As the carrier of medicines, medicine packaging plays a very important role in ensuring the quality of medicines during transportation and storage, especially the inner packaging that directly contacts medicines. The stability of the materials used has a direct impact on the quality of medicines. With the improvement of the Chinese health system, the disordered and backward situation of medicine packaging will fundamentally change, and the domestic medicine packaging industry is also developing rapidly. After a short period of structural adjustment, the Chinese medicine packaging industry has eliminated outdated production capacity and screened out substandard enterprises. With the change in residents’ consumption concept and the improvement of consumer demand, the Chinese medicine packaging industry will continue to maintain a growth trend. In the future, it will develop in the direction of high quality and high quality, showing new trends such as increasing varieties and diversification of consumption. The participants in the Chinese medicine packaging industry chain are constantly enriched, and the industrial ecology is gradually robust.
According to the medicine packaging materials, medicine packaging products can be divided into glass packaging, paper packaging, rubber packaging, and plastic packaging. In 2021, although the scale of medicine packaging in China has declined, the market size will still exceed 100 billion yuan, reaching 102.6 billion yuan. Among them, pharmaceutical plastic packaging products have huge market demand potential due to the impact of the new crown epidemic in the past two years. It is thanks to the previous technology accumulation that a batch of technologically advanced, stable, and reliable domestic medicine packaging products such as pre-filled packaging and neutral borosilicate glass can provide strong support for the production of the new coronavirus vaccine. With the joint efforts of associations, experts, and enterprises, the Chinese pharmaceutical industry has realized that the compatibility of drugs and packaging is also one of the key factors in the research and development of formulations, which has prompted the development of Chinese medicine packaging industry to embark on a fast track.
However, the new crown pneumonia epidemic has had a great impact on the global pharmaceutical industry chain and supply chain. The price of raw materials in the medical packaging industry has risen sharply, the domestic core equipment is in short supply, and the production cost has increased significantly. At the same time, the price of medicines brought by centralized procurement has dropped sharply, further squeezing the profits of the medicine packaging industry, and the packaging industry is facing severe challenges. The GDP of Chinese medicine packaging industry has accounted for more than 10% of the national packaging industry. There is still a certain gap between the output value of more than 30%. New dosage forms of medicines are emerging one after another, and the pace of follow-up of the matching medicine packaging materials is still relatively slow, and there is great potential to be tapped.
At present, China is constantly introducing and updating medicine packaging machinery and materials, and the medicine packaging industry will present a new situation. With the implementation of the new version of GMP, new requirements are put forward for the hardware equipment of pharmaceutical companies, which has achieved the growth of a number of pharmaceutical equipment companies and an opportunity for the upgrading of the medicine packaging material industry. In the future, medicine packaging should not only ensure the quality of drugs but also focus on product innovation, technological innovation, and concept innovation. In the future, packaging products may be ready to use and have multiple functions such as drug delivery and data collection. Green products and technologies that can achieve energy saving and emission reduction will also become the future innovation direction of the industry.