British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) decided to close down its operation in Bangladesh for failure to launch “appropriate” drugs in the market.
“It was in our mind how to fill up the portfolio gap, but we could not do that,” he said.
GSK Bangladesh Chairman M Azizul Huq came up with the statement at a news briefing in Dhaka on Friday, reports bdnews24.com.
Earlier on Thursday, the company announced that they will close down the pharmaceutical operations in Bangladesh. But its main consumer healthcare products will stay in the market.
A press conference was arranged on Friday to explain the reasons behind the announcement of closure.
“We are a global company. Our business model is that we’ll do a research and get a unique product out of our research which will meet unmet need [of drugs] and we will distribute it across the world,” the chairman explained.
“But in Bangladesh our products are (very) old and cheap. We could not fill up the portfolio gap. And we don’t have any drugs in the pipeline to fill up that gap,” he said.
However the company promised to compensate nearly 1,000 of its workers properly, and the pneumonia vaccines, which the government buys via the UN’s wing for children UNICEF, will continue to be available in Bangladesh.
But the argument of “unsustainable” market comes as a surprise as Bangladesh is known to be a perfect market for drug sellers with its 160 million population, increasing purchasing power, a shift of diseases from acute to chronic, and rising ageing population.
Global data suggest Bangladesh's pharmaceutical sector can grow at 15 per cent for the next five years with its growing domestic market that can meet 98 per cent of the local demand and export to 127 countries.