Industry revenue of “Human Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Product Manufacturing“ in Australia 2011-2023

The Australian pharmaceutical manufacturing sector has been through some tough times over the last few years. Pricing reforms and resultant cost savings initiatives by manufacturers has resulted in somewhat of an industry slowdown with revenues expected to decline from their 2015 peak of 7.4 billion U.S. dollars to 5.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2023.

Australia is not a major manufacturer of pharmaceuticals or medical equipment with as much as 90% of medicines consumed in the country being imported. In fact, the only product area where it has significant capacity is Vaccines. According to a study conducted by the Institute for Integrated Economics Research – “Australia has almost no capacity to manufacture any active pharmaceutical product for most of the products listed on World Health Organisation's list of Essential Medicines."

This reliance on foreign manufacturers and lengthy global supply chains has resulted in many shortages of late. One such example is the country wide shortage of EpiPen, used to treat anaphylactic reactions in children. With Australia running out of supplies in December 2019, they had to resort to what would otherwise be termed as illegal means, by asking people to consume out-of-date EpiPens.