Across the pharmaceutical industry, a familiar narrative has been unfolding these days. A state government announces incentives for a new API cluster. A company breaks ground on a fermentation facility. A ministry unveils a Pharma 3.0 plan. An industry group publishes a report on reducing dependence on China.
Each of these stories reflects real investment, real jobs, and real intent. They also signal a sector that is taking decisive steps to strengthen itself in a changing global environment. When viewed together, week after week, a clear pattern emerges: pharma is increasingly building with strategic purpose. We are building to reduce exposure. We are investing to create greater reliability, flexibility, and long-term supply security.
Two types of building happen in any industry. One is aspirational. It creates something new that did not exist before, a new molecule, a new format, a new market. The other is compensatory. It addresses something that should have been in place already. A backup generator does not add to your power supply; it exists because your power supply was never reliable to begin with. Both have value, but they serve different purposes.
Much of what is called supply chain resilience in pharma today reflects this second type of building. It is not only about adding new capability, but also about strengthening the system through parallel capacity, even when this comes at a high cost. These investments are important. A new API plant creates value. A government incentive scheme creates value. Diversifying critical inputs away from a single country is both necessary and strategic. The real question is how we define that value, whether it creates something fundamentally new, or whether it helps correct a vulnerability that had remained unresolved for too long.
A new manufacturing line can create value in different ways. If it produces a molecule that was not being made earlier, it adds a new capability to the system. It expands what the industry can do. But if a new line is built for a molecule that has already been manufactured for many years, mainly to reduce dependence on China, its role is different. It may not create something entirely new, but it makes the supply chain safer, more reliable and less exposed to external shocks. That is also important. It shows that resilience is not only about innovation, but also about fixing long-standing vulnerabilities before they become bigger risks.
This is what we can call the resilience economy. As tariffs rise, national security reviews increase and trade relationships become less predictable, every new capacity announcement starts to look strategically important. The investment is real and the urgency is real. But pharma manufacturing does not change overnight. A new facility or line can take three to five years to design, build, validate and secure regulatory approvals before it produces a batch that can be sold. By then, the original risk may have changed or moved elsewhere. This is why resilience cannot depend only on building more plants. It also needs the ability to adapt quickly as the external environment keeps changing.
The deeper issue is that capacity and capability have become confused in this discussion. Capacity is steel, concrete, and time. Capability is a filing that a regulator has already reviewed, a process that has been validated, and a facility that has passed inspection for a specific molecule. By that measure, the world is not short of pharma capability. India alone has more USFDA-registered facilities than most places outside the US and Europe, much of which is underused. What is truly lacking is the ability to quickly reorganise that existing capability when the landscape changes again, and it will.
This issue extends beyond pharma. Every industry currently navigating its own de-risking moment–electronics, critical minerals, defence components, everyone faces a version of this same conversation. Most discussions focus on capacity: More plants, more lines, more groundbreaking ceremonies. Capacity is visible and photographs well. Capability, on the other hand, the regulatory filings, validated processes, and networks of qualified partners that can be reconfigured without years of lead time, is often invisible. As a result, it is often undervalued in both policy and investment, even though it determines how fast a system can respond when conditions shift.
The solution is not to stop building. It is to build with greater clarity. Every time a new facility is announced, the right question is whether it is adding a capability the world does not yet have, or strengthening an area where the system has remained exposed for too long. Both can be valuable, but they should be understood differently. The first expands the industry’s future. The second makes the industry more secure by addressing past vulnerabilities.
Five years from now, the industries that respond best to the next disruption may not be the ones with the largest number of new plants. They will be the ones that invested early in the capability to move quickly; through validated processes, regulatory readiness, qualified partners and flexible networks, before they urgently needed to.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Hari Kiran Chereddi, managing director & CEO, HRV Pharma.
