The pharmaceutical sector in Belgium in the XXth century at the dawn of the XXIst century – At the very end of the XIXth century and within the first decades of the XXth century, Belgium had only a very limited number of pharmaceutical factories. Two of these, operating in the Belgian Congo, were created in 1927 to address the potential of the colonial market. A panorama of the pharmaceutical sector on the threshold of the 1970s reveals the existence of 254 companies active in Belgium. Next to two major national companies, one finds firms recently fallen under foreign control, subsidiaries of foreign groups and pharmaceutical divisions of international chemical groups. Some four decades later, the country has become a magnet for research and development and is a champion in terms of export. According to some authors, it counts about a thousand pharmaceutical companies and the sector provides about 50 000 full-time jobs in terms of direct employment. The degree of dependence on foreign countries varies greatly depending on the segment concerned (biotechnology research and development, production of drugs, distribution). In the first decades of the XXIth century, two historical actors of the chemical sector are taking divergent paths : while UCB operates its transformation into a biopharmaceutical company and leaves the branch that made its reputation, the Solvay group gives up the hybrid model adopted in the 1970s, sells its pharmaceutical branch and refocuses its activities on chemicals and plastics.
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