China’s plan to expand its pharmaceutical industry along the “Health Silk Road” – the routes of trade and investment created by the Belt and Road Initiative – took a step forward on Monday as Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical announced the first phase of its new manufacturing plant in the Ivory Coast will be completed by the end of this year.
When Chinese dictator Xi Jinping announced his intention in the early 2010s to make a series of massive infrastructure investments along the general lines of the Silk Road, he dubbed it the “Belt and Road Initiative” to evoke the ancient trade route. “Health Silk Road” caught on as the nickname for Xi’s plans to expand the Chinese pharmaceutical industry to developing nations along the trail blazed by those infrastructure projects.
Nigeria once supplied much of Africa with pharmaceuticals manufactured by Western giant GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi, a company specializing in polio vaccines.by the Nigerian government’s decision to eliminate fixed prices for foreign currency trading to slow the collapse of Nigeria’s currency, the naira.
Another perk of the Health Silk Road is that even with the high costs and production difficulties cited by GSK, Chinese pharmaceutical firms might be able to turn a better profit in Africa because they run on very thin margins in China.