“In the first half of 2012 we are talking about a rise of just 5% against 2011, rather non-significant compared with the market growth,” Iacob said. According to the manager, the 5% growth was based mainly on improved collection of overdue payments.
In the first six months of 2012 the drug market rose by 12.6% in lei (7.2% in euros) to 5.7 billion lei (EUR1.29 billion), according to data from market research company Cegedim Romania. For the full 2012 Cegedim expects an 8.9% rise in lei.
ADM Farm is one of the largest drug wholesalers on the Romanian market, ranking 7th according to data cited by the company.
Businessman Alin Iosep owns 50% of the company’s shares. The rest used to be held by Dragos Pop, who passed away in August after a heart failure. The company said it would make the new shareholding structure public after all legal aspects are clarified.
ADM has also said Dragos Pop’s responsibilities were taken over by Alin Iosep and that the business plan until 2014 stands.
“This development plan entails expanding the product portfolio and the number of pharmacies served. (…) By the end of 2014 we should be in the top 5 of distributors of pharmaceutical products in Romania, now we are no. 7,” Octavian Iacob said.
At the beginning of this year ADM Farm finalized the expansion of its storage facility in Suceava (NE Romania), to a capacity of 1,600 cubic meters. The relocation of the Timisoara storage facility (Western Romania – Banat) will be finalized by the end of the year, which will double the storage capacity in the Banat area. Octavian Iacob says the move in Timisoara was generated by the development of businesses in this area in the last year.
Drug distributors, which post the biggest sales on the drug market, have in the past few years had deadlines of over 300 days for getting their money back from the market (distributors get their money back from pharmacies, which in turn have to get funds from free and subsidized drugs from the state). These long deadlines have caused the biggest problems in terms of liquidity and recouping money from the market.
Distributors are the largest players in the pharmaceutical industry and post sales of hundreds of millions of euros because they work with hundreds of suppliers for prescription and non-prescription drugs, cosmetics, dermocosmetics and parapharmaceuticals.
The largest pharmaceutical distributors on the local market are Mediplus, Farmexpert, Polisano, Europharm, Farmexim, Fildas, ADM Farm and others.
(English version by Daniela Stoican)