INSIGHT Health: Strong allergy and cold season supports the pharmacy market in the first half of 2011
05.08.2011 10:56
With some dynamic changes in individual market segments, growth on the pharmacy market weakened significantly in the first half of 2011 (+ 1.9 %) compared to the same period last year (+ 5.2 %). According to figures from INSIGHT Health, sales, valued according to ApU (pharmaceutical manufacturer's selling price), are 12.8 billion euros for the first six months of the year. During the same period, the volume increased by 2.9 percent to 807 million packs (-4.4 % in the first half of 2010).
The cold and allergy markets experienced a significant increase in volume and sales due to the weather. Cold medicines were sold 15 percent more, both in quantity (142 million units) and in sales (507 million euros). Allergy sufferers suffered particularly badly from the dry and early warm weather, but the allergy market was able to benefit from it. Revenues and sales were around 10 percent higher than in the same period last year. The highest monthly sales in recent years were achieved from February to May.
The ulcer therapeutics (A02B) (- 26 %), the platelet aggregation inhibitors (B01C) (- 23 %) and the lipid-lowering drugs (C10A) (- 12 %) have significantly lost market volume in the indication groups with the highest sales with half-yearly sales above 100 million euros. The reason for this is the sometimes significant expansion in generic sales volumes, combined with significantly lower unit prices.
When looking at the market segments, a recent trend became apparent: the market share in sales of prescription products increased continuously from 80.0 to 82.5 percent from 2006 to 2010 (here based on the first half of the year). This trend was at least temporarily slowed in the first half of 2011; the market share is currently 82.0 percent. The market share of pharmacy-only products behaves in exactly the opposite direction: for the first time in years, these experienced a slight increase to 11.5 percent (2010: 11.3 %), not least due to the strong allergy/cold season. This also influenced direct business: While the prescription range stagnated at 10.4 percent in the first half of the year, the pharmacy range grew by more than four points from 20.2 to 24.6 percent.
INSIGHT Health is a leading information service provider in the healthcare market with a broad portfolio of data-based services for market and healthcare research. The success of INSIGHT Health lies in providing individual solutions for the pharmaceutical industry, health insurance companies, medical associations, scientific institutes, authorities, politicians and other decision-makers in the healthcare market.