Pharmaceutical Machinery: Industrial Overview
Along with the development of pharmaceutical companies, Pharmaceutical Machinery manufacturers are also advances themselves to meet the challenges of pharmaceutical industries. Most of the leaders in the field are looking towards advanced market like US and Europe for their pharma products. As these countries mandate proper validation of the products the importance of machineries which incorporate advanced technologies are also increasing. For validation of the products, the machine also should be fully equipped.
Now the machine manufacturers are upgrading themselves by investing in knowledge. Many pharmaceutical machinery manufacturers often visit in the various countries just to observe the latest development in the machines and to follow latest development.
In addition to this there are also other visible trends can explain committed interest of Indian machinery manufacturers further:
- Machine makers are going for CNC machine to get quality output
- Using more and more gadgets in the machine, like, VFD, PLC etc.
- Many firms are getting ISO approval
- Importing of prototype machines
- Getting CF approvals for machines
- Collaboration and technology transfer
- Expanding to meet rising global demand.
- Investing in HRD by taking professional to meet the challenges of International market.
The association Indian Pharma Machinery Manufacturers Association (IPMMA) also arranges various technical seminars to make people aware about new developments.
Evidently, the Indian pharma machines which have already made a dent in the domestic soil have also started making considerable forays into the Indian international market as well. The growing acceptance of the Indian machines is in the foreign countries is illustrative of this trend.
The Pharmaceutical Engineering and Machinery Sector
During the 60's and 70's the pharmaceutical industry mostly imported machines from Europe for their processing and packaging needs. But the mid 70's saw the country going through a severe shortage of foreign exchange and therefore the Indian government introduced very high import duties and restrictive import licensing policies. This forced all the pharmaceutical companies to encourage some Indian engineering enterprises to manufacture machines locally. This was perhaps the only route for the pharmaceutical industry to enhance production and cater to the growing demands of the domestic market. This was a great opportunity for the Indian small scale engineering companies to provide machineries to the pharmaceutical industry and thus a scenario was created whereby 100's of machinery manufacturers grow rapidly to provide the needs of 1000's of pharmaceutical companies over a period of time. Today Indian pharmaceutical manufacturing cost much lower and this was made possible due to the huge savings on capital investment of plant and machinery besides low-cost technical manpower costs. Looking at the capabilities of Indian engineering companies many international machine manufactures have joined hands with some Indian companies which has helped the Indian pharmaceutical industry to procure further improved Indian made machinery at a price almost one third or one fourth of the imported technology. The Indian Pharma Machinery Industry growing 15-20% annually and there are more than 700 units today, that are supplying machines to the pharmaceutical industry in India and worldwide. There is bright future for Indian Pharma Machinery industry. The machines produced by our foreign counterparts are however, five times more expensive than Indian machines, for the same products and in the same capacity. Because Indian pharmaceutical machineries are inexpensive, people still look to the Indian market for those products. |