Azerbaijan is holding negotiations to create pharmaceutical plants jointly with Turkish and Ukrainian companies, Shahin Mustafayev, Azerbaijani economy minister and chairman of the country’s Tariff (price) Council, said.
Mustafayev noted that currently those Turkish and Ukrainian companies were preparing business plans and documents on technical justification of their projects.
“Meanwhile, work is being carried out to attract European companies to Azerbaijan”, he said, adding that a delegation of Azerbaijan’s Economy Ministry visited Germany and Switzerland, where it had negotiations with potential partners.
The companies expressed interest in cooperation with Azerbaijan in production of medicines, added the minister.
“For example, some companies expressed interest in creation of packaging enterprises for the patented drugs to be produced in our country”, Mustafayev said. “Along with the construction of pharmaceutical plants, investors are also interested in other medical areas, for example, currently work is underway to implement a project on production of single-use syringes”.
He reminded that the groundbreaking ceremony of a joint Azerbaijani-Russian pharmaceutical plant was held in November 2016 in Azerbaijan’s Pirallahi Industrial Park.
“Leading companies of Germany and Italy are engaged in engineering work at the plant and the project’s cost is estimated at $74 million”, Mustafayev noted, adding that the plant would produce medicines of various pharmaceutical groups, including anticancer, antifungal, antiemetic, antiviral and other drugs.
He also said the plant’s capacity would be 22.5 million packages or 500 million pills and capsules.
The minister added that it was also planned to lay the foundation of an Azerbaijan-Iran joint pharmaceutical plant in January.
The enterprise will at the first stage start producing pills and capsules, at the second stage – ampoules and vials, at the third stage – a more expanded range of antibiotics.
The cost of the first stage is $20.5 million and it is planned to produce 84 various types of painkillers, antibiotics, antiallergic, gastrointestinal, antifungal and other medicines within the first stage, he added. (Trend/Business World Magazine)
