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30 June 2015Americas

Market for fighting fake pharma packets to soar in value, report says

The global market for products seeking to tackle counterfeit pharmaceutical and cosmetics packaging will reach more than $80 billion by 2020, according to a report.

Produced by US-based market research company Allied Market Research, the “Global Anti-Counterfeit Pharmaceutical and Cosmetics Packaging Market—Industry Analysis, Size, Growth, Trends, Opportunities, and Forecast, 2014-2020” was released on Wednesday, June 24.

It found that the global market for making products designed to deter counterfeit packaging, including authentication technologies, generated $35.7 billion in 2014.

The report predicted that the figure will increase by 15.7% every year until 2020, reaching more than $80 billion.

Allied Market Research analysed the use of anti-counterfeit technologies, including track-and-trace systems, in regions including North America, Europe and Asia.

The company said it obtained its results by interviewing “industry participants” as well as by using “reliable statistics and regional intelligence”, although it is unclear what this refers to.

It predicted that the use of track-and-trace technologies, which include  RFID tags, barcodes and  ePedigree, will surpass the use of authentication technologies such as holograms and watermarks in tracking products and managing inventory by 2020.

The report also predicted that North America will remain the largest global market for products that tackle counterfeit packaging.

“Pharmaceutical, cosmetics and personal care products are the first line of target for counterfeiters” due to the “high volume, low-value manufacturing nature of the market,” the report said.

But the report added that “the advancement in track-and-trace technologies, increasing practices of multi-layered authentication technologies have [brought] revolutionary changes in securing original products”.