People's spending on health was increasingly high giving pharmaceutical enterprises great potential for development, said Associate Professor, PhD. Le Van Truyen, former Deputy Minister of Health.

Speaking to Suc khoe & Doi song (Health & Life) online newspaper, Ta Manh Hung, Deputy Director of the Drug Administration of Vietnam (DAV) under the Ministry of Health (MoH), said that previously a Vietnamese person only spent less than 5 USD each year to buy medicine but now this number increased to 70 USD per person per year.

According to the Vietnam Pharmaceutical Companies Association (VNPCA), the growth rate of drug production by domestic enterprises has increased quite rapidly.

The value of domestic drug production only reached 17% of the total value of people's medicine costs in the 2001-2011 period, and increased to 46% in the 2015-2021 period.

A DAV report also shows that the total value of the Vietnamese pharmaceutical market grew from 2.7 billion USD in 2015 to 7 billion USD in 2022 and is forecast to reach more than 10 billion USD by 2026.

Although Vietnam has developed a large number of pharmaceutical companies, domestic manufacturing enterprises do not yet play a leading role in the pharmaceutical market.

Domestically-produced drugs account for less than 50% of the total value of drugs consumed.

The scale of pharmaceutical manufacturing enterprises is not large with fewer products and low science and technology. Plus nearly 90% of raw materials for drug production are imported.

The reason is that consumers' psychology of using pharmaceuticals still has preference for foreign products. In addition, Vietnam currently has not been able to produce specialised drugs.

Hung said to realise the goal of developing the pharmaceutical industry in Vietnam, continued improvements needed to be made to institutions and laws on drug production, business, import-export, supply and distribution.

In particular, there needed to be a special preferential policy for research and technology transfer to produce invented drugs, vaccines, and biological products, he added.

In addition, it was necessary to implement solutions to improve the capacity to manage and control the market of drugs and medicinal ingredients, especially testing vaccines and biological products, he said.

The DAV representative also recommended promoting research and international relations to develop special treatment drugs.

There should be a specific orientation and roadmap to standardise training of pharmaceutical human resources./.