THE Competition Commission of Pakistan (CCP) has created the pharmaceutical export promotion committee without any of the national pharmaceutical firms as members.

This has been done to help end the monopoly of a few companies in pharmaceutical sector. These companies call themselves multinationals because they sell foreign company products, although these companies are owned by Pakistanis.

These few companies have the highest retail prices for medicines and all other national companies are not allowed the same high price by the Drug Regulation Authority of Pakistan. These companies make more money and, therefore, can spend more money on research and personnel. Thus, they also have the highest sale.

This monopoly in price has allowed these companies to capture 80 per cent of the market in Pakistan.

Just by ending this monopoly and allowing all firms the same price we can make significant improvement in all national pharmaceutical companies and their allied supply chains, helping them improve income of thousands of Pakistanis.

The government is urged to end the monopoly of a few pharmaceutical companies.

S. Baseer
Peshawar

Published in Dawn, November 8th, 2019