Faes Farma has signed an agreement with Kalbe Pharma to market its antihistamine Bilastine in Indonesia, a country with around 230 million inhabitants. The Indonesian pharmaceutical market is one of the fastest growing in Asia, increasing in size by between 12% and 15% in the past four years. Kalbe Pharma, the leading Indonesian pharmaceuticals manufacturer, has a market share of 13% in prescription products and 14% of the OTC market.

Kalbe thus joins the long list of pharmaceutical companies with whom Faes Farma has reached a licensing agreement for this medication, including Pfizer (Mexico and Turkey); Glaxo (Spain and Poland); Takeda-Nycomed (Brazil); Merck-Serono (India); Menarini (50 countries from Europe and the former Soviet Union); Vianex (second licence in Greece); Pierre Fabre (second in France); Yuhan (South Korea) and Hikma (Middle East and north Africa).

These will soon be joined by companies from countries such as Japan, China and south-east Asia, where Faes Farma is currently negotiating new agreements.

The company has opted to diversify by expanding into new overseas markets, obtaining important licences, consolidating the new products marketed this year (Bilastine, Acoxxel, Ristaben and Ristfor, and Hirobriz) and concentrating on products with non-administered prices. This route will allow the current profit decrease resulting from the greater contributions to the Ministry of Health to be reversed, and to achieve established targets, namely obtaining a gross profit in 2013 around 50% higher than that obtained in 2010 (19.4 million euros), and doubling it by 2014.