Russia: 74% of Medicines Registered Since 2024 Are Domestically Produced

Medicines produced in Russia account for 74% of the drugs registered in the country since 2024, according to a presentation by the Russian health minister. The figure was reported by TASS from Yekaterinburg on 16 September.

What the figure measures

Registration is the regulatory step that allows a medicine to be placed on the Russian market: a product is entered in the state register of medicines after its dossier, manufacturing site and quality documentation have been assessed. The 74% share therefore describes the composition of the registration flow — products cleared from 2024 onwards — and not the register as a whole, which has been accumulating for decades and still holds a large body of older foreign approvals.

The TASS report carried the headline share only. It did not give the absolute number of registrations behind the percentage, the split by therapeutic area, or the criteria the ministry applies when it classifies a product as domestic. Those definitions matter commercially: under Russian practice a medicine can be counted as locally produced when the finished dosage form is manufactured in the country, even if the active pharmaceutical ingredient is imported.

Registrations are not market share

For producers, distributors and importers, the distinction between approvals and sales is the central one. A registration certificate is a licence to compete, not evidence of volume. Several things the figure does not settle:

• how many packs or treatment courses the newly registered products actually sell;
• what share of pharmacy and hospital spending they capture in value terms, given that imported originator drugs usually carry higher prices per pack;
• how deep localisation goes — full-cycle synthesis of the active ingredient, or secondary packaging of imported bulk product.

A high share of domestic approvals is consistent with a generics-heavy pipeline, where registration is comparatively fast and inexpensive. A far smaller number of imported innovative products can still absorb a disproportionate share of spending, particularly in oncology, immunology and rare diseases, where treatment costs per patient are highest.

Import substitution as policy backdrop

The number is being presented as evidence of progress in import substitution. Sanctions imposed on Russia have not banned the supply of medicines as such, but cross-border payments, logistics, and access to manufacturing equipment and reagents have become more complicated, and that friction has strengthened the official case for building capacity inside the country. Registration, state procurement and price regulation are the three levers through which authorities can steer demand towards locally made products, and the share reported by the ministry is the most visible output of the first of them.

What the industry watches next

The open question is durability. The easiest substitutions are molecules whose patents have expired and whose manufacturing is well understood; once that pipeline is worked through, holding a domestic share above seventy percent requires either original development or deeper backward integration into active ingredients, much of which the global industry sources from Asia. Neither is quick, and both are capital-intensive.

For foreign manufacturers, the practical consequence is a narrower commercial window: each domestic approval in a given therapeutic class adds a competitor that is favoured in tenders. For Russian producers, the competition is increasingly with each other, which typically compresses prices in crowded generic categories and pushes the larger companies towards ingredient production and more complex dosage forms.