India's Sun Pharma Hit by US Import Ban, Shares Plunge

NEW DELHI -- U.S. regulators slapped an import ban on some products of top Indian drugmaker Sun Pharma, sending the firm's shares tumbling Thursday and dealing a fresh blow to the nation's beleaguered generics industry.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration  announced an "import alert" late Wednesday on drugs made by Sun at one of its plants in western India over failure to meet "good manufacturing practices."

The FDA action against India's largest drugmaker by market capitalization comes as U.S. regulators scale up scrutiny of India's $14-billion-a-year pharmaceutical sector to eliminate quality lapses and worries about safety.

Sun's shares fell as much as 6.4% before recovering slightly to close down 3.3% at 551.70 rupees.

Over the past few years, the FDA has banned imports from the India-based factories of Ranbaxy Laboratories, the nation's largest pharmaceutical company by sales, citing rampant manufacturing quality problems.

The FDA has also targeted major drugmaker Wockhardt, blocking it from producing drugs for the U.S. markets from some of its plants over quality issues.

Earlier this week, the FDA said Sun voluntarily recalled 2,528 bottles of a generic diabetes drug from the U.S. market after a customer complained one bottle contained an epilepsy medicine.

Last weekend, Ranbaxy announced it was withdrawing two batches of Atorvastatin calcium tablets, a generic version of Pfizer's (IW 500/22) cholesterol-busting drug Lipitor, after a complaint about wrong dosage.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2014