Because global demand soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, the export of pharmaceutical products from South Korea has already been up by a monthly average of 60 percent this year compared with the first half of 2019. This is according to numbers by the country's customs service. Those numbers could rise even more as the country is gearing up to produce a large amount of coronavirus vaccine doses.
According to Bloomberg, SK Bioscience is expected to produce 200 million vaccine kits by June 2021. The subsidiary of Seoul-based SK Group entered into an agreement with European drugmaker Astrazeneca and Oxford University to produce doses for the duo’s coronavirus vaccine which is one of the few already in late-stage testing globally.
Many of the doses will be bound for export. Different governments have already secured deals with different drug makers for the delivery of vaccine doses. Astrazeneca was actually the first drug maker to commit millions of doses to U.N. initiative Covax, which aims at making access to a vaccine more equitable once it is available. But single country deals – like between Sanofi/GlaxoSmithKline and the U.S. as well as the UK or between Japan and Pfizer have also been taking place.
SK Bioscience is also working on its own vaccine candidate, which has not progressed as far in testing yet. The Gates Foundation is backing the production effort with $3.6 million. Stocks of parent company SK Chemicals quadrupled in value after since June.
