Bartłomiej Rodawski, Adamed: Polska farmacja musi uniezależnić się od Azji

Good day, welcome.

Let me clarify a bit. A medicine consists of an active substance — the most important ingredient — excipients, and packaging. When the pandemic started, we identified the biggest risk regarding active substance availability, because 80% of global production of these substances takes place in China and India. Everything depended on how a given company managed the topic. The risk grew, but that didn't necessarily mean a supply chain disruption. In Adamed Pharma's case, we reacted early — we had a double sourcing strategy, meaning we had two suppliers for each component, and we managed to come out of this problem dry-shod. We didn't interrupt production; we continued manufacturing from the first day of the pandemic and to this day we've ensured continuity of production and thus availability of medicines. However, today I see much greater risks in Europe, from where we source excipients, and we see actual broken supply chains. Even with countries like Germany, considered a model of availability and productivity, we have situations where suppliers cannot fulfill our orders. The war, political instability, the energy crisis, and the ongoing pandemic in various countries have all caused genuine disruptions. We also drove this ourselves — it's a natural psychological mechanism: when I see a risk in availability, I try to secure myself by ordering more than I need. When this spreads across the whole sector, suppliers with their specific production capacities can't satisfy everyone's needs, which further fuels the problem.

Probably so. You'd need to look at the production capacities of individual plants, but generally it's said that Polish pharma has available production capacity. It all comes down to competitiveness — how my drug stands out, how well I can ensure excellent availability, and at what cost I can compete with factories in Asia.

Yes, there are. It's hard to talk about a critical list, but I particularly see problems with substances whose patents are expiring and which are reaching Europe for the first time — everyone is competing for them, so we have limited supply. For traditional substances the situation is somewhat better because we operate at elevated inventory levels — we invested our cash in stockpiles and maintain higher inventory, so we try to absorb any periodic availability problems that way.

Absolutely. If we want to become independent from Asia, China, India, we should promote the development of active ingredient production in Europe. To do that, we need to build the right infrastructure and transfer technology — but innovative technology. The methods used in Asia can be considered, in many cases, less efficient and having a negative environmental impact. If we tried to transfer it that way to Europe, in my opinion it wouldn't work, because we must do it in a way that ensures higher efficiency and environmental neutrality. So these would be very large investment outlays. State support is needed — EU grants, national fund grants — but please also remember that we co-finance these investments. If we have very high inflation today and our profit levels are dropping, without refundation indexation it's hard to say we'll find funds for further investment. So I'd say support is needed in two directions: state refundation indexation and available investment funds.

It depends on what we're talking about — for an active substance with very modern technologies, yes. For very complex medicines, such amounts can certainly come into play.

We are in dialogue with the Ministry of Health and other ministries. We're discussing that the pharmaceutical industry must receive strategic status, because any longer energy supply interruptions create a risk of medicine unavailability. We must not only produce the medicine under specific conditions — temperature, humidity — but also store it under those conditions. If we had a longer-term energy shortage, first we'd stop production processes, but worse, all medicines stored under unsuitable conditions would essentially be unusable. So there's a very significant risk that the entire stock held by market participants would be unfit for use.