According to a consumer survey report of the Southern Institute of pharmaceutical economics of the State Food and Drug Administration (hereinafter referred to as the Southern Institute) in November 2021, nearly 44% of the respondents have purchased drugs through online channels in the past year, and the proportion has approached offline channels. It is expected that with the outflow of prescriptions driving the reconstruction of information flow, service flow, capital flow and logistics related to medicine, the position of online pharmaceutical retail as the “fourth terminal” of the pharmaceutical market after public hospital terminal, retail pharmacy terminal and public grass-roots medical terminal is becoming more and more consolidated.
At the same time, with the improvement of social and economic level, the acceleration of population aging and the change of disease spectrum, consumers’ online drug shopping behavior has also changed.
In recent years, the online shopping retail market has grown steadily. According to the 2020 online retail market development report released by the Ministry of Commerce, the online retail market has maintained steady growth in the face of the challenge of the epidemic, and the technological innovation of e-commerce enterprises has become an important accelerator for the transformation of the real economy. In 2020, the national online retail sales reached 11.76 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.9%; The online sales of physical goods accounted for nearly 25% of the total social consumer goods, with a year-on-year increase of 4.2%. In terms of category sales scale, clothing, shoes and hats, daily necessities and household appliances still rank among the top three; In terms of growth rate, Chinese and Western medicines were the most significant, with a year-on-year increase of 110.4%.
Due to the special nature of the medical equipment, before the COVID-19, with the slow disease rate rising and other factors, the penetration rate of the medicine and equipment sales line maintained a slow growth: only 6.4% in 2019. In 2020, the online penetration rate reached 9.2%, with a significant growth rate.
Post time: Mar-22-2022