Adar Poonawalla, Owner of Serum Institute of India, he starts to reap the rewards of his bet. In June, even before the first clinical trials were completed, the family business got underway the production of the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca-Oxford. Two months later, the Indian company was awarded by an agreement with the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation who has invested billions of dollars in the company to accelerate production with the aim of realizing 200 million vaccines at the price of 3 dollars each, about one-tenth the cost of Pfizer BioNTech's vaccine. In this way, Sii has confirmed itself among the most efficient vaccine factories in the world, a leadership that has been recognized to various laboratories engaged in the fight against Covid-19, such as Novamax and Codagenix.
But another Indian company, the biological and, has secured an even more important customer, the Johnson & Johnson, while the Russian vaccine will roll off the production lines of Dr Reddys. “Thanks to economies of scale and unsurpassed quality/price ratio, Indian companies are set to play the biggest role in the global fight against Covid-19”, reads a speech by Gavi (the international pharma alliance). The Indian companies have already signed up agreements for 3 billion doses from give to developing countries, for two thirds with Sii, which will in any case allocate half of the production to India. The first deliveries, booked by the New Delhi government, should start if all goes well in March. In the spring there should be around 20-30 million doses available to other buyers as well.
It can also be explained this way the sudden fortune of India, afflicted by Covid -19, isolated from the rest of Asia (it is the only country not to have entered the recent agreement between 15 nations of the continent, China in the lead), one step away from the military confrontation with Beijing. But with strong technological skills, a leading position in advanced markets such as pharmaceuticals, and protagonist of an industrial resurrection, daughter of Modi's isolationism. The case of Sriperumbudur, in its time Nokia's most important plant (8 thousand employees) closed in 2014 after a long tax dispute between New Dehli and the company controlled by Microsoft that moved the production of furniture to Vietnam. Six years later, however, the factory was reopened under the name Salcomp thanks to an agreement with Apple, looking for suppliers who could free it from dependence on China.
Thanks to these exploits, the India Stock Exchange it rises and is very close to the maximum in history, driven by the increasingly significant flow of purchases from abroad: last week, net inflows rose to 17 billion dollars, a level never seen since 2013.
Who has already surpassed the previous primates is the piazza della South Korea, among other things benefiting from the coldness between China and the USA which has prompted several multinationals to focus on Seoul, which has passed the test of Covid-19 with relatively modest damages (6 thousand victims, however growing today).
Since the beginning of 2020, the performance has been among the best in the world, +22,50%, even surpassing that of the Chinese stock exchange, which stands at +21,60%. A particularly significant result, because at the same time the currency also shines, the won, on the highs since June 2018. Able to score a spectacular rise of +17% against the euro from the lows of March to today.
Once again today (+0,2%) the list took a step forward, albeit a small one, thanks to the securities in the electrical and electronic equipment sector, driven by Samsung electronics. December (five rises in a row out of five sessions) is set to be the seventh positive month in a row, after November ended with a gain of 14,3%. The massive inflow of liquidity, which started eight months ago now, caused last month a sharp appreciation of dollar-denominated bonds issued by Korean companies. To confirm the country's ambitions, suffice it to say that the International Finance Center, one of the real estate initiatives developed to welcome Hong Kong's billionaires, offers the services of an interpreter free of charge.
