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My mother lives by herself in a large regional city in NSW. At 90 she is pretty remarkable,\u00a0 although some of the bits are wearing out, so she has a pharmacological regime that would make your average teenage party-goer green with envy.<\/p>\n
Her pills are made up from the actives by a local chemist with the compounding License that allows him to assemble her prescriptions and combine them, which he then delivers weekly in a pack that reflects the changing nature of the prescriptions written by her doctor.<\/p>\n
A great service, and the young entrepreneurial pharmacist has the geriatric market in the town sewn up.<\/p>\n
I was thinking of him last week when I saw that Amazon had bought US startup Pillpack<\/a> for almost a billion dollars. As\u00a0 a result, the share prices of listed pharmacy retailers, Walgreens and others fell<\/a> into a hole, a now common outcome when Amazon comes around.<\/p>\n Jeff Bezos has long signaled his interest in the pharmacy market, being a part of Drugstore.com in the 90’s which was eventually bought by drug store chain Walgreens for $400 million, and closed down. He has made other investments<\/a> in various areas of the health industry over a long period, which should have provided an early warning alarm to the incumbents.\u00a0 More recently he has launched a venture<\/a> in collaboration with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan to disrupt the huge but cosey health insurance market.<\/p>\n I can only wonder at the hand wringing going on in the Walgreens board room. They had a decade to build a moat around their business,\u00a0 but failed to do so, and now the pirate has returned. This is exactly the same mistake Blockbuster<\/a> made a couple of years later, by dismissing the overtures of Netflicks, and disappeared as a result. By contrast, the young pharmacist in Armidale will be well insulated, and I suspect will have his own plans to keep his business thriving. Meanwhile I suspect the Pharmacy Guild in Australia will again tread the road of trying to use the regulations as a protective mechanism, and try to fight the tide of change, which is ultimately going to fail.<\/p>\n