The Cabinet of Ministers plans to ban the operation of drug price aggregators, which enable consumers to buy drugs at optimal prices. The petition demanding not to adopt the relevant Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers has already gathered the required number of votes and must be considered. The petition calls on the government to remove from the text of the draft Resolution the paragraph that prohibits the sale of medicinal products outside pharmacies. The author of the petition Yevhen Muravshchyk, co-founder of Tabletki.ua, is convinced that with the ban on aggregator sites, consumers will lose an independent source of information about available drugs and price offers with discounts, and pharmacies that do not have the financial ability to develop their own site will lose an important communication channel with the consumer.
A wave of support for the petition swept across social networks. Users are asking: “Where is the Ministry of Statistics looking at? Such convenient and useful platforms as “Tablets” should be protected. They write: “The ban, against which people are protesting, benefits large chains with sky-high prices or “court” pharmacies. This ban is extremely harmful to consumers, that is, to each of us.”
How convenient are aggregator sites?
They make it possible to easily and clearly compare the price offers of different pharmacies and get a special price when ordering through the platform. Aggregators allow you to save significantly, which is very important for older buyers, who are especially sensitive to prices. Sometimes the difference between the cheapest and most expensive offer is up to 80% of the cost of the drug. Someone sells an older batch at the old price, someone has a new supply at a higher rate, someone uses promotions from manufacturers only for certain networks. The list can be continued. The price range is what consumers are most interested in on such platforms.
And the actual availability.
Consumers need to be sure that medicines are available, especially now, during wartime, when supply delays occur. The aggregator shows medicines “as of now” and makes it possible to find the offer that is geographically closest to the user.
Why is it important for Ukrainians?
The Deloitte company, which conducted a survey of consumers in Ukraine, testified that medicine is the only product category whose consumption in our country is growing despite the decrease in people’s purchasing power. 49% of Ukrainians do not save on the purchase of medicines. And the word “uneconomic” should not mislead here, because it is not about the scale of consumption, but about the forcedness of a significant percentage of people to “live on drugs.”
Already cited research shows that the frequency of purchasing medicines online is increasing: in 2023 compared to 2022, this difference is 36%.
An idea of the volume of the “pharmacy basket” is given by the figures given in the profile publication Aptek. u.a. According to the results of the 1st quarter 2024 the total volume of pharmacy sales of “pharmacy basket” products amounted to UAH 47.7 billion and 334.6 million packages. Compared to the same period in 2023, sales volumes in hryvnias increased by 20%, and in physical terms – by 4%.
Thoughts about
Vyacheslav Sauts, marketing director of the Podorozhnyk chain of pharmacies, told the newspaper “Forbes”, that this Resolution is not beneficial to them, and explained: “The bigger the network, the more it will lose due to the closing of price aggregators.” On Tabletki.ua, the share of the top 5 pharmacies reaches 70–90%, on the other hand, the share of “Traveler” on “Tabletki” is 18%, which is more than in the retail market as a whole.
Yevhen Muravshchyk, co-founder of Tabletki.ua and author of the petition, asserts, that banning the use of price aggregators, such as Tabletki.ua, Apteka24, Liki.ua and Doc.ua, “is a blow to both the consumer and the market.” The resolution unjustifiably and illegally displaces price aggregators from the market, violates the rights of consumers and worsens the situation of most pharmacies.
Viktor Serdyuk, President of the All-Ukrainian Council for the Protection of Patients’ Rights and Safety, wonders: who benefits from banning aggregator sites?
And answers: certainly not to average consumers, after all drug prices will rise at least by 15%. Not pharmaceutical manufacturers, since aggregators allow avoiding situations where pharmacists replace their drugs with others, help consumers make a choice at their computer, without the participation of pharmacy chain marketers, who do not always want the same as the pharmaceutical manufacturer. Maybe the ban is beneficial to pharmacy chains? At first glance, there is a benefit, because price aggregators seem to take the audience away from their sites. But at the same time, they bring up to 20% of total pharmacy sales, and even more in big cities.
Viktor Serdyuk suspects that only one large pharmacy aggregator will benefit from the ban, which will occupy a monopoly position on the drug market. The need to obtain a pharmacy license does not frighten him, since the resources allow him to buy a large chain of pharmacies and more than one as needed. At the same time, the resonance surrounding the resolution is a way to draw attention to oneself and the opportunity to destroy young promising competitors.
From the latest news
“On the resource forum DOU Evgeny Muravshchyk wrote:
I am sharing the results of the meeting at the Ministry of Health on May 21. The scandalous norm was not abolished, but we agreed to develop changes together with the State Medical Service. We are at the beginning of the journey, we hope we will be able to reach a result that will allow us to work for our users. For us, the priority is the consumer. We consider unacceptable any risks of depriving the consumer of information and choice. This is exactly what we brought to the attention of the officials today. Time will tell if we were heard. Thank you for your support, it was noticed!”
