Bangladesh Supplies Medicine to 150 Countries. It Imports Most of What Goes Into It.

The 200-acre BSCIC API Industrial Park at Gazaria in Munshiganj has 42 plots allocated to 27 pharmaceutical companies, with the first commercial production of active pharmaceutical ingredients now beginning.

By the UISC BD Editorial Desk · United Information Service Center · Published 10 September 2026 · 6-minute read

Bangladesh's pharmaceutical industry meets almost all domestic demand and exports to more than 150 countries. It is the country's most technically sophisticated manufacturing sector.

It also buys the overwhelming majority of its active pharmaceutical ingredients — the molecules that make a medicine work — from abroad, mostly from China and India.

The API Industrial Park is the attempt to fix that.

What Exists

The park sits on 200 acres at Gazaria in Munshiganj, developed by the Bangladesh Small and Cottage Industries Corporation. It has 42 plots, allocated to 27 companies including Square, Beximco, Incepta and ACME.

At full operation it is projected to employ around 25,000 people.

Production has now started to arrive. Healthcare Pharmaceuticals has begun limited-scale commercial production, while ACME Laboratories and Ibn Sina Pharmaceutical await regulatory approval to begin theirs.

Three producers out of twenty-seven plot holders is early. The project was approved by the national economic council back in 2008, which tells you how long this has taken.

Why It Matters Now Rather Than Then

The deadline is LDC graduation.

As a least developed country, Bangladesh has enjoyed a World Trade Organization waiver from the TRIPS agreement on intellectual property. In practical terms that waiver allows Bangladeshi manufacturers to produce patented medicines without licensing them — which is the single largest reason the country's pharmaceutical industry became what it is.

On graduation, that waiver ends.

An industry that has competed by making patented drugs cheaply will have to compete by making off-patent drugs efficiently. Efficiency in generics is decided largely by the cost of the active ingredient — which is exactly what Bangladesh currently imports.

The Strategic Arithmetic

An API is typically the largest single cost component in a generic medicine. A manufacturer that imports its API pays that cost plus freight, plus currency exposure, plus whatever margin the supplier takes.

Domestic API production removes all of that, and it does something else that matters more: it removes dependence on suppliers in two countries for the inputs to Bangladesh's healthcare system. Supply concentration in essential medicines is a national resilience question, not only a commercial one.

Why It Is Hard

API manufacturing is a chemical industry, not a packaging one, and it is a genuinely different business from making finished dosage forms.

It requires process chemistry expertise, significant capital, effluent treatment for hazardous waste streams, and regulatory approval from the authorities of every market the resulting medicine is sold into. Margins are thinner than in formulations, and global API pricing is set by enormous Chinese and Indian producers operating at scales Bangladesh cannot match.

That is why a park approved in 2008 has three producers in 2026. This publication is not going to present the slow pace as anything other than what it is.

What Success Would Look Like

Not Bangladeshi API self-sufficiency. That is not a realistic target against Chinese scale.

The achievable goal is domestic production of the APIs behind the country's highest-volume essential medicines — the drugs where import dependence is most consequential and where domestic demand alone justifies a plant. Square Pharmaceuticals already operates its own API unit, which demonstrates the model works at company scale.

Everything beyond that is upside.

Where It Connects

The API park belongs to the same policy logic as domestic vaccine manufacturing and semiconductor design: moving from assembling imported inputs to producing them.

It also sits inside the wider zone strategy. Bangladesh's decision to concentrate on completing a small number of zones properly rather than announcing many exists because of projects exactly like this one — allocated, partially built, and waiting.

With the Korea CEPA and Japan EPA both naming pharmaceuticals among the sectors expected to gain, the timing of the park finally producing is better than its history would suggest.

Related reading

• Bangladesh Makes 98% of Its Own Medicine — and Exports to 160 Countries
• Bangladesh Makes 16 Vaccines. One Certificate Blocks the Export Market.
• WHO Praises Bangladesh's Maternal Mortality Progress
• An mRNA Cancer Vaccine Has Succeeded in a Late-Stage Trial for the First Time

Sources

• "Three drug makers ready to produce raw materials in API park," The Daily Star — thedailystar.net
• "API park to boost export of medicines," The Financial Express — thefinancialexpress.com.bd
• "Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) manufacturing: the next growth driver of the Bangladesh pharmaceutical industry," LightCastle Partners — lightcastlepartners.com
• "Bangladesh Pharmaceutical & API Industry," Bangladesh Investment Development Authority — investbangladesh.gov.bd
• "Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) Industrial Park," BSCIC — bscic.portal.gov.bd