The report shows that the total pharmaceutical retail sales this year is expected to be 974.1 billion yuan

The "Blue Book on the Development of China's Pharmaceutical Retail Industry" recently released shows that in 2011 China's total pharmaceutical product volume was 826.1 billion yuan, and it was estimated to be 974.1 billion yuan in 2012, an increase of 17.9% over the same period of the previous year.

According to the report, the retail terminal market for pharmacies in 2011 was 203.8 billion yuan, an increase of 9.98% over the previous year. This is the first increase in the number of drug retail terminals below 10% in recent years. According to the monitoring data of China Health News, in the first half of 2012, the total retail sales of 52 city pharmacies was 48.7 billion yuan (accounting for 45% of the total retail sales of county-level and above pharmacies in the same period), a year-on-year increase of 13.1%. Based on the data and policy trends in the first half of this year, China Health News predicts that the overall market size of the pharmaceutical retail industry in 2012 will reach 226.8 billion yuan, of which medicines account for 76.1%, non-pharmaceuticals account for 23.9%.

The report also pointed out that the concentration of Chinese chain pharmacies is relatively low. At present, the proportion of sales of top 100 direct sales stores in the total scale is only about 30%. M&A is an important force for the improvement of industry concentration. In 2011, the industry completed a total of more than 40 million yuan in mergers and acquisitions, of which 4 were more than 200 million yuan.