Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) withdrew the plan to apply the stepped drug pricing reduction on drugs transferred by business restructuring in just four months to reflect the pharmaceutical industry’s opinion. It was first announced in February, and the revision was updated in June.

The industry has been in a chaos for a while as the government mentioned of a possibility of applying stepped pricing on the transferred drugs.

Initially, the stepped drug pricing, in effective from August, sets the upper limit pricing a drug, regardless of qualifying two criteria for top-level pricing, at 85 percent of either the lowest pricing or 38.69 percent of the first-in-class drug,