Susan Liao, General Manager of Everest Pharmaceutical Industrial Co., Ltd., represents the second generation of the family business founded in 1978. Trained in pharmacy with a PhD in clinical medicine, she has spent nearly two decades at the company. Everest, with over 40 years of history, specialises in pellet-based drug delivery systems across Taiwan.
Could you introduce yourself and the company to our international readers?
Everest was established in 1978, with our GMP manufacturing site in Chiayi County set up in 1988. We began developing our pellet drug delivery system from 1996 onward, and in 1999 we founded a subsidiary company dedicated to hospital and clinic distribution channels. We passed TFDA cGMP inspection in 2005, and between 2013 and 2017 we obtained PIC/S GMP certification and Foreign Manufacturer Accreditation from Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. In 2019 and 2020 we added a stick packaging line for food supplements alongside a new warehousing building.
The company was founded by my parents, , and I grew up watching them work hard to build and manage it. Influenced by them, I also entered the pharmaceutical industry. I have been working here for almost 18 years now. Before formally joining the company, I studied computer science and pharmacy. After working for some time, in order to further broaden my professional perspective, I pursued advanced studies and research at the Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine at National Yang Ming University, where I obtained my doctoral degree.
Our production facilities mainly include pharmaceutical manufacturing lines, laboratories, and dedicated health supplement production lines. We are currently planning to expand our production capacity with additional manufacturing lines. The customer demand is there and growing; the constraint right now is simply our ability to produce enough to meet it.
Your business spans generics, health supplements, and OEM manufacturing services. How are these structured today?
Pharmaceuticals generate the majority of our revenue. Most of our products are registered under our own licences, with around 70 percent sold through our in-house sales team and 30 percent through distributors, an arrangement that allows us to manage pricing and margins more directly. Pharmaceutical sales primarily serve NHI-contracted hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. For OEM, we manufacture for other pharmaceutical companies and distributors – both for the Taiwan market and for export –In addition to Taiwan and Hong Kong, our products are currently sold in several Southeast Asian countries as well as in Central and South America. As demand continues to grow, we are actively expanding both the range of products we offer and the number of markets we export to.
Pellet technology seems to be the company’s defining technical capability. Can you explain what it is, why it matters clinically, and what makes it difficult to replicate?
We introduced pellet technology here from 1996 and have been refining it ever since. Drugs are formulated into multiple microparticles with staged coating designs, enabling both immediate and extended-release characteristics within a single dosage form. The clinical advantages flow from that architecture in several ways: more even drug distribution reduces irritation and the risk of rapid release; absorption is less affected by gastric emptying, making it more consistent; bioavailability is improved through a wider release area; bitter taste is masked for a better patient experience; capsules can be opened for patients who have difficulty swallowing; and the design remains flexible enough to accommodate immediate-release needs where required. The overall clinical value is straightforward – fewer doses, better symptom control, and reduced side effects.
One of our best-selling products illustrates this particularly well. Taiwan has a very humid climate and a correspondingly high prevalence of allergic. The product is a combination drug bringing together an antihistamine with a long half-life and a decongestant with a very short one. Because these two active ingredients behave so differently in the body, combining them in a single stable controlled-release formulation is technically demanding, and it is precisely that kind of challenge that pellet technology is designed to solve. The result is a once-daily capsule that delivers immediate symptom relief through the decongestant while the antihistamine provides sustained anti-inflammatory effect throughout the day. We currently sell this product in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
A key constraint is that the nasal decongestant is a controlled medication, and the government imposes supply quotas on it. However, due to its reliable and effective performance, it continues to be highly favored by many physicians and patients. We have also explored expanding this product to other markets, but there is a regulatory obstacle that has so far limited us to Taiwan and a few regions where it was registered at an early stage. In most countries, if there was no equivalent dosage form previously approved on the market, products will be classified as a new drug rather than a generic, which triggers a full new drug registration process – far more expensive and time-consuming than a standard generic dossier – and given that the product contains the same active ingredients as the original branded version, the price premium it could command may not justify that level of investment. That remains a strategic question we continue to evaluate.
How do you protect that intellectual property as the company grows?
Even in the absence of active patent protection on the formulation itself, the technical barrier remains very real. We hold our own patents wherever possible and are careful not to infringe on others’, but ultimately the deepest and most durable protection lies not in a certificate but in the accumulated manufacturing knowledge that the company has built over nearly three decades of working with this technology.
You focus on specialised generics and niche formulations. As second-generation leader, what is your product development strategy going forward?
The fundamental challenge in generics is that the window of reasonable margin after patent expiry is shrinking. In the first few years, pricing is still relatively favourable, but it compresses quickly as additional competitors enter the market, which means we need to launch new products as early as possible and keep the pipeline moving. Our R&D resources are not unlimited, however – finding people with genuine formulation expertise, particularly in pellet technology, is genuinely difficult. We address that constraint by collaborating with external laboratories to accelerate our development timelines rather than trying to do everything in-house.
For the broader product strategy, health supplements are where I see the clearest growth opportunity, and this is something I have actively championed since taking over the leadership.[The R&D challenges we have already solved in pharmaceuticals – enteric release, sustained action, poor bioavailability, formulation stability – translate directly into high-end nutraceutical innovation, and pellet technology enables versatile formats such as granules and functional spheres that go well beyond what standard capsules or tablets can offer. These formats address a range of practical problems: moisture-sensitive ingredients, difficulty swallowing conventional dosage forms, unpleasant taste, ingredient instability when mixed, and cases where controlled release is needed to enhance bioavailability. The regulatory environment for health supplements is also far more flexible and development-friendly than that for pharmaceuticals, which makes exporting far more straightforward – a pellet-format supplement does not face the same new drug classification challenges that our pharmaceutical combination product encounters in foreign markets. Although the food and health supplement sector represents a new and challenging area for market development.
There is also a subtler commercial advantage in the format itself. Many people taking health supplements are uncomfortable with the psychological burden of feeling as though they are taking medicine every day, and a stick-pack or granule presentation feels meaningfully different from a capsule, even when the underlying technology is just as sophisticated. The health supplement segment is supported by dedicated production lines, operates mainly on an OEM and ODM basis, and we see it as the key growth driver for the business going forward.
In Taiwan’s generics market, where generics account for roughly 70 percent of prescription volume but only around 20 percent of total expenditure, how do you remain competitive and maintain margins?
The annual downward adjustment of reimbursement prices is relentless, and managing that pressure is a constant discipline. For some of our products, the price has already reached a floor where further reductions have little practical impact – it simply cannot go lower – and for those, the strategic focus shifts from pricing to market share and cost efficiency.
Our broader approach to navigating what might be called the generics squeeze rests on four elements: continuously expanding our market presence to offset margin compression from price adjustments; scaling production, improving packaging efficiency, and maintaining long-term supplier relationships to optimise costs; launching as promptly as possible after patent expiry to secure the most favourable NHI pricing before competitors enter; and developing health supplements, which offer greater pricing flexibility while leveraging our existing formulation expertise.
In terms of how we reach the market, the dynamics differ meaningfully between hospitals and independent clinics. Due to the budget system of the National Health Insurance program, hospitals and clinics have become increasingly cost-conscious. Hospitals, in particular, usually have greater bargaining power with manufacturers because of their larger purchasing volumes. However, as manufacturers continue to face rising operational and regulatory costs while profit margins become increasingly compressed, more and more products are being discontinued by suppliers. The gap between the NHI reimbursement price and the actual transaction price represents a financial margin for the hospital or clinic, and managing that gap effectively is an important part of how we make our products commercially attractive. Our commercial focus is on promoting high-quality and consistently reliable generic drugs, helping physicians and patients who are willing to use generics feel more confident in their choice. The benefits that generic drugs bring to healthcare resources are reflected not only in budget efficiency, but also in maintaining the quality of treatment.
How important are quality standards and manufacturing compliance to the business – for internal discipline, for client relationships, and for your longer-term international ambitions?
Meeting PIC/S GMP standards is demanding work, and it requires sustained effort rather than a one-time certification exercise. Some companies find the requirements too burdensome and step back from them. We have kept going, and I genuinely believe that discipline has made us a better organisation – more consistent, more reliable, and more trusted by the partners we work with. It is also becoming a competitive filter in practice: as regulatory standards continue to rise, those who cannot keep pace exit the market, and that creates meaningful space for those who can.
Our supply chain approach rests on four practices that work together: maintaining safety stock as buffer inventory for at-risk materials; annual forecasting and early ordering to avoid supply disruptions; direct long-term contracts with raw material manufacturers; and cross-functional alignment between sales, procurement, production, and quality assurance teams.] That last element – the ongoing communication between functions – matters more than it might initially seem. Quality cannot sit solely within the quality department if it is to be genuinely embedded in how the organisation operates.
For international expansion, our priority is to strengthen the manufacturing foundations before moving aggressively into new markets. Production efficiency, manufacturing quality, and regulatory compliance are the core competencies required for credible global market entry. We are also transitioning toward reduced manual dependency in our processes to maintain consistent product quality and batch stability at greater scale, and we are working with consultants and business-matching channels to identify partners and opportunities across new geographies.
Attracting and retaining talent in Chiayi, competing against the semiconductor industry for qualified people, must be a real challenge. How do you manage it?
It is one of the most significant operational challenges we face, and I do not think we are alone in that. Formulation specialists – particularly people who understand pellet technology at a process level – are genuinely scarce, and we cannot match what TSMC or other semiconductor companies offer in terms of salary. What we offer instead is stability and continuity: we are a company with over 40 years of history, and most of our core colleagues have been here for more than 20 years. We treat the team as a family, and people know that when they join us. We also invest in structured training programmes in which senior employees develop junior colleagues through daily practice, and we actively encourage participation in external qualification programmes relevant to our work. The career path here is visible and long-term, and for many people, particularly those who have roots in Chiayi, that matters as much as the headline salary figure.
Looking ahead, what are your ambitions for Everest, and what keeps you personally motivated on this journey?
To be honest, I am still working out the full answer to that question, and I think that honesty is more useful than a polished strategy statement. I recently completed an EMBA programme – not primarily to study in any formal sense, but to meet people from different industries and different ways of thinking. In my cohort there were people from the semiconductor supply chain, from green energy, from businesses that are considerably more global in their orientation than ours currently is. That kind of exposure gives you a different perspective on what scale and ambition can look like, and it reminds you that the problems other industries have already navigated are often closely analogous to challenges you are facing, even when the language around them is entirely different.
For the business itself, the near-term priorities are clear: complete the manufacturing expansion, deepen the health supplement business where we already have long-term OEM partnerships in place and a concrete growth plan, and continue launching new pharmaceutical products as quickly as possible to capture the best available pricing window. The generics business will remain the foundation – it is stable, well understood, and we run it with considerable efficiency. Health supplements are where the meaningful growth will come from.
Beyond those near-term priorities, I am genuinely still thinking about what the next level looks like for Everest. The pellet technology platform has considerably more potential than we have so far fully exploited, and I am certain there are applications and markets we have not yet reached. I am not ready to say exactly what that future looks like – but I am working hard to figure it out, and that process of figuring it out is, in itself, what keeps me motivated.
