Drug exports rise 93.8%

Exports of pharmaceutical products grew by leaps and bounds in the first half of this year, representing growth of 93.8 percent over the same period of last year, sources from the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) said yesterday.

ITRI's Industrial, Economics and Knowledge Center (IEK) quoted customs statistics as indicating that Taiwan exported NT$1.24 billion (US$40 million) worth of pharmaceuticals in the first six months of this year, up 93.8 percent over the year-earlier level.

IEK analyst Tseng Nian-kuo (曾念國) attributed the brilliant performance mainly to surging exports to the Australian and Japanese markets this year.

Meanwhile, according to IEK, the nation imported NT$15.68 billion worth of pharmaceuticals and related products in the first six months of this year, down 2.3 percent from the year-earlier level.

However, Tseng said exporters will find it even more difficult to export pharmaceuticals into the US as the US government has tightened controls on such imports.

According to an IEK survey, Taiwan's production of pharmaceutical raw materials totaled NT$4.33 billion in the first six months, up 9.9 percent from the year-earlier level, while the production of traditional Chinese herbal medicine amounted to NT$2.41 billion during the same period, up 7.6 percent.

Biomedicine and biotechnology services are expected to yield a combined production total of about NT$21.2 billion this year, an increase of 5 percent over the level posted last year, the IEK survey shows.