Seite 2: Paracetamol from Europe - that no longer works

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A few euros is the price of a kilogram of paracetamol, the most important drug for fever and pain, which has been on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines since 1977. "It's a race to the bottom," Braun acknowledges. "In China, you build factories like this ten times bigger than here, and you have 1.5 billion people who need the drug themselves." It sounds like an immutable fact: Paracetamol from Europe - it just doesn't work anymore.

The French government sees things differently and is currently attempting to revive paracetamol production with a governmental show of strength. In 2013, the last European plant there closed in Roussillon, south of Lyon. In the meantime, other companies have settled on the site. But the former factory owner, now Seqens, is still there.

New paracetamol factory to be built

And so Seqens is to build a new paracetamol factory with an additional 30 million euros from Paris. As early as 2023, 10,000 metric tons of the active ingredient are to be produced in Roussillon - in an environmentally friendly manner, using a new, CO2-reduced and now patented process. The production facility is expected to cover one-third of European demand. According to its own information, Seqens is making the largest investment in its history, at 100 million euros.

The project in Roussillon is just the icing on the cake of a gigantic state reindustrialization program by the French government. Seqens is to produce a total of twelve active ingredients, including the important anesthetic propofol, again on French soil. Whether the drugs "Made in France" will cost more once the government start-up funding is over is still an open question. At any rate, the paracetamol will be purchased by the French drug manufacturers Sanofi and UPSA; corresponding cooperation agreements have reportedly already been signed.

In neighboring countries, the French centralist revitalization campaign is viewed skeptically. Revitalizing a production that is dead requires an investment of years, not months. "It can be done. But it wouldn't happen without the state," says Axel Glatz, plant manager of a new Pfizer drug factory in Freiburg, Germany. It's a question of the strategic importance of primary care. The U.S. company is pursuing a different strategy to produce in Europe as well. "The keys are innovation, automation, digitization, very well-trained specialists and precisely production for the global market, because that brings the volumes at which we become economical," says Glatz.

Seven billion pills per year

This economical European production is to be ensured by what Pfizer calls "one of the most modern high-tech pharmaceutical factories in the world" in Freiburg since May of this year. The so-called high containment factory is hermetically sealed off from the environment because it processes active ingredients that are highly effective in particularly low doses. Seven billion tablets and capsules are produced here every year. Only a few people work on the two floors; robots and machines dominate. "Production is controlled by more than a hundred intelligently networked IT systems," Glatz describes. The products are shipped to 150 countries.

In one of the three neighboring factories at the Freiburg site, digitization goes so far that the work steps are combined on the computer: The weighing of the active ingredients, the mixing, the pressing - the various production processes have their own rooms. In total, there are 60 rooms. These, and thus the work steps, can be combined with each other as desired by computer. "This allows the plant to produce more flexibly, faster and with less strain on resources," explains Glatz.