After a peak reached in 2007, when the price of a license for Bucharest amounted to as much as €250,000, followed by a dramatic decline in 2008, the cost of a license is currently approaching zero, and everybody is waiting for the beginning of 2011. The liberalization will enhance competition between pharmacies and the advance of performing businesses, on the back of profit margins under pressure, due to lower prices for medications.
“As of the end of 2010, people will no longer need licenses, with the market to be free. I expect two phenomena: the first, pharmacy chains will consolidate, and the second, young pharmacists, who had no chance of opening their own pharmacy, because they did not have the money for the license, will now be able to open one,” the Manager of the Centrofarm pharmacy chain, Dorin Catană, told Business Standard.
Radu Tudorache, President of Newarch Investments, which owns the Montero distributor and the Remedio pharmacies, said that in case the market becomes free, the main barriers for entering the market will be the shortage of pharmacists and the fact that the best locations are already taken.
The pharmaceutical market, valued at €1.8 billion by the Cegedim analysis and market research company is 50 percent smaller than the markets in Central and Eastern Europe, in terms of number of inhabitants, and three-four times smaller than markets in Western European countries.
