It seems that India’s home grown e-commerce giant Flipkart is finally making a foray into India’s rapidly growing online pharmacy market. According to a report published in Techcrunch, the Walmart owned e-commerce company has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kolkata based online Pharmacy startup SastaSundar.
According to Tracxn, SastaSundar had raised a funding round at a valuation of nearly $125 Mn in 2019.
Flipkart has said that its healthcare vertical will be named as FlipkartHealth+.
Earlier unconfirmed reports claimed that Flipkart was seriously planning to invest in the IPO bound PharmEasy.
Both Flipkart and Amazon have been aggressively trying to penetrate India’s online pharmacy market. Amazon has already started selling medicines on its platform.
Since last year India’s online pharmacy industry is witnessing lot of traction. From Reliance acquiring NetMeds, Tata acquiring 1Mg to PharmEasy acquiring BSE listed Thyrocare Diagnostic.
The implosion of activities in the online pharma industry clearly signifies that investors have sensed the inherent growth opportunity of the industry. Currently, the size of online pharma industry constitutes merely 4-5% of the offline industry. The headroom for long-term growth for the E-pharmacy industry is obviously huge. But several challenges persists for this highly nascent industry.
One of the prominent challenges being that the E-Pharmacy industry is highly regulatory driven industry.
