Annual Report 2019

MANAGEMENT DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS 15 The United Laboratories International Holdings Limited Annual Report 2019 Outlook for 2020 Looking forward, the global economy will be on a downturn trend, and the COVID-19 pandemic will add greater pressure to China’s overall economy. By virtue of the special attributes of the pharmaceutical industry, the Group faces both opportunities and challenges. Driven by demands resulted from the novel coronavirus pneumonia outbreak, sales of the Group’s finished products, i.e. oral antibiotics and vitamin C effervescent tablets, increased significantly. As for the intermediate and bulk medicine business, as the epidemic spread and evolved into a worldwide pandemic, demands from domestic and overseas markets have been and are being on the rise, and prices of major intermediate and bulk medicine products stabilised and rebounded in 2020. In response to the country’s call for resumption of work and production by enterprises required for epidemic containment, the Group organised employees to resume work efficiently and orderly according to its actual situation, and strictly ensured product quality, to actively cater for market demands. In order to ensure the supply of medicines for epidemic containment purpose, the Group provided epidemic containing medicines to Hubei and other regions as soon as possible. As at the end of February 2020, the Group has basically resumed to normal work in an all-round manner with stable operation and sound turnover of funds. As an enterprise that has been proactively performing its social responsibilities, the Group has cumulatively donated funds of over RMB4 million and epidemic prevention materials worth about RMB1 million to support the epidemic prevention and control. The Group will continue to contribute actively to the containment of the novel coronavirus pneumonia outbreak in China and around the world, and to the safeguard of human health. Although the future is subject to greater macro-economic uncertainty, it is expected that China’s pharmaceutical industry will continue to steadily promote the transformation, and the structure of pharmaceutical industry will be further improved, which will lead the industry to the high-quality development stage. The Group will continue to take insulin series as its strategic category, promote further sales growth and improve its market share. In addition, the Group will make balanced development as the top priority, continue to strengthen the building of academic platform through improving the management system, thus realising the all-round, balanced sustainable development of product, market, and sales team. As centralised procurement of drugs gradually run into a normal and integration of the industry structure accelerated, the Group will continue to monitor the development of pharmaceutical policies and participate in a timely manner. At the same time, it will increase its development efforts on and coverage over the out-of-hospital market, in cooperation with the ongoing county-level expansion plan of the finished product sales team. The Group will actively promote the ongoing research projects on diabetes and new drugs to further enrich its finished product reserve. As the market competition becomes less intense and the demands rise, prices of major products under the intermediate products and bulk medicine business will stabilise and rebound in 2020. In the future, following the industrial trend of segment integration among the intermediate product segment, the bulk medicine segment and the finished products segment, the Group will keep on optimizing its product offerings and capitalise on its industrialised operation strength resulted from vertical integration.