The Egyptian Drug Authority (EDA) has rejected requests by pharmaceutical companies to approve a 10 per cent price increase for certain products, concerned that this may affect their availability in the local market.
Local and Arab media reports cited unnamed sources within the EDA as saying that the authority had no intention of approving price increases for medicines soon, given the relative stability of the Egyptian pound against the dollar.
Over the past four months, the exchange rate has dropped from LE52 to LE49 to the dollar.
The decision was confirmed by Ali Ouf, head of the Pharmaceuticals Division at the Federation of Chambers of Commerce (FEDCOC).
“The EDA told us that their rejection of requests for price increases was based on the stability of the dollar exchange rate in recent months,” Ouf said.
However, he also said that certain cost factors have risen during the same period, including the minimum wage, pushing up wage rates in the public and private sectors, and the cost of energy and packaging materials, “many of which are imported”.
One request for a 10 per cent price increase for certain pharmaceutical products stemmed from a disagreement between the FEDCOC and the EDA over the latter’s recent increase in regulatory service fees for registering new products, Ouf said.
EDA authorisation is required to market pharmaceutical products in Egypt.
The EDA had hiked the fees from LE1 million to LE5 million per product, Ouf said, and in response the FEDCOC had asked the EDA either to approve a 10 per cent price increase to cover rising production costs or to reduce the fees by 75 per cent.
It argued that increases in production costs would ultimately be passed onto the consumer through higher retail prices.
Since Egypt floated the pound in March 2024, driving its exchange rate from LE30 to around LE50 per dollar, the EDA has been inundated with price increase requests.
The last increase it approved after the floatation was in August, when a pharmaceutical firm requested a price adjustment for 22 of its products.
According to data from the Chamber of Pharmaceutical Industries at the Federation of Egyptian Industries, 180 pharmaceutical factories operate in Egypt. The chamber aims to attract 70 new local and foreign factories with a total investment of LE350 billion or an average of LE5 billion per factory.
There are also 120 cosmetics factories and 116 medical supplies and equipment factories in Egypt.
Local pharmaceutical factories provide 91 out of every 100 boxes of medicine consumed in Egypt, the prime minister has stated. According to figures from the FEDCOC Pharmaceuticals Division, around 17,000 pharmaceutical products are available on the Egyptian market, of which 3,000 account for the lion’s share of consumption.
Efforts have been made to keep price adjustments limited to at most 1,000 products to ensure both production and price stability.
The Chamber of Pharmaceutical Industries has not recently submitted price increase requests for locally produced medicines, Gamal Al-Leithy, head of the chamber, told Al-Ahram Weekly.
The last request it made was shortly after the floatation of the pound. Some medicines could now see price reductions if the dollar falls against the pound by 10 per cent or more.
Ouf said that if the EDA is too rigid about allowing price adjustments, a black market could emerge for some medicines.
Some pharmaceutical products are imported, and without price increases the suppliers may reduce the quantities available on the Egyptian market. Rising demand could create a black market in which scarce goods could fetch far more than their official prices, Ouf said.
He added that while imported medicines for certain chronic illnesses have local alternatives, these are sometimes not as effective as the imported versions.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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