20,000 chemists plan common brand

The exercise will cost Rs 15 crore.

The All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists (AIOCD) plans to have 20,000 pharma retail outlets in the organised sector under a common brand by February 2010, a top official said.

“We plan to have 20,000 retail outlets by February 2010 with common branding across the country for distribution, sales and marketing of pharma products and services,” AIOCD Chairman J S Shinde said on the sidelines of a press conference here.

The branding will be done for the outlets, most of which are already existing, at an investment of around Rs 15 crore.

The name of the brand would be announced in the next few days, Shinde said, adding that AIOCD aimed to effectively leverage the benefits of scale from consolidation and to channel the requisite capability, infrastructure, reach and breadth of service offerings even while providing assurance of genuine products at competitive prices.

With the organised retail market in the country growing at 15-16 per cent, AIOCD plans to have over 300,000 retail outlets under the common brand in the next few years pan-India, he said.

The outlets would be mostly on a franchise basis, Shinde said. AIOCD launched its product ‘PharmaTrac’, an online database of the Indian pharmaceutical market, in association with Chennai-based IT firm Tirkaal Medi-Infotech.

PharmaTrac will provide information to 600 top pharma companies and guide them to plan their strategies and action on new product launches, therapy presence, appraisal, budgeting, stocking patterns as well as tapping newer growth avenues.

It would also track the rank, size, share and growth of major pharma companies. With the introduction of PharmaTrac, the two-year-old AIOCD targets a Rs 100-crore turnover for this financial year.