Insights

Pharma market analysis in figures: pricing, deals, regulation, staff.

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Technology
11 min

Agentic search in pharmacy retail. How AI assistants answer where to buy medicine and what a pharmacy chain can do

More and more shoppers ask an AI assistant where to buy a medicine in their city. The assistant replies with a list of pharmacies or links to aggregators, and a place on that list cannot be bought. I read the help pages of Yandex, OpenAI, Sber and DeepSeek and the Russian rules on selling medicines. This article covers where assistants get their answers, what a pharmacy chain may legally do and how to measure the result.

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Pricing
9 min

How to Track Competitors' Prices. Four Approaches Presented at Pharmliga

At the autumn Pharmliga forum, competitors' prices came up in talks by pharmacy chains, two manufacturers and a distributor. Pharmacies rely on knowing their own shoppers, Akrikhin has built its own AI agents, Grand Capital forecasts competitors' prices from sales history, and Natura Siberica buys cheap raw data and gets it into shape itself. I compared these approaches with my own monitoring of online pharmacy prices.

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Pharmacy business
9 min

Notification instead of a permit. What the draft law on online drug sales simplifies and what it leaves for later

If the Health Ministry's draft is adopted, from September 2027 a pharmacy will no longer need a permit from Roszdravnadzor, the healthcare regulator, to sell medicines for delivery. A notification will be enough. I read the draft, went through the register of current permits and looked at who obtains them. The procedure will become simpler, while the conditions for delivery itself will be set by a future government decree.

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Pharmacy business
22 min

Selling what isn't there. How online booking rewrites a pharmacy's stock and assortment

Courier delivery accounts for a couple of per cent of pharmacy e-commerce in Russia. Everything else the customer collects in person, and what he comes for was increasingly not in that pharmacy before he pressed the button. I ran my own price monitoring to see how wide that gap is and what it costs a pharmacy chain.

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Technology
18 min

You can buy every GPU on earth and still solve the wrong problem

In 2019 Richard Sutton set out the "bitter lesson": in artificial intelligence, clever ideas lose to raw computing power. In September 2026 one of the authors of InstructGPT replied that this is only the tip of the iceberg: data matters more than compute, and the right task matters more than data. A plain-language retelling, with the numbers checked against primary sources.

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Pricing
15 min

How semaglutide and tirzepatide carried Russia's pharmacy market

In 2025 GLP-1 drugs accounted for 1.8% of the entire pharmacy market, parapharmacy included, but delivered a tenth of its growth. Without them the prescription segment would have grown more slowly than a year earlier. Two Russian manufacturers share the market, the shopper pays for it, and some of the permits to produce these drugs expire on 31 December.

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Deals
27 min

What a pharmacy is worth when nobody names the price

In under a year pharmacy retail disclosed ten-odd deals and not one sum. Outside estimates land between two and five months' turnover, and the spread is set not by the pharmacy but by whoever does the counting and whose revenue goes in the denominator. After that the buyer starts deducting: stock, somebody else's working capital, the rent

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Pricing
15 min

The drug market grew 13 percent without selling a single extra pack

In one year the same number of boxes went through pharmacies, yet the money grew by 13 percent. One and the same shopper behaves like two different segments inside a single basket, and a single price is no longer addressed to anyone.

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Pharmacy business
2 min

The Mobile Pharmacy: 35 Sales a Day

A three-year experiment puts pharmacies on wheels in villages that have none. But at 35 sales a day the math only closes with transport subsidies, tax breaks announced up front, and the right to carry pre-orders on the same trip.

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Regulation
2 min

Track-and-trace from September 1: the problem isn't the scanner

Eight new medical-device categories have been under mandatory track-and-trace labeling since September 1 — but the real risk is your stock and a wrong deadline circulating in the trade chats, not the hardware on the counter.

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Staff
2 min

You Can't Get Into Pharmacy Through Courses

Two new Health Ministry orders rewrite who is admitted to the profession and what jobs exist inside it — but they codify a pharmacy that has already vanished, and they won't touch the real staffing problem.

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