Following the recent inauguration of a pharmaceutical facility at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, the only facility owned by a ground handler dedicated to pharmaceuticals at the airport, air cargo handler Worldwide Flight Services (WFS) has opened a pharma facility at Copenhagen Airport.
France accounts for approximately 7.0% of the world pharmaceuticals market, with Denmark accounting for about 3.5%.
In addition to these investments, on Sept. 1 WFS extended the company’s cargo-handling capabilities in Copenhagen to 13,900 square meters by adding an additional 4,700-square-meter freight center at the airport.
The new 1,500-square-meter building provides end-to-end handling in a temperature-controlled environment for 2- to 8-degree Celsius pharma products, incorporating acceptance, offload, prestorage, buildup and storage for loose shipments and prebuilt pallets, with the capacity to handle up to 300 euro-pallets.
The upgrading of WFS’ existing temperature-control areas in its largest facility at Copenhagen also will meet demand for growing volumes of pharma products requiring a 15 to 25 C temperature range.
WFS noted in a press release that, since commencing the upgrade of pharmaceutical capabilities at Copenhagen Airport about 18 months ago, the company has seen a significant increase in pharmaceutical volumes.
Denmark and Sweden have pharmaceutical production sites located in or around the Oresund region, making Copenhagen a natural international gateway for these products.
The global market for pharmaceuticals reached $1.2 trillion in 2018, up $100 billion from 2017, according to the Global Use of Medicines report from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science.
Going forward, the global market will grow by 4 to 5% CAGR, reaching $1.5 trillion (based on invoice pricing). That rate is lower than the 6.3% CAGR of the 2014 to 2018 period.
Global sales from exported drugs and medicines by country totaled approximately $370 billion in 2018, according to the World’s Top Exports database.
Overall, the value of drugs and medicine exports grew by an average 5.8% for all exporting countries since 2014, when drugs and medicines shipments were valued at $344 billion, according to the database.
Year-over-year, there was a 7.9% uptick from 2017 to 2018.
Among continents, European countries sold the highest dollar value worth of exported drugs and medicines during 2018, with shipments from Europe totaling $296 billion or 79.7% of the global total, according to the database.
In second place were Asian pharmaceutical exporters at 10.7%, while 8.1% of worldwide drugs and medicine shipments originated from North America, according to the database.