SEQENS
SEQENS is a world leader in the development and production of active pharmaceutical ingredients, intermediates and specialty ingredients, with 16 production sites, 9 R&D centers and 3,300 employees on 3 continents.
ID: 790576352506-25
Lobbying Activity
Response to Critical Medicines Act
21 Feb 2025
As the Strategic Report of the Critical Medicines Alliance highlights, the European pharmaceutical supply chain is currently facing significant challenges due to its heavy reliance on non-EU countries for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), intermediates and starting materials. This dependency is a major risk to the security of medicine supplies, as APIs are the essential components that produce the therapeutic effects in medicines. European producers, such as Seqens, are deeply affected by a huge competitiveness gap, fierce competition from non-EU manufacturers massively supported by their governments and the lack of appreciation of higher environmental and social standards. For critical medicines, which are often low cost generics, there is no business case for ensuring sustainable of local and resilient production across the value chain and for continuing to innovate in more environmentally friendly and efficient production processes. The Act must aim at reinforcing the role of our manufacturing industry to build an open strategic autonomy while: - Supporting at EU or national level (with proper coordination) the modernization of our industry and its innovation towards greener and more competitive processes - Promoting a local, resilient and sustainable production in public tenders, in trade agreements, in medicines prices - Protecting EU manufacturing facilities from unfair competition from non-EU regions and levelling the playing field by enforcing our EU social and environnemental standards. With this Critical Medicines Act, EU must send immediate, clear and strong signals to its industry which is facing a very critical situation. Not acting is not an option and the level of ambition should be aligned with the needs of our industry. This is the condition for maintaining a competitive and sustainable industry in the EU and avoiding putting our continent in a situation of complete dependency on China and India and for maintaining our industrial and health sovereignty especially for critical value chains such as critical medicines chain. Finally, the Critical Medicines Act must set and monitor clear objectives to measure its strategic autonomy: the % of dependencies on critical medicines, the amount invested in this strategic value chain, the EU market shares on APIs manufacturing, the EU carbon footprint of our medicines (taking into account the imported emissions), the EU competitiveness deficit, the EU trade balance, etc. ensuring that the measures implemented are efficient and support the open strategic autonomy we are calling for. Please fin attached the Advancy report commissioned by SICOS (representing the French Fine Chemicals Industry), which details the situation of our industry in the EU and in relation to other regions with concrete examples.
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