South Korea’s JW Pharmaceutical has picked up a 35,000-square-meter production facility in Vietnam once owned by US pharma Valeant as part of a plan to target emerging markets.  Terms of the deal in which the Seoul-based drugmaker bought Euvipharm were not disclosed.

The facility, believed to be the largest in Vietnam, is approved by the World Health Organization and is capable of producing up to 1.9 billion units a year. According to Korea Biomedical Review, JW wants to use the location in the Hoa District in Long An province as a base to export to other Asian countries and also intends to use it for contract manufacturing.

Valeant, now known as Bausch Health, acquired the premises in 2013 during its expansion drive but later listed it among assets it planned to divest to relieve part of its staggering debt load.

Reports say Vietnam is looking increasingly attractive to Western drugmakers. Pfizer earlier this year announced a deal with Cyprus-based Medochemie to make some of the US company’s drugs in the Southeast Asian country, including some injectables. Medochemie has three manufacturing sites in Vietnam.

In 2018, Hikma acquired Medlac Pharma Italy, a Vietnamese injectables manufacturer established ten years ago as a Vietnamese/Italian joint venture and with it an injectables plant in Hanoi and nearly two dozen drugs.