Dermapharm fills the Biontech gap

Dermapharm produced the Corona vaccine for Biontech. This lucrative additional income is now drying up. With an acquisition in France, the pharmaceutical manufacturer hopes to fill this gap and grow abroad.

PPatent-free branded medicines, dietary supplements, allergy and cannabis preparations, the mosquito pen Bite Away – all these products come from the house of the pharmaceutical manufacturer Dermapharm in Grünwald near Munich. Since the beginning of the year, the French pharmaceutical company Arkopharma has also been part of the portfolio, and the takeover, which cost around 450 million euros, has now been completed. Dermapharm wants to achieve additional growth with the French, especially abroad, in order to make up for the collapsing sales from the production partnership Biontech to compensate for the corona vaccine. This was also shown on Tuesday with the presentation of the preliminary annual figures.

“We used this time from an economic point of view and wanted to avoid running into a dip in growth when vaccine production for Biontech came to an end. With the acquisition of Arkopharma, we can achieve a positive effect in the very short term,” said Hans-Georg Feldmeier in an interview with the FAZ with a view to the corona pandemic. With Arkopharma’s sales team behind it, Dermapharm now wants to push ahead with expansion. “We are thus opening up markets in which we have not previously been present. These include France, Spain, Italy and the Benelux countries. Arkopharma is also strong internationally, in North and South America, in the Arab world and in Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam. So we don’t see any cannibalization effects,” he said. Dermapharm now has almost 3,500 employees and 15 production sites around the world.