We all entered into new financial year with a fresh rigor, but just one month into it has pushed us back to square one as COVID-19 cases rise at a devastating rate across the country.
While medical stores were categorized as essential services, online pharmacies still emerged as the one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic-induced lockdown in India as people chose to buy medicines online to reduce risk of contagion. As policies help private COVID-19 vaccine market evolve in India, how can we ignore the bit contributed by e-pharmacies like PharmEasy!
PharmEasy, one of India's leading digital healthcare platforms, announced plans to vaccinate over 3 crore people via camps and vaccine centres through its 5,000 partner centres pan India in the next few quarters on April 23,2021. Within first 24 hours, PharmEasy had already received an overwhelming response, with over 50 lakh individuals and 750 organisations across the length and breadth of the country, making a soft commitment to vaccinate themselves and their respective families. This denotes not just the fear of the pandemic, but also the trust that people place on these e-pharmacies!
A start-up that was founded in 2014 and is the latest unicorn in the country, PharmEasy’s model was to digitise existing pharmacies by connecting them to an efficient supply chain. Medicines would be sourced through pharma companies, like Cipla, and distributors. These would be stocked and managed at a central warehouse by the company. Once an order was placed by a customer on their app/website, it would be delivered to the customer’s doorstep by a fleet of delivery partners owned by the company. Cutting out intermediaries, i.e. the chemists, meant that PharmEasy could offer a flat 20% discount on the medicines.
The group also provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings to pharmacies for procurement, delivery and logistics support. It also offers credit solutions to pharmacies, assisting them to buy over 200,000 medicines from around 3,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers. Sounds quite easy-peasy!
Yes, these numbers look amazing, but do you know that it took PharmEasy 3 years to reach its first 2 million families? Reason?
Well, imagine India 8 years back – this was way before the digital revolution brought about by Jio and Digital India drive by the government. While people had smartphones, they were not very comfortable sharing their details with an online entity when they could purchase the same items from a nearby trustworthy pharmacy. PharmEasy had to struggle to bring about this behavioural change in Indians – to purchase medicines with prescriptions only – something not so common in India.
Couple this with regulations pertaining to e-commerce, pharmacies and online pharmacies, mobile health related laws, telemedicine related laws, and cyberspace related regulations that PharmEasy had to adhere to. All of these were new and ill defined.
However, this also meant that the online pharmacy market in India was ripe for disruption. This gap was, in fact, so obvious that year 2014 & 2015 saw rise of about 60 startups in the e-pharmacy sector, though only a few remained after consolidation and closures.
As per Govt of India, the total market size of the Indian pharma industry is expected to reach $130 billion by 2030. The medical devices industry in India has the potential to grow at 28 per cent per annum to reach $50 billion by 2025. India’s domestic pharmaceutical market turnover reached US$ 20.03 billion in 2019, up 9.8% y-o-y from US$ 18.12 billion in 2018. In May 2020, pharmaceutical sales grew 9% y-o-y to US$ 1.47 billion. As per a report by Ibef.org, Medicine spending in India is projected to grow 9-12% over the next five years, leading India to become one of the top 10 countries in terms of medicine spending.
With numbers like those, it is not surprising that PharmEasy has already become a unicorn & we see giants such as Reliance Industries Ltd., acquiring a majority stake in Chennai-based Netmeds, Tata Group that is in the final stages of acquiring a majority stake in online pharmacy 1MG, and Amazon have entered the online pharmacy sector.
With growing interest and current environmental conditions redirecting all eyes to this sector, next revolution is yet to be seen – a wave of online registrations for COVID-19 vaccinations seems to be baby step in the direction!
As PharmEasy gives you easier access to medical necessities, Finns&Marks aims to provide you easier access to information. If you enjoy reading us, don’t forget to share with you friends:
By: Anmol Gupta | Isha Garg