Haleon Pakistan rode a powerful pricing wave over the past two years. The company behind Panadol, Sensodyne and CaC 1000 has seen its earnings swell as the government loosened control over many medicine prices and granted long-requested increases on paracetamol. But the latest numbers suggest that the easy part of the story may be over, and that future growth will depend much more on new products, exports and plain old volume rather than on price hikes.
Haleon Pakistan’s most recent published accounts – the nine months of calendar 2025 to September – show just how strong the deregulation windfall has been.
Net sales rose from Rs27.5 billion in 9MCY24 to Rs32.2 billion in 9MCY25, a robust increase of 17 percent. Management told investors that roughly 10 percentage points of that growth came from higher prices, with the remaining 7 percentage points driven by volume gains.
The impact on profitability has been even more striking. Gross profit climbed 35% over the same period, taking the gross margin from 33% to 38%. Net profit after tax jumped 43% to Rs4.6 billion, lifting the net margin from 12% to 14%. Earnings per share for the nine months rose from Rs27.4 to Rs39.2, while dividends per share for the period tripled from Rs5 to Rs15.
These results build on an already strong 2024. According to market data compiled from Haleon Pakistan’s 2024 annual report, the company booked net sales of about Rs43.6 billion that year, with net income of roughly Rs4.6 billion – both solid increases on 2023 and achieved before the full impact of deregulation had flowed through. In other words, 2024 was the set-up year; 2025 is turning into the “banner year” in which those policy changes fully hit the P&L.
But buried in the same briefing note is the first hint that the sugar rush is already fading. In the quarter ended September 2025, net sales grew by 8% year-on-year, from Rs9.8 billion to Rs10.6 billion – still respectable, but less than half the pace seen over the nine-month period. EPS grew 21% in the quarter, compared to 43% for the nine months.
Part of that slowdown is simple arithmetic: once prices have been reset, there is only one chance to book the step-change. Subsequent quarters are measured against the new, higher base. That is exactly what investors are now seeing in Haleon’s numbers: price-led growth has peaked, and the company must increasingly rely on volume growth and mix.
Management appears to recognise this. The briefing note stresses that the strategic focus “moving forward” is a robust, volume-led growth strategy rather than repeated price increases, acknowledging that volume is the main driver for acquiring and retaining consumers in over-the-counter categories.
At the same time, Haleon believes it can sustain much of the recent margin improvement. The company is targeting gross margins of around 38% on a continuing basis, supported by efficiency gains, cost optimisation and selective, inflation-linked price adjustments rather than a new round of aggressive hikes.
Analysts modelling the company now expect that when the first quarter of 2026 is eventually reported, revenue growth will look far more subdued than the double-digit gains seen through much of 2025. The strong 2025 base, public frustration with rising medicine prices and the political sensitivity of a product as basic as Panadol all point in the same direction: the deregulation windfall is unlikely to be repeated, and Haleon will have to work harder for every rupee of incremental sales.
If the deregulation story looms large over Haleon’s financials, it is because of one product family above all others: Panadol.
The company’s own breakdown shows that Panadol accounts for 49% of Haleon Pakistan’s revenue mix, with calcium supplements under the CaC brand contributing 22% and oral-care products such as Sensodyne and Parodontax adding another 17 percent.
Using the 9MCY25 net sales figure of Rs32.2 billion and that 49% share, Panadol alone generated roughly Rs15.8 billion in sales in Pakistan during the first nine months of 2025. By the same logic, Panadol sales in 9MCY24 would have been about Rs13.5 billion. On a simple annualised basis, that puts Panadol’s 2025 Pakistan sales in the region of Rs21.0 billion – an extraordinary number for a single over-the-counter brand in a country where per-capita incomes remain modest.
These calculations assume that virtually all of Haleon Pakistan’s sales are domestic. That is a reasonable approximation given the current scale of its export business – historically only around mid-single digits as a share of sales, with management targeting 10% in the next couple of years. Even if exports were somewhat higher today, the order of magnitude would not change: Panadol is a tens-of-billions-of-rupees franchise in Pakistan.
That scale is underpinned by market share. Haleon estimates that Panadol holds more than 40% of the analgesics segment in Pakistan, while about three-quarters of its Panadol portfolio is categorised as “essential”, which makes it more politically sensitive and more exposed to policy decisions on price control.
Alongside Panadol, CaC 1000 is the company’s other workhorse. The effervescent calcium and vitamin D supplement, together with sister brand Qalsium-D, accounts for around 22% of revenue and more than 30–35% market share in Pakistan’s bone and joint segment. Oral-care products, led by Sensodyne with over 70% share of the sensitivity category, provide a profitable third pillar.
These are mature categories, but Haleon is not standing still. On pain management, the company rolled out Panadol Ultra nationally in March–April 2025 after a soft launch in Karachi, positioning it as a premium, fast-acting formulation aligned with global Panadol variants. Management is also preparing to enter the menstrual-pain and migraine-relief sub-segments with new Panadol line extensions – a move that both deepens its reach in pain and ties the brand more closely to women’s health.
The other major growth vector is nutraceuticals. Haleon has launched Centrum – the world’s largest multivitamin brand – in Pakistan in Adult and Silver variants, initially as imports from Italy. A Reuters interview with the company’s chief executive last year revealed just how ambitious these plans are: Haleon already commands roughly Rs7.5 billion of Pakistan’s Rs24 billion vitamins and minerals market through CaC 1000 and Qalsium-D, and aims to capture a further 7–8% of the remaining market once Centrum is fully rolled out.
Local manufacturing is central to those ambitions. At present, Centrum tablets are imported because Pakistan’s regulator, the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP), insists that nutraceuticals must be produced in separate facilities from pharmaceutical drugs, making it uneconomic to manufacture Centrum locally. Haleon is lobbying DRAP to allow nutraceutical production in pharmaceutical plants – arguing that the higher standards of drug facilities should more than satisfy any safety concerns – and has signalled that it would in-house all Centrum production if rules change.
Even without policy relief on nutraceuticals, Haleon is already investing heavily in manufacturing. About 36% of its product portfolio is currently outsourced, but CaC 1000 is fully made in-house, and the company has spent roughly US$10 million upgrading its Jamshoro factory so that Panadol can be shifted from toll manufacturing to local production. Some Panadol SKUs are expected to move in-house in the third quarter and the remainder in the fourth, reducing the outsourced share of the portfolio to around 4 percent.
That change should not only protect margins by cutting conversion costs; it also gives Haleon more control over quality and supply – crucial in a country that has repeatedly grappled with paracetamol shortages whenever price disputes between manufacturers and the state flare up.
Exports are the final piece of the growth puzzle. Haleon already exports CaC 1000 and Voltral Emulgel (a topical pain-relief gel) to Vietnam and the Philippines, and is in the process of opening channels to 18–19 countries across South-East Asia and Africa. Management wants exports eventually to account for at least 10% of sales, up from the 5–6% peak reached in 2022, although it acknowledges that the approvals process for each new market can take two to five years.
In short, Haleon’s product and capacity strategy is clear: defend and extend Panadol, deepen CaC 1000’s grip on the vitamins segment, add nutraceuticals like Centrum, and leverage an upgraded Jamshoro plant to push both domestic and export growth.
Haleon Pakistan’s story cannot be separated from the global reshaping of GlaxoSmithKline’s consumer healthcare business over the past decade.
Globally, Haleon was created in stages. First came the 2019 merger of GSK’s and Pfizer’s consumer healthcare units into a single joint venture, with GSK holding 68% and Pfizer 32 percent. Then, in July 2022, GSK demerged that business, listing Haleon plc as an independent company on the London Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange.
Since then, both legacy parents have progressively exited. GSK sold its remaining stake in Haleon in 2024, while Pfizer announced and then completed the sale of its final 7.3% holding in early 2025, with a portion bought back by Haleon itself and the rest placed with institutional investors.
In Pakistan, the restructuring has been equally involved. GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare Pakistan Limited (GSKCH) was incorporated in 2015 after being demerged from GlaxoSmithKline Pakistan Limited, and listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange in 2017. Following the global demerger, the local company’s ultimate parent changed from GSK plc to Haleon plc, and on 3 January 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan formally approved a name change to Haleon Pakistan Limited.
Today, Haleon Pakistan is a publicly listed subsidiary of the global Haleon group, headquartered in Karachi with a manufacturing facility in Jamshoro, Sindh, and regional sales offices in Lahore, Islamabad and Multan. The company employs around 450 people and continues to focus on over-the-counter medicines and consumer healthcare lines rather than prescription drugs.
The rebranding has been more than cosmetic. It has tied Haleon Pakistan more closely to a global portfolio of brands that includes Advil, Sensodyne, Voltaren and Theraflu, and to a parent that is increasingly positioning itself as a pure-play consumer-health champion. Globally, Haleon is targeting organic revenue growth of 4–6% annually, with adjusted operating profit growing faster than sales and high single-digit profit growth expected from 2026 onwards.
For the local subsidiary, the challenge is to translate those global ambitions into a market that is at once opportunity-rich and policy-constrained.
The central macro story behind Haleon’s recent numbers is Pakistan’s shift from tight medicine price controls towards partial deregulation.
For decades, the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) used maximum retail prices and CPI-linked formulas to govern what manufacturers could charge. This led to repeated clashes with the industry, particularly around low-priced products such as paracetamol tablets, where input costs had surged but prices were slow to adjust. After a very public shortage of paracetamol in 2022, the Economic Coordination Committee approved several rounds of price increases on paracetamol products, pushing the MRP for a 500 mg tablet from around Rs2.35 to Rs2.67 and allowing higher prices on stronger formulations and syrups.
The bigger change came in early 2024, when the federal cabinet approved proposals to deregulate the prices of medicines not included in the National Essential Medicines List. Under this policy, non-essential drugs are exempted from the 2018 drug pricing framework and DRAP’s direct price-setting powers, leaving prices to be determined more by market forces. Essential medicines – currently almost 500 molecules – remain under a regulated regime, albeit with some indexation to inflation.
This two-track system has been a boon for many pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare companies. A sector-wide research note last year described deregulation of non-essential drug prices as “a boon for the pharma industry”, citing the ability to pass through higher input costs and improve margins. A blog post focused specifically on Haleon pointed out that after deregulation, the company secured hardship approvals for around a 10% year-on-year increase in Panadol prices, while some other non-essential products saw hikes of about 33% on average. This goes a long way towards explaining why Haleon’s gross margin has jumped from the low-thirties to the high-thirties in a short span of time.
But the policy has also triggered a backlash. As medicine prices have surged, especially in 2025, media reports have highlighted patient hardship and accused both manufacturers and regulators of fuelling a “drug price crisis”. The federal government has ordered fresh surveys of medicine prices across the country and hinted at tightening oversight again, particularly for products that households regard as basic necessities.
Panadol sits squarely in that politically sensitive zone. It is often the first medicine a Pakistani household buys, and any further sharp price increases would be hard to justify in the court of public opinion. That creates a natural ceiling on how far Haleon can push price as a growth lever, regardless of what the formal rules might allow.
Haleon’s own management seems to understand the balance it must strike. In the corporate briefing, executives stressed that the full effects of deregulation should be judged over a three-to-five-year horizon, and that in the long term they expect prices to rise broadly in line with inflation, not far ahead of it. In other words, deregulation has given Haleon breathing space and the funds to invest – in plants, brands and exports – but it is not a perpetual licence to print money.
That framing also explains why the company is leaning so hard into volume-led growth and category expansion. New Panadol variants in menstrual and migraine relief, a full-scale bet on nutraceuticals through Centrum, and an export push into South-East Asia and Africa are all ways to grow the top line without repeatedly testing the limits of consumer tolerance on price.
