The almost 6% increase comes after three quarters of decline in a row for the pharmaceutical industry, which once used to grow at a rate of 20% to 30%.
Despite the growth, Cegedim is not optimistic about the full-year performance, so it has not revised its previous forecast, which pointed to a decline.
“Considering the subsidized drug list will most likely be updated towards the end of the year its impact will be marginal in 2014, so we’ll keep our current forecast of 0.3% decline in lei,” says Petru Craciun, general manager of Cegedim Romania.
An explanation of the upward trend may be that business in the second quarter of last year was slower, so the comparison base was lower. At the same time, some changes were made to how prescription drugs are issued, which had a positive influence on sales.
The non-prescription drugs (the so-called over-the-counter drugs or OTC) saw double growth compared with the rest of the products, 12%, in line with the trend of the last few years, when more and more companies turned to this segment to offset the problems on the other niches.
OTC price is not regulated, which makes such drugs extremely attractive for the pharmaceutical industry. They only account for 18% of the entire drug market.
The government subsidizes more than 60% of the drug sales in Romania, but access to new drugs has been restricted in the last two years, as the subsidized drug list has not been updated.
Cegedim calculated that sales of pharmaceutical drugs to patients rose slightly in the first half but recommends using a 12-month period for analysis to be able to avoid seasonal fluctuations. The market was down 0.4% in July 2013 – June 2014, as expected.
Next year will come with the eagerly awaited growth for the pharmaceutical market.
“We estimate a slight 1.8% growth in lei for 2015,” Petru Craciun said.
Roche remained the leader of the pharmaceutical industry in Romania, a position it got last year, but its lead on Sanofi was lower, merely RON0.5 million. Third place went to Novartis, which beat Servier by RON5 million.
The largest pharmaceutical companies have constantly lost market share in the last few years so they now account for 48.8% of the EUR2.7 billion sales of the market, compared with 57.7% in 2010.
The winners are the small companies specialized on niches, a growing worldwide trend shown by recent deals. The big battle in the pharmaceutical industry now is fought over buying companies with rare disease drug portfolios or those developing niche products.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)