Why Pakistan makes billions of Panadol tablets but can't make the powder

The industry that lives in the background

Muzamil opens by naming a strange gap. The pharmaceutical industry sits in the top handful of any economy, yet almost no one in Pakistan talks about it. It is, he says, always in the background — until your health turns and you need a Panadol, or a vitamin, or until a crisis like COVID brings it very close to home. So he wanted someone from inside it, and few are more inside it than Farhan M. Haroon, CEO and General Manager of Haleon Pakistan — the company behind brands so common, Muzamil notes, that everyone knows Panadol whether or not they know anything else about medicine.

What follows is less a product tour than an economics lesson, told through one man’s career and one industry’s structural problems. Haroon is a finance person by training, and he reaches for the same instruments throughout — margins, absorption costing, return on investment — to explain why a country of 240 million can manufacture billions of tablets and still not make the powder inside them.

A humble Karachi home and a triple-qualification sprint

Haroon is a Karachi native — born, schooled, and built there, with grandparents who migrated from Gujarat. He spent his early years at Habib Public School, an institution he credits for far more than its classrooms. There were three grounds, two swimming pools, a daily mandatory sports hour. He is candid that he wasn’t a strong student until his O-levels; what the school gave him was the team sport, the house competitions, the debates and dramatics — the competitiveness that he argues carries over into any career.

The seriousness about education arrived with his A-levels, when, as he puts it, he came from a humble background and the growth of the whole family rested on his education. His decision after that is the part Muzamil lingers on. A 19-year-old in the late 1990s does not usually choose chartered accountancy on purpose. Haroon did, deliberately, because it had the best payback period and return on investment of any qualification at the time. He enrolled in ICMA, B.Com and ICAP at once — the certifications for the career and the B.Com for an academic degree to sit beneath them.

He tells one story that captures the temperament. There was a single day on which he sat all three exams: an ICMA presentation at 9:30 in the morning, a B.Com paper in Ramadan that ran past one o’clock after a forty-minute-late bus to Karachi University, and the ICAP qualifying exam from two to five. Nine-thirty to five, three institutions, one day. The point, he says, was to stretch the boundaries early — to get into his mid-twenties with the fundamentals settled and then launch himself.

Whether AI ends the chartered accountant

Muzamil presses on a worry he keeps returning to: in the age of AI, will accountants be the first to lose their jobs? Haroon’s answer reframes the question. Finance has already evolved past the version people fear for. Decades ago, the function was ledgers, payroll, trial balances — operational and narrow. Now the same person speaks the language of the business: product launches, mergers, restructuring, where to put the next rupee of investment.

His example is concrete. A brand ambassador standing in a large store, intercepting customers — a finance team can now tell you, from the data, whether that placement is earning its keep or whether the money should move to a different territory. AI is the tool that lets the finance partner do that better, not the thing that replaces them. The operational accounting may need fewer man-hours; the value moves to mixing the numbers with something more tangible. He is careful with the optimism, though. The career is still open to a young person with the right hunger and resilience — but he notes that today’s safety nets, the ACCA-style alternatives, can erode the determination that the older, harder path demanded.

From PwC to the chair at Haleon

Haroon’s career is a sequence of changes, and he treats change as the only constant. He trained at PwC A.F. Ferguson — which he calls one of the most underrated institutions in the country for the way it transforms people, handing juniors real work on real assignments like the incorporation of Meezan Bank, even when their drafts would be rewritten up the chain. He left in 2005 to get to the other side of the table, joining Sanofi as a financial controller for its manufacturing plants, partly to learn the manufacturing side of finance and partly because healthcare was something he wanted to be part of.

Then ICI, where in three years the company went from global ICI to AkzoNobel to a South Korean owner — two ownership changes and the cultural whiplash that comes with them. He is precise about what culture means in that setting: not only how people treat each other, but who knows more about the technical work. New owners with deep engineering experience can make local teams feel their autonomy has shrunk; Haroon argues that input loss often pays off later.

He joined GSK in 2011 and says he knew on the first day it was his forever home. He arrived to help complete two major acquisitions, ran distribution and warehousing, was even deputed to HR for three months, and started his MBA because he wanted to be a CEO one day. He became CFO of the consumer-health business, led its demerger and separate listing on the exchange, and worked on integrations across the Middle East, North Africa and Russia, plus the US groundwork for the Pfizer consumer-health acquisition. After two and a half years in London, he came back — by choice, and with his family’s foreknowledge — to take the CEO seat in Pakistan, the geography he knew best.

Panadol, Sensodyne, and the line before the prescription

The GSK-to-Haleon split, Haroon explains, came from carving the consumer-health business out of a company that also held pharmaceuticals, vaccines and an HIV portfolio. Haleon — “hail,” good health, plus “lion,” strength — was built to be relevant to consumer healthcare specifically, which works differently from prescription pharma. In Pakistan the business was already separately listed, one of only a few markets where that was true.

He draws the line cleanly. Consumer healthcare lives before the nuskha, the doctor’s prescription; pharmaceuticals live after it — the antibiotics, the oncology, the respiratory drugs. Haleon’s job is preventive: better everyday health, people taking ownership before illness arrives. And the brands carrying that are formidable. Panadol is the largest pharma and OTC brand in the country, larger than the next two combined. The company is the largest in multivitamins through CAC-1000 Plus and Calcium-D, and Sensodyne sits at the top of oral care. The scale is striking: roughly 6.5 billion Panadol tablets a year, produced and sold inside Pakistan.

On self-care, Haroon is honest that the country is early. The system starts after illness, not before it. Two in four women and one in four men are calcium-deficient, heading toward osteoporosis, and the supplements that would prevent it are treated as optional. He pushes a small, practical point: a calcium supplement without vitamin D barely absorbs — taken alone, you’ve effectively swallowed it for the taste. The deeper change he wants is a mindset of investing in yourself before the body forces the issue.

The tablet is local, the molecule is not

This is where the conversation turns to the structural problem, and Muzamil frames it as a no-brainer: with 6.5 billion tablets a year and a growing population, why has Pakistan never localised the raw material? Haroon’s answer is unsentimental. The industry is roughly 90% dependent on imports. Local manufacturing is largely secondary — shaping the tablet, adding the excipients, the foil, the PVC, the carton — while primary manufacturing, the active pharmaceutical ingredient itself, the paracetamol powder, is brought in from abroad. Even the raw materials made locally rely on raw materials from outside.

The reason isn’t will; it’s scale and margin. An API plant demands enormous capital — he reaches back to a $490 million petrochemical plant from 1998 as a sense of the order of magnitude, and notes you’d eventually have to integrate all the way back toward oil and naphtha crackers. Meanwhile two manufacturers in China already supply 40% of the global paracetamol market, at a scale no new entrant can compete with. And the safety standards for highly flammable inputs raise the bar further.

Sitting underneath all of it is price. He invokes the economics of marginal versus average return: if the marginal return is too low, no one invests. Paracetamol is on the WHO essential-medicines list, so its price is fixed; combination products like Panadol Extra, with caffeine, or self-care products like Eno carry inflation-linked increases. When the per-kg price of paracetamol ran from PKR 750 in mid-2020 to PKR 2,400 by early 2023, the arithmetic on a single 500mg tablet — paracetamol, excipients, foil, carton, electricity, gas, labour, distribution across the country — stopped closing. The result shows up in the data: large-scale pharma output down 26% over eleven months, and 38% in a single month year-on-year. Production became unviable. He says the company kept making Panadol at a loss through COVID and dengue seasons simply to keep the brand on shelves.

A $200 million export against a $24 billion neighbour

The export gap is the number that lands hardest. Pakistan’s total pharma exports — herbal products included — sit around $200 million. India’s are roughly $24 billion. Muzamil’s instinct is that the logic points the other way: cheaper labour, a devalued currency, a CPEC corridor, a rising African market — pharma should be one of the biggest things to come out of Pakistan.

Haroon agrees on the potential and explains the obstacle. Exporting into Africa or Europe means meeting each regulator’s requirements, and that often means an FDA-approved plant, whose cost is high enough that few have built one. India and Bangladesh have many; Pakistan has a handful. And it’s circular — local profitability funds export capability through absorption costing, so weak domestic margins starve the very investment that would open foreign markets. He points to how India got there: a contract-manufacturing route, where global companies were drawn in to produce locally, which built the volume and the muscle that turned India into “the pharmacy of Africa.” Pakistan’s current exports go mostly to Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, where regulatory standards sit closest to its own, and remain stuck in old generics — paracetamol, ibuprofen, amoxicillin — with real R&D still distant and mostly confined to herbal products.

The talent thread runs through this too. Pakistan produces pharmacists and B.Pharma graduates, but the high-value R&D roles barely exist domestically, and much of that research capacity has been built next door. An FDA-approved plant needs the right skill set; a contract-manufacturing future needs specific university programmes feeding it. None of it works, he keeps returning, until the numbers do.

A market too large to ignore

Asked where the industry could go by 2030, Haroon stacks the conditions: bring innovative global solutions into the country, build the API and raw-material base locally, get the regulatory framework right, and fix pricing. With those in place, he believes exports alone could reach $3 billion — but only with the API policy properly implemented. The good news, he insists, is that the realisation has started: a trade-policy framework, the first pharma export awards, attention from the top.

Muzamil’s final question asks him to look past his own industry to Pakistan in 2050 — without leaning on the usual lines about youth and talent. Haroon answers with the market itself. The country went from 120 million in 1981 to 240 million now, heading toward an estimated 350 million by 2050, and the next 120 million will arrive faster than the last. That, plus rapid urbanisation and a growing middle class shifting consumption and lifestyle, is the opportunity — relevant to corporates, consumer brands, IT and data companies alike. He is careful to name the other edge of it: those people need jobs, housing and food, and without investment the same growth becomes pressure rather than promise. He closes on the startup wave — a serious effort and real money, much of it lost early, but a cycle he expects to restart once stability returns. The optimism is real, but earned the way the rest of the conversation is: by counting.