Reckitt Benckiser, all about the Gaviscon company (which sells like hot cakes)
The seaweed necessary to produce the active ingredient of Gaviscon is missing and Aifa inserts it among the temporarily deficient drugs. Meanwhile, the British multinational Reckitt Benckiser, which markets it, carves out a place of honor in the infant formula crisis that has been going on for more than a year in the United States. Facts, numbers and predictions
Gaviscon, marketed by the British multinational Reckitt Benckiser, has been in short supply in pharmacies since this summer, but with Christmas and the end-of-year holidays, the search for remedies against gastric reflux and heartburn has become a real treasure hunt. that the Italian Medicines Agency (Aifa) has also included it in the list of medicines currently in shortage.
WHAT AIFA SAYS
Aifa has included different types and formats of Gaviscon in the list of temporarily deficient drugs updated on January 10th. The products that are missing, for reasons other than the 'finally discontinued marketing', are:
- Gaviscon 500 mg/10 ml + 267 mg/10 ml mint flavored oral suspension, 24 single-dose sachets of 10 ml; 500 mg + 267 mg mint-flavored chewable tablets, 24 tablets in blister;
- Gaviscon Advance 1000mg/200mg oral suspension in mint flavored sachet, 20 pet/al/pe sachets of 10 ml; 500mg/5ml + 100mg/5ml oral suspension in 500ml bottle; 500mg/5ml + 100mg/5ml mint flavored oral suspension in 500ml bottle;
- Gaviscon heartburn and indigestion 500 mg + 213 mg + 325 mg mint flavored oral suspension, 24 pet/al/pe sachets of 10 ml.
For some of these products, the shortages began between the spring and winter of last year, for others in the first days of 2023 and further shortages are expected in the coming months. Only for Gaviscon heartburn and indigestion is the end of this period at the end of March indicated.
AIFA also reports whether there is an equivalent or not.
THE CAUSES
Among the causes responsible for the shortage of these products, the Agency indicates: high demand, production problems, in some cases due to "discontinuous supplies" or "limited distribution".
In the specific case of Gaviscon Advance, Pharmercure writes, "the reasons underlying this shortage are linked to a reduction in the supply of sodium alginate, the drug's active ingredient, by the relative supplier and the difficulty of finding other materials necessary for the production. The supply is not interrupted but limited, which is why it is difficult to find the product for all pharmacies".
SODIUM ALGINATE DEFICIENCY
Sodium alginate or sodium alginate, often associated with other active ingredients, is used for many drugs that counteract acidity and heartburn.
In this case, its shortage, according to Pharmercure, would seem to depend on the "adverse weather conditions, which have caused very low yields" in the production site of the only supplier currently registered for Gaviscon Advance, "who communicated that he was unable to supply the volumes of alginate necessary to cover the entire requirement requested by the Reckitt Benckiser Group”.
This active ingredient, in fact, is obtained from the cell walls of brown algae collected along the coasts of Norway.
Corriere Torino , on the other hand, argues that sodium alginate, which is essential for giving a gelatinous consistency to anti-reflux drugs, is missing because " mostly produced in China , where the lockdowns have almost blocked its production and reduced the 'export".
INSIDE THE COMPANY THAT MARKETS GAVISCON
The Reckitt Benckiser Group based in Slough, England, is a multinational company specializing in the manufacture and marketing of over-the-counter (OTC) medicines, personal care products and household cleaning products.
The group was born in 1999 from the merger of the British company Reckitt & Colman and the Dutch Benckiser NV
Its major shareholders currently include Morgan Stanley, The Vanguard Group and BlackRock.
WHAT AND WHERE RECKITT BENCKISER SELLS
According to MarketScreener , net sales by product family are split between household cleaning and personal care products (41.6%), OTC remedies and wellness products (34.9%), nutrition (23.4%).
And geographically they are divided between the United Kingdom (5.8%), the United States (28.3%), China (11.2%) and others (54.7%).
THE SUMMITS
The group made up of over 50,000 employees is headed by the CEO Nicardo Durante, currently also the president of TIM Participações; the CFO Jeff Carr and the head of human resources, Ranjay Radhakrishnan, who previously worked at Unilever.
COMPANY NUMBERS
Reckitt Benckiser reported 14% net revenue growth in Q3 2022 results .
Going into detail, hygiene products suffered a drop in like-for-like (LFL) sales of 1.2%, while those of health products grew by 10.7% and for nutrition 24.7%.
Société Générale analysts, writes MarketBeat , last Monday decided to raise Reckitt Benckiser's rating from 'sell' to 'buy', while others from 'underperform' to 'hold'.
TO THE USA'S RESCUE FOR THE BABY FORMULA CRISIS
Sales related to nutrition products, according to the multinational, are the result of "average single-digit growth in developing markets of more than 40% in the United States", thanks to the role the company is playing in the production ofinfant formula , absent from the shelves of American supermarkets for months.
Recently, in fact, reports Reckitt Benckiser, the Food and Drug Administration (Fda) granted him a temporary authorization to import baby formula from their production plants in Singapore and Mexico. And, the company told Reuters , the shortage "will likely persist into the spring."
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/come-gioisce-gaviscon/ on Fri, 13 Jan 2023 10:51:05 +0000.