Pharma funding is bountiful but Iran seek greater innovation

With plenty of money in hand, however, pharmaceutical companies in Iran are rarely affected by the complicated financing rules of sanctions. In Iranian Pharma market, 60 percent of the company funding comes from internal sources while we have 30 percent comes from government. Most of the companies they have are entirely profitable businesses. There’s not much impact from government finance in Iran for any company. Iran also have some of the Lowest prices for pharmaceutical products in the world. According to the World Health Organization, Iran pay as much as 1/3 times less than international standard prices for drugs.Such low levels of spending are not attractive for importers and Multinational companies, but for domestic companies that may have to deal with government support they can gain from free pricing mechanism and use minus 40% of medicine price in European countries, and also for international companies in search of market share and great growth there is insurance against loosing investment. The market is particularly attractive for secondary packaging- mostly heavy biotech start-ups, which are welcomed throughout the Iranian FDA with open arms and open wallets.

ATTRACTING MORE INNOVATION
Iran, in particular, has emerged as a hub of biotech innovation following Novo investment in Iran and strong footprint of government investment. Iran is very successful in promoting start-ups in biopharmaceutical and especially oncology injectable and Insulins. They have a model of larger companies running incubators to help provide business support for start-ups. The MENA area is diverse but Iran is the major area that’s attracting interest, the attention is around lifestyle diseases, especially diabetes, which is going to be a major health care issue in the very near future. We are seeing most of the Western pharmaceutical companies investing in Iran. There’s quite strong brand loyalty for Western pharmaceutical products in Iran that could make it hard for domestic companies to capture market share. (pharmalyze? Business intelligence ).
Foreign drug makers dominate the market while domestic production supplies around One-Third of the market by value. The majority of pharmaceuticals are imported from developed countries, including, France, Switzerland, Germany, the U.S. and the UK. Sanofi, Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc., Bayer AG, Roche AG and Eli Lilly and Co. all have an extensive presence, but only Merck and Sanofi SA and Roche have local manufacturing facilities. Iran is keen to attract more research and innovation and are also keen to attract the pharmaceutical companies to manufacture in country with using government finance to diversify their economies from oil. Drug prices may also be coming under pressure if MNC continue to supplying goods with importation business model, particularly government will add tariffs and put in place value-added taxes for finish goods importation.
We see price harmonization at the moment so companies importing certain biopharmaceutical products would have to conform to this harmonization and in near future all MNC must follow local manufacturing business Model.