During the years that Syria was all but cut off from the world, the country’s national industries rose to the challenge of producing and supplying all necessary commodities. The government encouraged private investment, and thus grew a high-quality pharmaceutical industry.
With a successful career in medical research and experience in opening his own clinical laboratory, Dr. M. Haysam Alkamal sought out and found partners to establish a pharmaceutical company. Created in 1989,
National Company for Pharmaceuticals Industry, or
NCPI, began producing soon after.
From square one, Dr. Alkamal, managing director, enforced good manufacturing practice (GMP), an act that caught the attention of foreign companies. Today, NCPI manufactures pharmaceutical products for French company Servier as well as for Zina Pharma of Switzerland. NCPI is now in talks with pharmaceutical companies in Greece to produce bulk for them and labeled under their names.
NCPI has achieved not only international recognition, but also international quality certificates, an asset that is aiding the company to export its world-class products to a greater number of markets abroad.
As for competition at home in Syria, although the newly opened market will allow foreign-made pharmaceuticals to enter, Dr. Alkamal doesn’t fear for the future of his company’s products. If anything, imports “will foster our efforts to achieve better quality when there is such competition,” he says. “Our products now are very similar to the European standards of products, so why should we fear importing? The income of Syrians is not so high, so they always look for cheaper prices with the same qualities, so I don’t think that this will be a problem for us internally.”
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