SK rebuilt Vietnam's Imexpharm around EU-GMP lines, then sold it to Livzon for double

In May 2020 Imexpharm was Vietnam's fifth-largest pharmaceutical firm: an antibiotic-focused generics producer in Dong Thap province, operating in an industry where most local manufacturers were certified only to WHO-GMP standards, several rungs below the European norm. Dragon Capital and other financial investors were selling out.

SK Group's subsidiary SK Investment Vina III bought that 24.9 percent block — 12.32 million shares, most of it from Dragon Capital — for an initial outlay of about 150 billion won ($100 million). Instead of treating it as a passive bet, SK pushed an operating overhaul built on the European Union's good-manufacturing-practice standard, taking Imexpharm to twelve EU-GMP-certified production lines, the largest such base in Vietnam.

The quality reset changed the company's ceiling. Between 2021 and 2025 Imexpharm compounded revenue at 18 percent and EBITDA at 16 percent annually, set 2026 targets of VND3.2 trillion of revenue and VND502 billion of pre-tax profit, and SK's vehicles raised their stake to roughly 65 percent along the way.

The exit validated the thesis. In April 2026 Livzon Pharmaceutical Group's Singapore vehicle tendered at VND57,400 a share, took 67.87 percent of the company for about $228 million, and SK sold down from 47.69 percent to about 3 percent — a return of roughly 100 percent on its original investment.

Revenue compounded 18 percent a year from 2021 to 2025 and EBITDA 16 percent; in 2026 SK exited most of its stake at roughly double its $100M outlay.

EU-GMP certification was scarce among Vietnamese drugmakers, so upgrading it turned a commodity generics producer into the country's premium supplier of high-standard antibiotics.

SK treated the purchase as an operating project rather than a financial stake, aligning capital raises with a certification and efficiency roadmap.

Vietnam's pharmaceutical spending was forecast to grow about 7.8 percent a year through 2026, so a certified capacity base was positioned to capture that demand first.

Where standards are the moat, certification upgrades reset a firm's ceiling: EU-GMP lines turned a commodity generics maker into Vietnam's premium antibiotic supplier and a takeover target.

Livzon said it would keep Imexpharm's strategy and expand its EU-GMP product lines, and the shares closed 6.95 percent higher the day after the tender closed. The deal made Imexpharm the flagship of Chinese expansion into Vietnam's fast-growing drug market, while SK's exit — at about twice its money — became the template for Korean conglomerates buying, upgrading and selling Vietnamese mid-caps rather than holding them indefinitely.