A few days ago, during the first China OTC Conference and The Promotion conference of Traditional Chinese Medicine, at the China OTC Regulation Forum, Wang Lu, director of management consulting at Iqbrow, said: Retail pharmacies are the central point of health management.
Consumers are highly aware of self-medication
Compared with China's pharmaceutical market and the global pharmaceutical market, due to the slowdown in the world economy and the impact of the new crown epidemic, the proportion of health care expenditure in gdp in countries around the world has generally increased. The slow economic recovery will greatly restrict the health budget, and the awareness of individual self-care and self-medication will further rise after the epidemic.
Combined with global consumer survey data, overall health and immunity improvement are the most important, which is also reflected in the rapid growth of vitamins and nutritional supplement sales data in countries around the world. At the same time, consumers have paid more attention to brands in self-medicated products purchased during the epidemic, and the sales amount of non-brand or private-label health care products has not risen but declined. If the sales data of China's pharmaceutical market also covers products such as traditional Chinese medicine tonics and medicinal and food homologous products, the growth rate during the epidemic period is second only to that of vitamins and nutritional supplements.
The above trends in the consumer health market coincide with the recommendations of the 14th Five-Year Plan for the Chinese OTC industry to advocate the development of brands and promote the development of traditional Chinese medicine. Important changes have taken place in the global pharmaceutical market since the pandemic, driving disease prevention and making consumers the first person responsible for health. Moreover, the improvement of self-medication or the popularity of OTC drugs are also closely related to changes in the payment structure, which is actually an economic reason that cannot be ignored.
Retail pharmacies are the central point of health management
Wang Lu said that at the global e-commerce conference held online on September 23-25, Ai Kunwei put forward a point of view that retail pharmacies have increasingly become the center of community health management.
Through new technologies and means of communication, consumers are greatly empowered, if consumers only have limited medical and pharmaceutical knowledge, they can not be the first person in charge of personal health management. At the same time, the content of health management is also more diverse, not only to simply understand the active ingredients, side effects, and indications on drug labels and instructions, but also to easily grasp the continuous occurrence of diseases, the situation of drug use, the symptoms of allergies, the symptoms of adaptation and maladaptation, and personal customized medical solutions. At this time, online and offline retail pharmacies are a central point of community health management, and such practices are becoming more common at home and abroad, such as providing simple remote consultations and vaccinations during the epidemic.
During the epidemic, the number of Internet medical diagnoses has risen rapidly, and after the epidemic, some specialty fields such as skin and spirit have maintained a high proportion, which has led to a change in the online and offline proportion of pharmaceutical e-commerce.
Pharmaceutical e-commerce is a channel that cannot be ignored
It is estimated that the global e-commerce scale will reach 6.54 trillion US dollars by 2023, of which health and beauty account for the fifth place in the global e-commerce online shopping preference.
The global pharmaceutical e-commerce scale in 2018 was 156 billion US dollars, and it is expected to increase by 2.8 times to 436 billion US dollars by 2025, that is to say, it accounts for 7% of global e-commerce. Among them, in 2018, North America was the largest region of global pharmaceutical e-commerce, accounting for 41%, and Asia-Pacific (including China) accounted for 25%.
Wang Lu predicts that by 2025, China's pharmaceutical e-commerce is 650 billion yuan in scale, accounting for 23% of global pharmaceutical e-commerce, compared with the entire Asia-Pacific region in 2018 accounted for only 25% of the global pharmaceutical e-commerce, there is no doubt that we are in the 10 years of rapid development of China's pharmaceutical e-commerce, the rapid development of China's pharmaceutical e-commerce has driven the position of the entire Asia-Pacific region pharmaceutical e-commerce in the global market.
In contrast, the traditional drug market, driven by innovative drugs and higher drug prices, is expected to maintain a market share of about 40% by 2025, and China is 12%-13%. Therefore, in the pharmaceutical e-commerce channel, which is mainly based on consumer drugs (including chronic diseases) and Chinese and Western-style nutrition and health products, China is worthy of the name of the Internet and pharmaceutical e-commerce power.
Compared with the OTC market in Germany and China, the German online market accounts for 21%, and the online growth rate in 2020 compared with 2019 is 17%, and the offline growth rate is -5%, and the online growth rate is much greater than that offline. China's online growth rate reached 48% in the same period, while offline also fell by 5% during the epidemic. China and Germany pharmaceutical b2c market are double dominant pattern, and China's pharmaceutical e-commerce concentration is higher, Ali and JD.com not only compete in indicators such as user volume and gmv, but also compete with each other in the fields of medical service and drug category expansion, supply chain management and digital marketing. The entry of Meituan and Ele.me has further promoted the competition between online and offline new retail, and behind the rapid response is solid consumer behavior and portrait data.
Standing in the global and Chinese outlook for 5 years now, the impact of the epidemic is profoundly changing the rules of the game for consumer health and the OTC industry, and accelerating innovation, opening up cooperation, and embracing new technologies and new channels is the way to win.