Pharma market posts double digit growth of 13.9 per cent in April 2013: IMS Health

By On May 27, 2013

Anti-diabetics was the fastest growing therapy for the month of April 2013

According to an IMS Health report, the pharmaceutical market was reported at Rs 6744 crores for the month of April 2013, with a double digit growth of 13.9 per cent.

Source: IMS Health TSA, April 2013

April 2013 has witnessed an excellent market performance by the pharma industry, registering all around healthy growths – be it acute or chronic therapies, local companies or MNCs. Of course challenges will always remain – the most imminent will be the implementation of DPCO 2013.

While the bigger pharma companies would take the major brunt of the erosion due to those drugs under the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM), they would be able to mitigate some of the drop in profits by higher volumes due to greater market reach and brand value. The major impact would be on the mid level pharma companies who would have to revisit their board rooms to draw up new strategies, and look beyond the ‘price differential’ advantage that they currently leverage to grow sales, according to Amit Backliwal, Managing Director, IMS Health – South Asia.

This upsurge in sales for the month of April 2013 is in line with expectations, where inventory build up at the stockists (March – financial year end), got liquidated in April through higher secondary sales, data which IMS Health reports.

Improvement in macro factors (forecasts of favourable monsoons, improved economic growth through 2^nd half of the year), we believe that the pharma market will register a progressive improvement going forward, and remain on track to grow between 11–13 per cent in the FY 2013, as forecasted in the IMS Market Prognosis report.

For the period MAT April 2013, the pharma market was reported at Rs 73,718 crores, with a growth of 10.8 per cent.

Leading Corporations Performance

The Top‐10 Corporations for the month of April 2013 were as follows:

Source: IMS Health TSA, April 2013

For the month of April 2013 – Sun, Alkem and Sanofi were the fastest growing corporations among the Top 10 companies. Among the Top 20 companies, USV was the fastest growing company (29.9 per cent) for the month of April 13, as well as for the period MAT April 2013 (21.5 per cent). In fact, while the Top 10 ranked companies combined grew by 10.6 per cent companies grew by 17 per cent.

There were a few changes in the Top 10 company ranking for the month of April 2013. While Alkem moved up two ranks, Ranbaxy moved up by one rank; GSK, Mankind and Pfizer declined by one rank, each. For the month, we see that local companies are growing relatively stronger at 15.1 per cent; however, MNCs have also posted double digit growth.

Source: IMS Health TSA, April 2013

Leading Therapy Performance:

Anti-diabetics was the fastest growing therapy for the month of April 2013 (22.6 per cent), followed by dermatology (20.3 per cent) and cardiac drugs (16.2 per cent).

Chronic therapies continue to show relatively stronger growths for the month underlining the growing penetration of these disease conditions in the Indian population.