KUALA LUMPUR (July 14): The current shortage of pharmaceutical products in the market is temporary and the situation is expected to return to normal within a couple of months, said Duopharma Biotech Bhd.
Group managing director Leonard Ariff Abdul Shatar said the shortage is due to various factors including under-forecasting of imported supplies, supply chain disruptions and foreign exchange movements.
"My suspicion is that within a month or two you will see a level of normalisation in terms of availability of pharmaceutical products," he said at a press conference on Thursday after Duophrama signed a collaboration agreement with US-based foodtech company The Live Green Co.
"I dont think it's anything that the consumers need to be worried about. Yes there are products of ours that are more difficult to get but I also know that quite a number of other products are slowly recovering in terms of availability into the market," he added.
Noting that the forecasting of imported supplies for the industry is done six to nine months in advance, Leonard Ariff said: "If you turn the clock back, we were in the middle of a Movement Control Order. People were putting in the forecast at a certain quantity, did not know we would move into an endemic phase, did not know the economy would reopen up, did not know what variants would be coming about.
"Now obviously that quantity has been shown by the market is insufficient but that's something that can be adjusted in the near term. It's transitional, not something that is problematic in the long term."
As for disruptions to the supply chain, Leonard Ariff said various local manufacturers would have their respective views to address the issue.
He said lockdowns in China have also disrupted supplies to some level, given that the country is a large supplier of raw materials for the pharmaceutical industry in Malaysia, but the situation is normalising now.
The third reason for the supply shortage is the fall in the value of the ringgit against the US dollar, he said, noting that the local unit has over the last four to six months depreciated significantly more against the greenback compared with the likes of yen, yuan, Australian dollar and Euro.
"Now we end up with most manufacturers in Malaysia having a double whammy. One is the absolute US dollar cost of the raw materials that has gone up, made worse by the fact that the exchange rate has operated relatively to the US as most of our imports are in the US dollar. We've actually suffered as a result," he added.
At the time of writing, the ringgit was trading at 4.444 against the US dollar, yen (3.1910), yuan (0.6585), Australian dollar (3.0021) and Euro (4.4543).