THE RISE OF INDIAN E-PHARMA
The e-pharmacy sector has been consistently outperforming in the lockdown period due the social distancing norms and these companies made use of this situation as an opportunity. Due to lockdown norms, all the consumers have moved to online platforms for medical consultations,medicine deliveries and also medical tests and these factors have been the reason for sudden spurt of demand. Along with e-pharmacy companies, even edtech companies have been showing exceptional growth. And now to even more boost the E-Pharmacy sector, there is a proposal at Competition Commission of India (CCI) regarding the merger of Pharmeasy and Medlife. This will result in a billion dollar company. In November, 2019 Pharmeasy was valued at $700 million and Medlife was valued at $450 million. In the India’s E-commerce sector we can see a duopoly of Amazon and Flipkart, and this merger of Pharmeasy and Medlife would be creating a strong entity in its own sector. Pharmeasy has proposed to acquire a 100% stake in Medlife but Medlife is also expected to acquire a 19% stake in Pharmeasy. And this is not the only expected merger. Recently Amazon has launched its Amazon Pharmacy in bangalore, which is reportedly considering to acquire a majority stake in the E-Pharma company called Netmeds.
According to various sources, even though the e-pharmacy sector is in its early days, the Indian e-pharma industry is expected to grow to $4.5 billion from $1.2 billion. Many e-pharmacy companies like Mfine, 1MG, etc are trying to build a single integrated application. The growth of this sector has a lot of potential because of the entry of big players like Amazon and Reliance. But at the same time due to these big players there should not be a rise of monopoly or duopoly, which is not healthy, especially for this kind of budding sector where there is a scope of great development. This sort of growth is only possible when a healthy competition exists in the market. These are the situations which increase the scope of competition law to a whole new level.
