The pharmaceutical company Ferrer, which closed 2022 with a net profit of 28 million, 81.8% more, is preparing its jump to the United Kingdom, France and Italy with new products with which it intends to “start a new era”, according to The CEO of the firm, Mario Rovirosa, explained to EFE. After a few years focused on restructuring and debt reduction, the company has increased turnover to 645 million euros in 2022, compared to 563 million in 2021, while profit has gone from 15.4 million to this os 28 million. The operating profit (ebitda) was 66 million.
Despite this improvement, Rovirosa believes that the results are “very better” and advances that in 2023 the company will foreseeably maintain the same level of billing and that profits may suffer somewhat, after the investment effort of recent years. “We still believe that the products have dropped in price because generics have entered and we have not yet been able to renew the portfolio, while we have made important investments in some plants,” Rovirosa pointed out.
On the verge of a product offensive.
In this context, the company, owned by Sergi Ferrer-Salat, is one step away from making the renewal of its product portfolio a reality and is working on several important launches in the two areas in which it specializes: systemic diseases nervous and pulmonary.
Specifically, it is waiting to know in a few months the result of the phase III of a trial on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) that would open the door to launching its own drug in Europe in 2025, while it plans to launch a a couple more products in the period 2026-2027 (it has a drug for epilepsy in phase III and a product for Parkinson’s in phase II).
“We look at the future with a certain optimism. We hope to no longer always depend on the same historical product portfolio. It has been a long time since we made major launches. We had limited ourselves to reaching licensing agreements,” explained the manager. With subsidiaries in 13 countries and a commercial presence in more than 120, Ferrer is immersed in the preparation of the commercial launch of these products, designed especially to be able to land strongly in Italy, France and the United Kingdom, three large European markets in those that do not yet have their own presence and where they want to establish subsidiaries.
Next objective: a subsidiary in the US
For later, it leaves the landing with its own subsidiary in the United States, where it has a research center and a production plant in California, while it continues to strengthen its network in Latin America. In this last year, the Catalan laboratory has undertaken investments such as the 20 million destined for the cosmetics plant in Esplugues (Barcelona), now specialized in liquids, and the 40 million that it cost to move to California, which it has used to build a Parkinson’s inhaler plant in Fremont. Among its plans is now also to increase the productive capacity of the Sant Cugat factory (Barcelona), dedicated to solids.
