A'bad-based pharmacy dispenses only the cheapest drug option

Business Standard reports a story about an entrepreneur in Ahmadabad who has a medicine shoppe and which dispenses only the cheapest drug option.

http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/a-bad-based-pharmacy-dispense s-only-the-cheapest-drug-option-115081001167_1.html

An Ahmedabad-based start up Medkart Pharmacy has taken an innovative approach to doing the business of selling medicines. Ankur Agarwal, an engineer and an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, has opened his pharmacy in Ahmedabad, which sells the cheapest available brand or medicine to the customer.

What Medkart does is when a customer approaches them with a prescription that might contain any brand name, the chemist suggests the medicine which has the same composition, but is the cheapest version available in the market.

Mr. Agarwal started Medkart in September 2014 after a personal tete-a-tete with a medical crisis and high medicine prices pushed him to think on these lines. Medkart started with a seed-fund of Rs 25 lakh and it has broken even around four months back. It currently has only one store in Ahmedabad and is planning to add a few more in the coming months. The Ahmedabad store currently makes around Rs 25 lakh turnover a month, with 40-50 new clients every day. About 90 per cent of its sales come from chronic segment therapies like diabetes and cardiac problems.

It has consciously chosen not to go for over the top marketing as word of mouth is a more reliable and credible way to win customers, feels Agarwal. He adds that several doctors visit our stores after they hear about us from their patients and once they see the way we dispense medicines, they themselves go back and recommend us to their patients.