Serialisation: South Africa will join the fight against counterfeiting

Monitoring the worldwide pharma Track and Trace regulations is key for accurate production planning and forecasting. Pharmaceutical companies exporting high volumes of their production output consider regulatory compliance to be a crucial requirement to operate successfully on the foreign markets. For example, companies shipping their products to South Africa must plan for rearrangement of their packaging process to meet the upcoming South African requirements described in the government notice No. 988¹ of the National Department of Health. Although this requirement is not as actively discussed, as the EU FMD and the US DSCSA regulations, it is certainly worth of paying attention to for companies exporting to South Africa. These are quite a few, as Eurostat², the statistical office of the European Union, estimated the exports of pharmaceuticals from the EU to South Africa to add up to 1,185 Million Euro in 2017.

¹South African Department of Health (2017). Request for information: National Department of Health phased implementation of GTIN-14 DataMatrix Barcodes (No. 988). Government Gazette (Vol. 627, No. 41114).

²European Commission, Directorate-General for Trade (2018). European Union, Trade in goods with South Africa.