Pharma14 is pleased to announce the addition of Ecuador to our list of countries on our growing medicine data and pricing platform.

The Ecuadorian pharmaceutical market embodies the national scale of health supply and demand, and the market is characterized as an industry driven by imports.

Interestingly, the Ministry of Public Health reports that 84.58% of commercialized medicines are imported into the country, comprised of 37.94% European origin, 25.27% Latin-American, 19.71% North American and 1.66% Asian origin (1). With room for growth, the investment opportunities are vast.

Other extenuating factors such as COVID-19 have also played a pivotal role in the rise of investment in the Ecuadorian pharmaceutical market that resulted in substantial increase, in value terms. In spite of this, due to COVID-19 there were also procurement challenges during the peak of the pandemic, with up to 25 medicines having one or more shortages in a hospital at one given time.

Drugs that were in shortage such as tocilizumab were also sold on the black market for up to 5 times the market worth in April 2020 (2).

In the last two years, the Ecuadorian pharmaceutical market was valued over $1 billion USD, surpassing other major Latin-American markets such as Peru, Dominican Republic and Paraguay.

Consequentially, Ecuador is regarded as one of the highest medicine consumer's per-capita in South America.

Most notably, the private pharmaceutical market in Ecuador has witnessed a considerable expansion related to sales in the last five years, with a tantalizing growth of 56.6%, making it one of the more attractive Latin-American markets for foreign investors, especially those who are looking to establish manufacturing facilities within the country.

 

 

 

Sample data: Actemra / Tocilizumab. August 2021 data