Amazon India is mulling over writing a USD 100 million check for Indian pharmacy chain Apollo Pharmacy as it looks to level up its online medicine delivery play in the world’s second-most-populous country.
If the deal goes through, it will allow the Seattle-headquartered company to sell and deliver medicines from Apollo’s 3,700 pharmacies throughout India, local media Economic Times reported, citing two sources familiar with the development.
Over three-decades old, Apollo Pharmacy is the largest pharmacy chain in India in terms of walk-in customers. Present in over 600 cities, its revenue in FY20 stood at over USD 700 million. It is closely followed by MedPlus, which has 1700-plus offline pharmacies across 300 cities that clocked USD 300 million in revenues in the last fiscal year.
With COVID-19 accelerating the adoption of services across healthcare, e-pharmacy market has heated up over the last six to nine months. While Amazon kicked off its online medicine delivery service with the launch of Amazon Pharmacy in India in August, Reliance Retail, the retail arm of Reliance Industries, owned by Asia’s richest person Mukesh Ambani, acquired a majority equity stake in Vitalic Health Pvt. Ltd, the parent company of digital pharmacy marketplace Netmeds for USD 83 million.
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