China's vitamins will become the world leader in production and sales

In the past few years, the export volume of vitamin raw materials in China has accounted for about 80% of the total output. However, due to entering the 21st century, vitamin sales on the international market are better, so some domestic manufacturers have expanded the vitamin production capacity, resulting in serious excess capacity of many varieties, not only VC, VE and other old varieties of excess capacity, even VB2, VB3 The production of B vitamins, which have relatively small yields such as biotin, also began to hoard.

At present, China's biotin production has accounted for 90% of the global biotin market, and its export volume has increased year by year. However, export prices have been declining year by year. The situation of other vitamin varieties is not much better than that of biotin.

Win by volume

In the past few years, China's exports of vitamin APIs are indeed satisfactory, but they mainly win by number. In contrast, major companies such as BASF and Roche currently produce high-end vitamin raw materials to win quality and high prices, especially. For high-end vitamin products used as chiral synthetic raw materials, there is still a big gap between China and international large-scale pharmaceutical companies.

In general, the export of vitamin raw materials in China has maintained a growth trend in the past few years. According to statistics from the China Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in 2010, China exported a total of 200,000 tons of vitamin medicines, which was 210,000 tons in 2011. Although the amount of vitamins exported to Europe and the United States decreased in 2012, the total amount of vitamins exported by the country remained at 19.29. Ten thousand tons. In general, over the past three years, vitamin A has become one of the highlights of China's raw material drug export growth in the context of the global pharmaceutical raw material market is not very booming.

In 2013, despite the year-on-year decline in the export of APIs, the export of vitamins continued to dominate the API sector. According to customs data, in 2013, China exported 197,200 tons of vitamin raw materials, a slight increase over the previous year.

In the export market, Asia, Europe, and North America are still the three major export markets for vitamin raw materials in China, including 52,600 tons of vitamins exported to Asia (a total of 471 million US dollars) and 68,800 tons of exports to Europe (a total of 654 million yuan). (USD), exports to North America 53,000 tons (a total amount of 481 million US dollars), China's total exports of vitamins to the above three major markets accounts for about 88% of China's total exports of vitamin raw materials, indicating that China's vitamin exports to the above three The serious dependence of the market.

A few years ago, vitamin producers in China started to open up new markets in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa and made some progress. However, due to the slow economic recovery in most Central and Eastern European countries, national income is far lower than that of Western European countries and their husbandry is not as good as Western Europe is well-developed. The demand for medicinal (health food) or feed additive-grade vitamins in these countries is not large. Therefore, efforts by China's vitamin exporters to try to open up a large population of 14 markets in Central and Eastern Europe have not yielded great returns.

In Africa, there are also many countries with better economic development, such as Egypt, South Africa, and Libya. However, because of the political and economic stagnation of these countries and other factors, China’s exports of vitamin raw materials to the African market are far less than originally expected. it is good. This shows clearly from the breakdown of the export of vitamin APIs last year: In 2013, the total value of China's vitamin APIs to the African market was only US$ 19.82 million (a 13% year-on-year decrease), and the amount of exports to the Latin American market was only 1.03. Billion U.S. dollars (down 3.2% year-on-year), the total amount of vitamins exported to Central and Eastern European countries was 89 million U.S. dollars, and 169 million U.S. dollars were exported to ASEAN countries (down 11.2% year-on-year). In general, China's exports of vitamins and raw materials to the emerging markets are poor.

Overseas markets are clearly differentiated

Why has the vitamin market in emerging countries, which was once highly hoped for, been delayed? According to the analysis, many factors are involved. The first is that the citizens of emerging countries do not have the habit of taking multiple vitamins daily as a health and disease prevention measure. Therefore, although the emerging countries have a large population, the sales volume of vitamins used in pharmaceutical/health food products in these countries is not very large. Second, China's export of vitamin products to emerging countries (such as India, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Argentina) are mainly based on feed additive grade vitamins, and pharmaceutical vitamin exports are relatively small.

Western Europe and the United States, on the other hand, are mainly based on imported vitamins with higher added value such as pharmaceutical grades, supplemented by feed additives. The composition of exported vitamins can show the economic development gap of each export market. China's pharmaceutical-grade vitamin C is mainly developed countries in Europe and America, while exports to a large number of emerging countries are relatively small. On the contrary, China's exports of VE, VB3, and biotin feed additives to emerging countries are huge.

From this point of view, the demand for feed-grade vitamins will drop sharply once poultry or mad cow disease are encountered in poultry or animal husbandry in emerging countries. Moreover, the growth rate of the global poultry industry has started to slow in the past few years, which is also a major factor in the decline in the number of vitamin exports in China. Overall, China's pharmaceutical grade vitamin exports have remained stable.

Since last year's export of vitamins to China, including Western Europe and emerging countries, the number of decline in the "cold stream", the domestic major vitamin producers have taken measures to reduce production and other measures to respond to this new change in the international vitamin market.

In summary, China has already dominated the international market in the production of vitamin raw materials, and European major vitamin producers no longer produce low value-added vitamins and produce high value-added vitamin products. Therefore, European countries must import from China. Low-grade vitamin raw materials are used for deep processing. In the foreseeable future, China's vitamins will continue to be the world's leader in vitamin production and sales in the case of huge production capacity. Among them, the growth in the export of pharmaceutical-grade vitamins will be difficult to increase in the short term due to the emerging countries. The poultry industry and animal husbandry in general are still evolving, so the feed-grade vitamins are expected to continue to grow.