"Novartis believes Romania is one of the markets in the CEE region with the fastest growth rates and this is why we want to focus more on this country. We have seven product launches scheduled for next year, in fields such as hepatitis, hypertension, transplants, and allergic asthma," explains Bojan Jagodic, managing director with Novartis Romania, in an interview with ZF.
Jagodic, 36, came to the helm of Novartis Romania in July, after having been a CFO of the domestic unit of Sandoz for three years, the generics firm of Novartis group. Before coming to Romania, Jagodic was a CFO with Sandoz Poland for five years.
Globally, Sandoz ranks 4th, while domestically the company holds a 6.9% market share (together with Sandoz), and thus ranks third among the top players in this industry, with sales of 398m RON (119m euros) in 2007, according to Cegedim data.
Jagodic says one of the first things he did after his appointment was to reassess the distributor network. "So far, Novartis has had a relatively closed circle of distributors and we have very quickly defined the necessity to enlarge the portfolio of our distributors, which should enable us to better serve the market and make more Novartis products available for patients," he says.
Novartis has 58 molecules registered in 167 marketing authorisations, second only to GSK in Romania. The company has 110 employees, with 70 working in the promotion team.
"The real investment year for us will be next year. We have seven new products to launch, and these launches will be felt at the level of market share. We are not expecting significant changes this year," says Jagodic.
In the first six months of 2008, Novartis' top-selling products in Romania were Glivec, Exelon, Stalevo, Zometa, Diovan, according to Cegedim data. Oncology is one of the main areas of Novartis in Romania, and also boasts the fastest growth rate. This year's advance is put at 70% and the rate for 2009 at 25%.
"The market is very competitive and aggressive, with high generic penetration, which also comes out of very strong local pharmaceutical production. Practically all global pharmaceutical companies are present in Romania will a full portfolio and we also know that current Romanian legislation enforces for the Romanian market the lowest price for said product anywhere in 12 reference countries, so the life of people in pharmaceutical industry in Romania is not an easy one," says Jagodic.
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