Bouskoura · Morocco · Official Website
A pharmacist by training and an industrialist by vocation, Lamia Tazi leads Sothema — the first wholly Moroccan pharmaceutical manufacturer, founded in 1976, and today one of the most significant medicine producers in Africa and the Middle East. Her work sits at the point where scientific precision, industrial capability and public health meet.
Chairwoman & CEO since 2019
Executive Introduction
Lamia Tazi qualified as a pharmacist at the University of Liège in Belgium. She could have practised. Instead she went into manufacturing — into the part of medicine that most people never see, where sterile suites, batch records and cold chains decide whether a prescription written in Casablanca, Dakar or Dubai can actually be filled.
She joined Sothema in 1997 and took up the statutory role of responsible pharmacist — the officer personally accountable under Moroccan law for the quality and conformity of everything the company releases — the following year. It is a demanding way to learn a business. It means learning it from the inside of the quality system outwards, rather than from the balance sheet inwards.
Over the following two decades she rose to Managing Director and, in 2019, was appointed Chairwoman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, succeeding the company’s founder, her father Omar Tazi, who moved to chair a newly created strategic committee. The transition was announced publicly in January 2020. It was a succession inside a family-founded, publicly listed company — a structure that carries particular governance obligations, and particular scrutiny.
What she inherited was already a national industrial asset. What she has built since is a regional one: a group operating eight production units, manufacturing under contract for more than thirty-five international laboratories, exporting across the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, the Gulf and into Europe, and moving decisively into biotechnology — insulin, heparins, monoclonal antibodies, oncology biosimilars — categories that most manufacturers on the African continent still do not attempt.
A Career in Leadership and Industry
Sothema is looking ahead by expanding our footprint geographically, broadening our portfolio and investing in innovative technologies.Lamia Tazi, interview with PharmaBoardroom
Her degree in pharmacy from the University of Liège in Belgium is the foundation of everything that follows. In a regulated manufacturing industry, technical literacy is not decoration — it decides whether a chief executive can interrogate a deviation report, a stability study or a technology transfer dossier without translation.
She joined Sothema in 1997 and became the company’s responsible pharmacist in 1998. That statutory office places personal legal accountability for product conformity on one named individual. It is the least glamorous and most instructive place in a pharmaceutical company to begin.
Promotion to Managing Director gave her the operational span — production, supply, export markets, partnerships with multinational principals — that later made the chairmanship a continuation rather than a leap. Over this period Sothema’s reported turnover multiplied more than sixfold.
Appointed to lead a listed company through the most demanding decade the pharmaceutical sector has faced in living memory: a pandemic, a global supply shock, and a continent-wide reassessment of what it means to depend on imported medicine.
Pharmaceutical Leadership
There is no version of this industry in which a chief executive can be indifferent to detail. Every batch is a legal act. Every export market is a separate regulatory jurisdiction. Every new molecule is a multi-year capital commitment made years before the first prescription.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we proved that our industry is vital not just to the health system but also to the economy.Lamia Tazi — PharmaBoardroom
Sothema manufactures in thirteen pharmaceutical forms and specialises in the aseptic environments required for injectable and biological medicines. That capability is what allows it to produce categories — insulin, heparins, monoclonal antibodies — that comparatively few manufacturers on the African continent are equipped to handle at all.
It also operates as a contract development and manufacturing organisation for more than thirty-five international laboratories, including several of the largest research-driven pharmaceutical groups in the world. That dual identity — proprietor of its own portfolio and manufacturer for others — is strategically deliberate. Contract work imports quality expectations, audit discipline and technology; the proprietary portfolio converts that discipline into affordable medicine for the domestic and regional market.
Sothema & Professional Leadership
Sothema — Société de Thérapeutique Marocaine — was founded on 26 January 1976 by Omar Tazi. It was the first wholly Moroccan pharmaceutical laboratory to operate as a genuine industrialist rather than a distributor, the first African producer of animal-origin insulin, and the first North African pharmaceutical company to list on a stock exchange, joining the Casablanca Stock Exchange in 2005.
Its principal site at Bouskoura extends over 60,000 square metres. From there the group supplies the Moroccan market, exports across the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa and the Persian Gulf, and manufactures under contract for European principals. It maintains a production site in Dakar, Senegal, offices in Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon, and a scientific presence in Saudi Arabia.
This website is an independent editorial profile of Lamia Tazi’s publicly documented professional work. It is not operated by Sothema and is not the company’s corporate website.
Innovation & Industrial Development
Not a laboratory concept, but the ability to make a complex biological medicine, at scale, to an international standard, at a price a national health system can actually pay.
Sothema has launched its own range of locally manufactured oncology treatments. Lamia Tazi has stated publicly that through these oncology biosimilars the company reaches six times more patients than the originator products had previously — at the same quality and a fraction of the cost. In oncology, that ratio is not a commercial statistic. It is a survival statistic.
In June 2023 Sothema joined Baylor College of Medicine, Dassault Systèmes, ReGenLab and Moroccan government ministries to establish what was announced as the first galenic development and clinical trials platform in Africa and the Middle East — moving the country up the value chain from manufacturing towards development.
The group’s biotechnology capability has been built through structured partnerships with international laboratories rather than through isolated in-house discovery. Technology transfer is slower to negotiate and harder to execute than licensing — but it leaves permanent capability, and trained people, in the country that hosts it.
Industrial ambition is verifiable because it is expensive and visible. In November 2024 the group opened a new storage facility representing a reported investment of some 20 million US dollars. In July 2025 it announced an agreement to acquire 99.99% of the capital of Soludia Maghreb — a leading Moroccan industrial player in haemodialysis — at an enterprise value of approximately one billion Moroccan dirhams, close to 111 million US dollars.
Following that transaction the group indicated consolidated 2025 revenue of around 3.5 billion dirhams, roughly 350 million US dollars, with consolidated EBITDA above 800 million dirhams.
Leadership Principles
Drawn from her documented decisions and from statements she has made in published interviews. No principle here is invented on her behalf.
Asked what young women entering leadership most need, she has answered that they must first build faith in themselves, and that “self-awareness is the first skill that every leader should have.” It is an unusually unsentimental answer — it locates leadership in judgement rather than in title.
Biotechnology platforms, aseptic capacity and technology transfer all cost money years before they earn any. A listed company that commits to them is choosing a horizon its share price will not reward immediately.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, we proved that our industry is vital not just to the health system but also to the economy.” The argument reframes pharmaceutical manufacturing from a commercial sector into a component of national resilience.
“Covid was a real crash test, and it showed what happens when you don’t have pharmaceutical sovereignty.” Sovereignty here is not rhetoric — it is plants, licences, trained staff and qualified supply chains, built deliberately over decades.
Her stated strategy pairs geographic expansion with portfolio breadth and investment in innovative technologies — acquisitions used to add capability, not simply to add revenue.
They must first build faith in themselves. Self-awareness is the first skill that every leader should have.Lamia Tazi, on advice to young women leaders — PharmaBoardroom
Women in Leadership
Heavy industry, and pharmaceutical manufacturing in particular, remains one of the least gender-balanced parts of the global economy at executive level. It is capital-intensive, technically demanding, and frequently inherited. A woman running a listed industrial manufacturer — as the board’s chairwoman and its chief executive simultaneously — is still statistically rare anywhere in the world, and rarer still in the region.
Lamia Tazi has been named repeatedly on Forbes Middle East’s regional rankings: among the Top 50 Leaders Transforming Healthcare in 2022, the Top 100 Healthcare Leaders in 2023, and the 100 Most Powerful Businesswomen in both 2024 and 2025, placing 33rd in the 2025 edition. She has been described in coverage of one such ranking as the only female leader from Morocco to appear.
Her own framing of the subject is characteristically practical. She has emphasised self-belief and self-knowledge rather than representation for its own sake — the position taken by someone who expects to be assessed on the same technical and commercial terms as anyone else in the room.
Africa & Regional Healthcare
The structural facts of African pharmaceutical supply explain why industrial manufacturing on the continent is treated as a health-security question and not merely a commercial one.
Morocco is one of the exceptions to that continental pattern. Domestic production covers roughly 65% of the national pharmaceutical market, around a tenth of national output is exported, and Moroccan pharmaceutical products reach more than seventy countries. The sector’s turnover is estimated at 14 to 15 billion dirhams.
Sothema’s regional model extends that logic outward. Through its Senegalese subsidiary the group operates a production site in Dakar, combining local manufacturing with technology transfer and the training of African technical staff — a Moroccan–Senegalese arrangement that demonstrates how regional value chains can be assembled rather than imported.
Lamia Tazi’s assessment of what the pandemic exposed is direct: “Covid was a real crash test, and it showed what happens when you don’t have pharmaceutical sovereignty.”
Selected Milestones
| Year | Milestone | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 1997 | Joins Sothema | Entry into the family-founded pharmaceutical manufacturer |
| 1998 | Appointed responsible pharmacist | Statutory accountability for product conformity |
| 2019 | Chairwoman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer | Succeeding founder Omar Tazi; announced publicly in January 2020 |
| 2021 | Elected Vice-President of the FMIIP | Moroccan Federation of Pharmaceutical Industry and Innovation, September 2021 |
| 2022 | Forbes Middle East — Top 50 Leaders Transforming Healthcare | Regional recognition |
| 2023 | Galenic development and clinical trials platform announced | With Baylor College of Medicine, Dassault Systèmes, ReGenLab and Moroccan ministries |
| 2023 | Scientific office opened in Saudi Arabia | Gulf market development |
| 2024 | New storage facility opened | Reported investment of approximately US$20 million |
| 2025 | Agreement to acquire 99.99% of Soludia Maghreb | Haemodialysis; enterprise value approximately MAD 1 billion |
| 2025 | Forbes Middle East — 100 Most Powerful Businesswomen, ranked 33rd | Also listed among Top Healthcare Leaders 2025 |
Insights & Perspectives
Analytical essays on the questions that define Lamia Tazi’s working field.
Health Security
Sovereignty is not a slogan. It is plants, licences, qualified people and secured ingredient supply — and it is paid for a decade before it is needed.
Read the essay
Access Economics
Why a manufacturing decision taken in Bouskoura changes how many patients in the region can be treated at all — and why the multiple is measured in patients, not margin.
Read the essay
Governance
The governance problem that founder-led businesses rarely solve well — and the structural answer Sothema’s board adopted in 2019.
Read the essayGallery
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