Major Development Trends in the Pharmaceutical Packaging Industry: Intelligent Upgrading and Consolidation

Although pharmaceutical packaging may appear simple, it is closely tied to drug quality and safety. It can protect drugs from environmental influences during storage and use, maintain the original properties of the drugs, and also provides moisture-proof functions to safeguard drug quality and safety. Therefore, from parameters such as humidity and cleanliness in the pharmaceutical packaging production process down to the electronic supervision code on the packaging, every single link places high demands on pharmaceutical packaging manufacturers. In recent years, as public consumption levels have risen and market demand for pharmaceutical products has expanded, the pharmaceutical packaging industry has also shown a trend of steady year-on-year growth.

Industry concentration will continue to increase

Pharmaceutical packaging can be divided into outer packaging and inner packaging. Among these, the pharmaceutical outer packaging market is relatively fragmented. With the development of the downstream pharmaceutical industry and foreign pharmaceutical companies gradually relocating their production bases to China, the domestic pharmaceutical packaging industry will develop rapidly, and the industry scale is expected to expand.

However, because there are many enterprises in the industry, the concentration of the pharmaceutical packaging market is relatively low. With the advancement of the consistency evaluation of generic drugs, the upgrading of environmental protection measures, and the rise in downstream paper prices, industry concentration is expected to continue to increase. The industry believes that against this backdrop, leading enterprises with large-scale, specialized production capabilities are expected to benefit. It is understood that in recent years, the market share of leading enterprises in the pharmaceutical market and the pharmaceutical outsourcing market has already increased to some extent.

Main future development trends of the industry

Against the current backdrop, the supply chain of the pharmaceutical packaging industry mainly suffers from problems of low concentration and fragmented demand, and relevant enterprises urgently need to seek new paths for transformation and breakthrough. Some industry insiders point out that intelligent upgrading and consolidation and integration will become the main development trends of the packaging industry in the coming years.

In terms of intelligent upgrading, with the rapid development of the Internet, information technology, and automation technology, the pharmaceutical packaging machinery and equipment upstream of pharmaceutical packaging is upgrading toward automation and intelligence. Against this backdrop, the pharmaceutical packaging industry urgently needs to follow the development trends of the upstream field and move toward intelligence.

It is reported that a leading enterprise in the packaging industry, taking industry supply chain management as its entry point, acquired a company serving the printing and packaging industry that covers a supply chain platform integrating information flow, logistics flow, and capital flow, established a supply chain management platform, and integrated upstream and downstream resources of the industry.

The company stated that by establishing a supply chain management platform, on the one hand, it can improve customer stickiness and expand its relevant market share in the pharmaceutical and FMCG fields. On the other hand, the company has rich industry experience and can provide customers with more value-added services based on the supply chain platform. It is reported that as of the end of 2019, the company cooperated with nearly a thousand pharmaceutical enterprises in the outsourcing field, producing a total of more than twelve thousand varieties of pharmaceutical packaging boxes for customers.

In terms of consolidation and integration, industry experts point out that increased industry concentration will be an unavoidable path for the development of China's pharmaceutical packaging market, and the industry will move toward higher standards and norms.

It can be foreseen that as downstream pharmaceutical enterprises place increasingly higher requirements on the safety and reliability of packaging materials, some enterprises that are small in scale, technologically backward, or have management problems may be eliminated or integrated. Industry concentration will further increase, the capacity structure will be continuously optimized, and enterprises in the industry will further move toward large-scale and specialized operations, while continuously growing larger and stronger and developing in the direction of internationalization.