Background

The pharmaceutical market in GCC countries & Yemen exceeds 6 billion USD. This market is growing rapidly and is expected to reach around 10 billion USD by 2020. Despite the growth of this market, local manufacturing is not able to meet the growing demand, and GCC countries continue to import most of their needs in medicines from abroad. Therefore, significant opportunities exist for growth and expansion of this sector in GCC. Expanding growth in this industry would also help to achieve the strategic objectives of the region in terms of industrial diversification into knowledge based industries.

As a part of its mandate to promote technical and policy coordination, GOIC has been organizing specialized coordination meetings for concerned bodies in the member states on regular basis. The proposed coordination meeting is the first of its kind in the sector and it could serve as a catalyst to promote further coordination at the horizontal and vertical levels.