Health & Beauty

According to Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation, a few days ago, Kracie Holdings of Japan announced that its Kracie Pharmaceuticals will build a new factory in China to manufacture raw materials for Chinese medicines.

This is the second Japanese pharmaceutical company recently to announce that it will invest in traditional Chinese medicine in China. Previously, Tsumura, Japan's largest Chinese medicine company, together with its partner Ping An of China, planned to establish a joint venture with Wuhan Jianmin.

Kracie Group is most famous for children's biscuits in China. But in fact, the company has long established a Chinese medicine manufacturer in China: Qingdao Huazhong Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. The second plant to be built this time is located in Weihai, Shandong Province, and is planned to be put into use in the autumn of 2023.

According to the Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation Report, the new factory of Kracie Pharmaceutical, a Japanese enterprise, will be mainly responsible for crushing the raw materials of Chinese medicine and producing kudzu root extract. It is planned to produce 400 tons of kudzu root soup extract powder every year, and the final product will be manufactured by the factory in Takaoka, Toyama Prefecture, Japan. Kracie predicted that after the completion of Weihai Plant, its total production capacity of Gegen raw materials will be expanded by 40%.

Gegen Tang is an authentic ancient Chinese recipe, which is now being watched by Japanese pharmaceutical enterprises to build factories in China to control upstream raw materials. At the same time, many pharmaceutical enterprises in China are increasingly far away from the goal of "integrity and innovation" of traditional Chinese medicine.

Pueraria root soup as the main product

Kracie Pharmaceuticals is a company owned by Kracie Holdings and is known as the largest manufacturer of non prescription Chinese medicines in Japan.

According to the import and export data observation report of Huacheng, there are mainly nine Chinese herbal medicines sold, including Danggui Shaoyao Powder, Gegen Decoction, Bawei Dihuang Pill, Liushen Pill, etc. Among them, the cold medicine series developed with Pueraria as the core ingredient are its main products, including Gegen decoction extract EX tablets, Gegen decoction extract granules, Gegen decoction oral liquid, etc., whose main function is cold.

In fact, "Gegen Tang" is a famous recipe in the Treatise on Febrile Diseases by Zhang Zhongjing, a medical sage in the Eastern Han Dynasty, and is called "the first recipe to penetrate the surface and dispel evil". A large number of clinical studies have shown that Gegen Decoction can effectively relieve fever, headache, body aches, thirst and other symptoms, and shorten the course of the disease. Modern pharmacological studies have confirmed its antiviral, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antipyretic, immune regulation and other effects.

Among Chinese pharmaceutical enterprises, only Ruiyang Pharmaceutical and Nanjing Xingyin Pharmaceutical have three batches of Gegen soup products. Among them, Ruiyang pharmaceutical's Gegen Decoction granules are well-known. It is a national class III new drug of traditional Chinese medicine and a national protected variety of traditional Chinese medicine. It has been listed in the list of COVID-19 prevention and treatment drugs in Hubei, Shandong, Guizhou and other provinces. In August 2018, Gegen Tang granules were converted to OTC, and the growth rate of retail market sales was quite ideal.

However, in the domestic social software, using "Gegen soup" as the key word search, we can find that many young people take the purchase of Chinese herbal medicine Gegen soup in Japan as the trend. The products of Gegen soup in Tsumura, Japan, are called "Japanese hundred year old Chinese herbal medicine" and "Japanese royal articles". There are also many supporters of Kracie's Gegen soup. Huacheng's import and export data observation report.

Traditional Chinese medicine is not popular, but it becomes a popular online product when Japanese enterprises make "Chinese medicine". This phenomenon is not uncommon, and it is thought-provoking.

When Kracie Group established Qingdao Huazhong Pharmaceutical in 1988, it was also called "Japan Zhongyuan Textile Co., Ltd.". This is an old Japanese textile enterprise, which was founded in 1887. It was reported by local media in Qingdao in 2006 that when the Japanese army occupied Qingdao in 1938, the local yarn factory was rebuilt. Zhong Yuan Textile led the construction of the "Zhongyuan Grand Fifth Factory", which was later Qingdao National Cotton Factory No. 6.

Today, Kracie continues to invest in the establishment of traditional Chinese medicine enterprises in Shandong to seize the "rich mine" of famous traditional Chinese medicine.

Stone from other mountains can be used to attack jade

With outstanding production system and management technology, Japanese Chinese medicine enterprises such as Tsumura have become the largest competitors of Chinese patent medicine internationalization in China.

In the international Chinese patent medicine market, Japan ranks first in the number of patent applications, and its export share also accounts for nearly 80%. For example, when Tsumura, Japan, has established more than 70 GAP medicine planting bases in China, the local Chinese medicine enterprises are hindered by the time-consuming and laborious establishment of GAP, and the management is difficult. At the same time, Tongrentang has no more than 10 GAP bases nationwide.

In China, traditional Chinese medicine is widely planted, the production mode is primitive, and the price fluctuates greatly. In recent years, due to the rising prices of traditional Chinese medicine and raw materials, cost control is particularly difficult. At the same time, due to the lack of unified standards and testing methods in all links, and the quality of the collected medicinal materials is uneven, Chinese medicinal materials and Chinese patent medicines have always been the hardest hit areas for the "flying inspection" of the FDA.

At the same time, the market situation of traditional Chinese medicine is not optimistic. In the past five years, the market sales of hospitals of the same level are similar. The domestic retail market of Chinese patent medicine has been stagnant, and the growth is achieved by the increase of unit price.

In such a market pattern, centralized purchasing has not spared Chinese patent medicine. The provincial centralized purchase carried out by Guangdong, Hunan, Shandong and other places classified commonly used Chinese patent medicines by common names. To avoid the fate of being haggled, brand Chinese medicine enterprises such as Tongrentang have withdrawn their networks in various places and returned to the pharmacy channel for sales.

In fact, there are not many policies for Chinese medicine. In March this year, the "Fourteenth Five Year Plan" for the Development of Traditional Chinese Medicine was released, proposing to build a national demonstration area for the comprehensive reform of traditional Chinese medicine and create a high-quality development highland for the cause and industry of traditional Chinese medicine, which will bring great benefits to the modernization of traditional Chinese medicine.

Compared with Japanese Chinese medicine, local Chinese medicine enterprises have a long way to go in terms of brand building, market development and image building, in addition to their differences in modern production methods. Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation Report.