Medicine is the foundation of a country. When the founding of New China bid farewell to our dilemma of using "penicillin" (the transliterated name of penicillin, commonly used before liberation), my country's pharmaceutical manufacturing industry developed rapidly. Although we have an advantage in terms of quantity, we are not satisfactory in terms of quality. Good medicine requires good equipment to make it. However, the development status of my country's pharmaceutical equipment industry is really worrying. Low-level and disorderly competition have almost become the industry standard.
my country's pharmaceutical equipment production scale
There are currently more than a thousand professional pharmaceutical machinery factories in our country, with sales reaching 1 billion yuan. In the past few years, due to the GMP certification of pharmaceutical manufacturers, a large number of equipment needed to be updated, providing development opportunities for the pharmaceutical machinery industry. 2002 and 2003 were the "golden" periods for my country's pharmaceutical machinery sales growth. By 2004, the number of companies had grown from 300 to more than a thousand. However, as the GMP certification of pharmaceutical manufacturers has come to an end, more than a thousand pharmaceutical machinery companies and more than 5,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers across the country have formed a 1,000:5,000 ratio. Supply exceeds demand, which has become the current situation of domestic demand. Various pharmaceutical equipment companies have gone abroad to seek business opportunities.
Among the more than a thousand pharmaceutical machinery companies, except for a few key companies, most of them are not strong, the products they produce are not of high quality, and the depth of scientific research and development is not enough. In terms of scale, there are only a handful of pharmaceutical machinery companies with annual output values exceeding tens of millions of yuan.
Pharmaceutical equipment is in direct contact with drugs, semi-finished products, raw materials and excipients, which is an important factor causing drug production errors and contamination. It has been reported at home and abroad that after ultrasonic cleaning of ampoules, vials, and infusion bottles, the skin becomes loose and brittle, and particles are prone to fall off after being soaked in medicinal liquid for a long time. These phenomena are difficult to detect with the naked eye, because the particles that can be seen by the eye are at least 50 microns, while human capillaries are only a few microns. Many undetected particles can block blood vessels and cause blood clots; another example is used for Many equipment for crushing, granulating, mixing, tableting, and coating of solid oral preparations are not made of 316 steel. The welding of these equipment is rough and the weld finish is poor. Through friction with the material, the grinding debris will be mixed into the medicine; As for equipment with transmission devices, it is not uncommon for mechanical wear and lubricating oil leakage to contaminate medicine due to loose sealing.
Three major bottlenecks in the development of my country's pharmaceutical equipment industry
Since the technical content of pharmaceutical equipment is not high and the industry entry threshold is low, when my country carried out GMP certification for pharmaceutical companies, the demand for equipment from pharmaceutical companies increased significantly, causing small and medium-sized equipment companies to emerge overnight. Since most companies have a low starting point and mainly imitate foreign equipment without demanding high technical standards, the copying of the same product has become serious and affected the overall technical level.
Take drying equipment as an example. The vast majority of domestic drying equipment is supplied to the domestic market and is rarely exported abroad. Even if it is occasionally exported, the selling price is not considerable. Although there are many drying equipment factories in our country, these factories are mainly concentrated in several regions. One of the important reasons why this situation occurs is that drying equipment is easy to copy, with dozens or even hundreds of companies producing the same model. If you can do it, I can do it, and if you can't do it, I can't do it either. The instructions and promotional materials of each manufacturer are exactly the same, and the content is surprisingly similar. The patented products are even more unique, resulting in no distinctive products from each manufacturer. Many drying equipment factories produce the same model, and the result is a price competition. The transaction is not based on the technical content of the equipment, but on the low price. As we all know, drying equipment is designed and produced in one piece. Every piece of equipment has a certain amount of intellectual investment, and mental work accompanies the entire process of drying equipment manufacturing. However, in economic negotiations with manufacturers, there is almost no technical content in the price of the equipment, which means that drying equipment is completely equated with general equipment. However, the risks borne by drying equipment manufacturers are much greater than those of other equipment. As a result, drying equipment manufacturers have no economic accumulation and no technology development expenses. It is not difficult to imagine that no new models have appeared in recent decades. On the other hand, the previous unfavorable technical protection is also one of the important reasons for the low enthusiasm of developers. There are no brand-name drying equipment products, and developers have invested a lot of manpower, material resources and financial resources. Once a new model is launched on the market, a number of imitations appear in a short period of time, and a new round of price competition begins again.
Modern industrial production emphasizes continuous production and mass production, so as to reduce production costs and maximize profits. However, due to industry competition and technical constraints, the durability of the products of many pharmaceutical equipment companies is often unsatisfactory. Some pharmaceutical factories of domestic multinational pharmaceutical giants basically do not consider domestic equipment when purchasing. The reason is that the durability of the equipment is too poor. Although domestic equipment has certain price advantages, from a long-term perspective, pharmaceutical factories use imported equipment, which has high efficiency and good quality, and the cost recovery is no slower than that of domestic products.
In addition, there are many single machines in domestic equipment but very few production lines. There are not many pharmaceutical equipment manufacturers that can provide production lines. The configuration of the electromechanical components matching the equipment is also a shortcoming of domestic equipment. For example, drying equipment, a complete drying system consists of a variety of equipment. Drying is a comprehensive technology involving multiple disciplines. In addition to the drying technology itself, it is inseparable from other aspects of knowledge. For example, the heating system involves heat exchange or combustion technology; the electrical appliances involve automatic control technology; the dust removal and purification system involves heterogeneous separation technology; sometimes it also involves environmental protection knowledge. For many equipment currently in operation, the combination of supporting equipment is unreasonable. The phenomenon of so-called large horse-drawn carts is extremely common, resulting in unnecessary waste. The main reason is that when designing the system, the relationship between various parameters and supporting equipment cannot be considered according to the actual situation. For example, when designing a convection dryer, the regions where the equipment is installed are different, and the air volume and heat load of the heat exchange equipment are different, which results in different fan models. There are countless examples of this. In addition, the standardization and serialization level of equipment is also relatively backward, and the interchangeability is poor. Even the interchangeability of equipment produced by the same manufacturer is not ideal. Some foreign manufacturers have numbered the parts and components of all their products. As long as the user indicates which part number they want, they can provide exactly the same parts as the original ones. This is very convenient for users when repairing equipment. The parameters given in the manuals of many domestic manufacturers are not very reliable, and the equipment specifications are too rough and incomplete, which increases the difficulty of user selection.
In terms of appearance, it is even more difficult for Chinese companies to pay attention to their appearance. First, the practice of Chinese enterprises is to examine hard indicators, that is, equipment processing capacity and work efficiency, and rarely examine appearance. Second, domestic equipment often wins at low prices, so it is difficult to add more added value to the appearance, making it difficult to upgrade the appearance of the equipment.
In competition, homogeneity is the biggest drawback. In addition to some general equipment, some special drugs require special equipment. On the one hand, equipment companies need to take the initiative to consider downstream pharmaceutical manufacturers; on the other hand, pharmaceutical manufacturers need to communicate more with equipment companies. But this will inevitably increase investment in technology research and development. In the small, scattered and chaotic pharmaceutical equipment industry, only a few large companies can do it. Therefore, industry reshuffle is inevitable.
For example, in terms of special needs for drying equipment, there are shortcomings in the drying of highly toxic drugs, high-temperature drugs, viscous drugs, flammable and explosive drugs, low-melting point drugs, etc. This has become a constraint for domestic drying equipment to increase its competitiveness and go abroad. bottleneck.
As domestic competition in the pharmaceutical equipment industry further intensifies, phenomena such as product homogeneity and technological backwardness have become increasingly apparent. Foreign equipment is also seeking China's vast market. Amid internal and external troubles, only by conducting self-diagnosis and treatment, and improving internally and externally after the pain, can we get out of the blue sky of my country's pharmaceutical equipment.
