Mr. Ade Popoola is a member of the Nigerian Representatives of Overseas Pharmaceutical Manufacturers (NIROPHARM). In this interview with Dorcas Egede, he sheds light on the poor fortunes of the nation’s pharmaceutical sub-sector currently experiencing the bitter pill of coronavirus. Excerpts:
How is the Covid-19 outbreak affecting business in the pharmaceutical industry?
“First, the instability is affecting business and then the uncertainty is making people weary. Secondly, India stopped shipment of some products to Nigeria including Active pharmaceutical Ingredients, API which has now caused some scarcity and also caused us stock out. So, we cannot supply the market as appropriate. Now, there’s job insecurity.
“Thirdly, the price of raw materials from Nigeria, India and China has gone up by more 50% in the last two weeks, which will impact the prices of our finished products, that’s another challenge. Fourthly, some of the products we ordered could not be dispatched from China because some of the regions were on lockdown for so long, so they just started manufacturing. Drug scarcity and shortages have started to rare up its head and the implication of that is that products will not be available to sell, we will not be able to achieve our 2020 budgetary expectation in terms of sales and the industry might be forced to start looking at staff strength, can I keep up with day to day running? And the most dangerous aspect is that I hope the country will not be on lock down. If it happens, that will be a wipe out.”
How much has the industry lost in terms of turnover?
“What we are selling now is what we have in the warehouse as at December. But the warehouse is nearly empty now, so we might lose like 25% of our turnover by half of the year and by the end of the year, we may only achieve 50% of our estimated turnover.”
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