| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 國際企業學研究所 === 93 === As pharmaceutical industry faces increasing difficulties of discovering new drugs, the commercial potentials of herbal medicines have received great attention by the worldwide pharmaceutical industry. However, the industrial development of herbal medicines in Taiwan reveals a somewhat disappointed profile for several reasons. The overall-budget system adopted by the National Health Insurance Plan in fact restricts the total reimbursement amount to herbal medicines and hence limits the income stream of providers. More fundamental limitation to a wide adoption of herbal medicine lies in the instability of herbal materials. Eventually, there is less innovation occurred in this industry, a fact which in turn forces it becoming a declining industry in Taiwan.
The purpose of this research is to analyze the structural impediments to a healthy development of the Chinese herbal medicine industry in Taiwan. By so doing, we are able to further explore potential growth directions and strategies of realizing these potentials at both the industry policy and firm strategy levels. To be specific, we will focus on the Chinese herbal medicine industry, rather than a broadly defined herbal industry.
To achieve the research goals, we first provide a general analysis on the herbal industries around major countries in the world. We then analyze the current development and structure of Chinese herbal medicine industry in Taiwan. Based upon these understandings, we undertake firm-level analyses on three indigenous Chinese herbal medicines companies, and two comparative cases of “Selected Vegetables” and “Sulbogin.” “Sulbogin” has been granted license by Food and Drug Administration of U.S.A., while “Selected Vegetables” has been in the phase III of drug evaluation at FDA.
We argue that inappropriate regulatory system plays a key role limiting the development of Chinese herbal medicine industry in Taiwan. Especially, the current regulations on the Chinese herbal drug discovery are defined based on those for (chemical-based) pharmaceuticals while they in fact have different drug discovery logic. Chinese herbal medicine providers could adopt alternative approaches, e.g., finding niche indications, converting extracts to chemicals, to drug discovery. We suggest that the categories of health food and herbal products be the potential areas of development for these indigenous firms. Policy implications and growth strategies are also discussed.
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