Population growth, the pressure of urbanisation and increasing healthcare awareness are stoking demand for medicines in Nigeria.
As one of Africa’s largest pharmaceutical markets — trailing only South Africa by value, and among the continent’s largest by population and consumption volume — Nigeria nonetheless leans heavily on imports to bridge a wide domestic supply gap, with roughly 70 per cent of medicines still sourced from overseas to meet its healthcare needs.
Yet, even the local drug manufacturing market is at the mercy of importation as it sources more than 90 per cent of its active pharmaceutical ingredients and excipients overseas.
Population growth, the pressure of urbanisation and increasing healthcare awareness are stoking demand for medicines in Nigeria, notably over-the-counter drugs which are seen taking up 69.4 per cent of total market share this year.
From $2 billion to $3.3 billion, estimates diverge as to the size of the Nigerian pharma market, with compound annual growth rate (CAGR) put at 6.5 per cent from 2025 to 2029.
On the exit of British multinational biopharma firm GlaxoSmithKline from Nigeria in 2023, the active pharmaceutical companies listed on the Nigerian Exchange are now four, namely Fidson Healthcare, May & Baker, Mecure Industries and Neimeth. That is only a fragment, considering that over 120 functional drugmakers altogether operate in Nigeria.
Fidson, which has a contract manufacturing relationship with Haleon, a British multinational consumer health giant and producer of brands such as Sensodyne, Panadol, Advil and Centrum, has led the publicly quoted pharma market for quite a while.
It holds the biggest slice of that market, alone accounting for well above half of the market share in the quarter to March 2026, when revenue soared to N42.6 billion year on year from N35 billion.
Mecure Industries, May & Baker (where Theophilus Danjuma, a former chief of army staff and minister of defence, is the biggest shareholder) and Neimeth came in tow, recording N20.2 billion, N8.4 billion and N1.8 billion in that order.
Little as it looks, exports by Fidson, at N1.8 billion, constituted only 4.3 per cent of revenue, but was a vast progress over the N146.5 million earned in the same period of the previous year.
Fidson’s topline performance in the period, as in recent years, built on a domestic prescription drug market boom, which Statista forecasted to touch $2.9 billion in sales in 2025 and thereafter advance at an annual growth rate of 3.6 per cent through 2029.
Ethical drugs, which have secured a place for themselves as the lifeblood of revenue, alone contributed 56.3 per cent of turnover.
For the financial year 2025, annual revenue climbed to an all-time peak of N119.1 billion from N84.1 billion, 53.3 per cent higher than that of Mecure, its closest rival.
Investment management firm Cardinal Stone has estimated that revenue for Fidson recorded a CAGR of around 28.5 per cent from FY 2021 to FY2024.
Beyond the favourable market dynamics, sales growth has reaped gains in no small measure from the forward-looking sectoral reforms of a government that is dreaming of ramping up the local share of national drug production to 70 per cent by 2030.
Nigeria’s pharma industry watchdog, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, issued a provisional approval in April for R21 Malaria Vaccine to be marketed in Nigeria.
The push cleared the hurdle for a deal between Fidson and Serum Institute of India Pvt Limited, the maker of the vaccine, targeting prevention of clinical malaria in children aged 5 to 36 months and reduction of malaria-related mortality in tropical Africa.
In September 2024, the company reached a joint venture pact with Chinese companies Jiangsu Aidea Pharma, Nanjing PharmaBlock, and the Beijing-based China-Africa Development Fund to set up a facility for the manufacturing of HIV drugs in the Lekki Free Trade Zone in Lagos, aiming for West African pharmaceutical markets.
The management took its international partnership further last September when it had an agreement with Ohara Pharmaceutical Co. Limited.
The move would enable the Tokyo-based company to support Fidson’s capital raise and offer advisory support “based on insights from the Japanese pharmaceutical industry that will expand the capabilities of Fidson to produce more specialised medicines for the management of diverse disease conditions.”
Fidson’s post-tax profit went up by 39.4 per cent to N4.6 billion in Q1 2026, compared to a year ago, helped by a stronger sales expansion and, in part, by cost management. Mecure and May & Baker jointly came second, each reporting N1.3 billion, while Neimeth posted N113.4 million.
After-tax profit for 2025 grew to N9.9 billion from N4.4 billion. The company was followed by Mecure (N6.5 billion), May & Baker (N4.4 billion) and Neimeth (N976.4 million).
“Notably, during the period, the company commenced the export of its products, earning an additional N523.1 million in revenue,” Cardinal Stone stated in a research note in January on the 2025 rreport.
The Financial Times, in its African Fastest Growing Companies’ list for 2024, ranked Fidson 65th at a CAGR of 42.1 per cent. The company took the 67th position the following year with a CAGR of 42.6 per cent.
EBIT margin, which shows the operational profitability of a company by measuring its core profit in proportion to revenue, stood at 19.4 per cent for Fidson in the first quarter of the year, slightly up from Q1 2025 level of 18.9 per cent.
Neimeth led in this performance parameter, scoring 32.4 per cent, followed by Mecure (22.5 per cent) and May & Baker (21.3 per cent).
