by Roberto Iotti article19 April 2013
It does not appear in many economic rankings dedicated to made in Italy. Yet together with fashion, wood furniture, food and ceramics, pharmaceuticals is one of the most solid pillars of Italian industry. But in manufacturing, pharma is also the sector with the highest rates of innovation, investment in research, development and production technology, with the most marked shares of internationalization and exports. A true flagship, which however is losing petals in a worrying way due to its main peculiarity: that of having the State as its number one customer. A State for years grappling with the puzzle of public accounts, which - as repeatedly emphasized by Farmindustria and its associates - has never hesitated to inflict drastic cuts to the budgets dedicated to pharmaceuticals.
With a first, macroscopic result: from 2006 to today the number of employees has dropped by as much as 11 thousand units. It is no coincidence that more than one pharmaceutical industrialist uses the paradox of therapeutic obstinacy to describe this continuous action of impoverishment. In Italy, the pharmaceutical industry is represented by approximately 170 production plants with over 64,000 employees (90% of university graduates and diploma holders), of which 6,000 are employed in research and development. According to Istat, pharmaceutical companies are the most competitive of Made in Italy manufacturing: taking the average of all manufacturing as 100, pharma is over 150, with a production capacity second in Europe only to Germany. The production value is 26 billion euros, while the export quota is 67%. And it was precisely from abroad that a strong positive signal arrived in 2012 with growth of 12.5%. In the last three years, exports have grown more than those of the other EU15 countries (+35% compared to Europe's +19%).
The domestic market, on the other hand, is in constant decline with -2.7% in 2012. Without the export quota, production in the same year would have collapsed by 5.3 percent. Two last data to be collected on the identity card of the Italian pharmaceutical industry. The first: 60% of active companies are foreign-owned, the remaining 40% are national, small and medium-sized but highly specialized companies.
The second: every year the sector invests 2.4 billion, half of which in research and development and half in new high-tech production plants. A non-secondary aspect, because the hi-tech related industries that gravitate around the drug industry are worth, according to a very recent survey by BCG, over 60,000 employees with an export that reaches 95% of production. That is, high technology made in Italy installed all over the world.
