Roche Diabetes Care to expand retail presence in India
Roche Diabetes Care India, the business which Roche Diagnostics India hived off into a separate entity last November, is planning to double its retail reach to 120,000 pharmacy outlets in the next five years and address around 60 per cent of the market. The company, which sells equipment for selfmonitoring of blood glucose (SMBG) under the brand AccuChek, is also looking at tying up with the government of India and the state governments, to reach more people.
Sidhartha Roy, managing director of Roche Diabetes Care India, said, “Our field force regularly touches 60,000 pharmacies across the country. We will be embarking on a model where we intend to double the reach in the next five years to 120,000 outlets.”
There are roughly 600,000 registered pharmacists in India, of which 200,000 pharmacies sell diabetes treatment medication including insulin, according to traders’ organisations. If the company could cover 60 per cent of the pharmacies, it would be a milestone that it should aspire for and that is how Roche Diabetes Care agreed to double its reach in the next five years, Roy said.
From two million at present, the company is planning to touch around 10 million patients in the next five years.
The overall market size for the segment should be around $100 million, which has four international players — Roche Diabetes Care with Accu-Chek, LifeScan from Johnson & Johnson under the brand One Touch, Abbott Diabetes Care division with its brand Optium and Ascensia Diabetes Care, which was earlier Bayer Diabetes Care business and later acquired by Panasonic Healthcare Holdings.
Roche Diabetes Care came into existence as a new legal entity on November 7, 2016, after the group decided to invest in diabetes care in India. The group has identified that it needed an organisation to solely focus on the diabetes care in countries such as India and China. India was one of the first countries where it hived off the SMBG business. The diagnostics business is fundamentally a business-tobusiness model, but the diabetes care is a business-to-consumer (B2C) one and both were in the same entity until the division took place.
“Structurally we can be more agile and make changes to the B2C model, get skill sets accordingly. It gets us more independence to do the things which are needed for this organisation to serve diabetic patients. The independence of the business makes our decision-making faster, also bringing in new products on time to the market,” Roy explained.
The entire segment is an import-based model, where the monitors are imported. The company claims to have the lowest price in terms of longterm diabetes management, such as the price of strips used in blood sugar monitoring.
The company is looking at bringing in connecting monitoring equipment using Bluetooth, and an Accu-Chek Connect App which would enable free flow of monitoring results in digital format that could also be presented in charts or other formats for better view of the doctor.