressure is terminal growth stall. First of all, the first terminal has experienced significant weak growth under the combination of fee control, two-vote system, collection, DRGs and other policies. Secondly, the second terminal sales also showed a slowing trend. Affected by the epidemic, retail terminals in 2020 showed serious polarization, with some pharmacies closed and unable to sell drugs, while head chains grew very well. In 2020, the growth rate of offline sales of pharmaceutical retail is 6%, and the sales growth rate in the first half of this year is only 0.5%, and the decline trend of the second terminal is obvious.

The second pressure is the waning of investment enthusiasm. Capital has a great role in promoting pharmaceutical innovation, especially after the opening of the science and technology innovation board, China's pharmaceutical independent innovation has moved to a new level. However, this year, Beigene Technology innovation board broke, Inke Medical gave up the Hong Kong IPO should also cause the industry to ponder, which shows that the original financing bubble, especially the high premium financing of high levels of repeated innovative products, has begun to ebb, and capital is rational.

The third pressure is rising prices for raw materials. In recent years, with the continuous introduction of innovative drugs to the market and the inclination of medical insurance to innovative drugs, the market share of innovative drugs has increased greatly, but generic drugs still occupy 68% of the domestic market share. After consistency evaluation, the cost of generic drugs increased. After the collection, the price of generic drugs has been sharply reduced, while the price of raw materials has been rising, such as vitamin E, captopril, cefixime and so on. The price increase of apis has brought great pressure to the entire industry, especially generic drug companies.

Lin Jianning also mentioned that the "Implementation Plan on Promoting high-quality development of API Industry" issued by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology not long ago put forward higher requirements for environmental protection, and the future API competition will be the competition of standardization, raw materials, energy and environmental protection costs.

Wang Yiting: Digital marketing upgrade is imperative

At the meeting, Wang Yiting, head of Jingdong Health and Medicine Division, mentioned when analyzing the current development status of the Internet medicine industry that the epidemic has driven the rapid growth of the entire Internet medical industry. In 2020, the number of users of digital medical services has reached 620 million, and more than 60% of patients obtain medical information through the Internet. The fully released market demand in the 2020 epidemic, coupled with the complete diagnosis and treatment chain linked with the diagnosis and treatment link, has driven the transaction scale of the pharmaceutical e-commerce industry to break the 100 billion yuan mark and approach 200 billion yuan. It also predicts the new trend of pharmaceutical retail under the upgrade of digital marketing.

Talking about the key drivers of the "Internet + medicine" reform, Wang Yiting analyzed: first, the change of circulation channels, online circulation channels are favored by users, efficient distribution and complete categories, building the core advantages of online circulation; The second is the change of user demand, user demand from the purchase of drugs gradually extended to the direction of richer professional services, more diversified; Third, upstream demand changes, in the case of inefficient marketing means in the past, enterprises began to find new digital marketing channels, the core demands of digital marketing pharmaceutical companies.

So, how to build a new development model of medical e-commerce driven by user needs? Wang Yiting believes that "first of all, we should make full use of the drug supply." On the issue of "fast", the current online and offline operation model of medical e-commerce is enough to meet the needs of users' drug distribution, and the key issue is "full". Pharmaceutical e-commerce must be closer to the direction of full category coverage in order to fully cover the different drug purchase demands of different user groups. In the future, this new model of professional service pharmaceutical retail and marketing will become the 'standard' of the pharmaceutical e-commerce industry, always providing solutions around the needs of users, and providing users with a full range of medical health protection with a long-term sustainable service concept."

Geng Hongwu: Forecast of drug collection trend in 2022

So far, China has carried out six batches of drug procurement and two batches of high-value medical consumables procurement, centralized procurement system framework has been basically formed. During the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, under the guidance of the policy, what kind of development trend will China's centralized drug procurement show?

Geng Hongwu predicted that procurement with volume is the main feature of centralized procurement at this stage and will become a breakthrough in medical reform. In 2022, price reduction and cost control are still the main goals of centralized procurement at this stage, and drugs and consumables will enter a new stage of "cheap and high-quality". At the same time, the variety, region, and scope of medical insurance agreements will be further expanded, and the forms of volume procurement will be more diverse. Proprietary Chinese medicines, biological products and medical consumables will be included in the procurement scope.

In addition, the national, inter-provincial, regional alliance VBP, provincial direct network will become the main form. Alliance procurement becomes the direction required by the policy, and more types of alliance organizations will emerge. And classified procurement, different treatment, detailed rules are also the direction of centralized procurement. In the centralized procurement will be treated differently according to the characteristics of varieties and clinical requirements, and more detailed evaluation rules will be established. At the same time, the information system has been continuously improved, and the price and credit evaluation system has been widely used. The price and bidding credit evaluation system has become the requirements of centralized procurement, the standards followed by bidding enterprises and the reference for medical institutions to choose products.

Geng Hongwu also mentioned that the use of big data and expert evaluation can solve the related problems of product quality evaluation in collective collection, effectively solve the difficult problem that the consistency evaluation system can not cover all products, accelerate the consistency evaluation process of drugs, and explore the application in the field of medical consumables. Low price selection, price linkage, integration of recruitment and acquisition, and direct settlement of medical insurance have become hard requirements. Through the lever of payment, the medical insurance solves the problem of long-term arrears of payment by medical institutions in centralized procurement. In addition, the concentration of clinical varieties, production and circulation enterprises will be greatly increased, the business ecology will change, the industry pattern is expected to be rebuilt, and the sales rules will be re-written.