MUMBAI: Warhorse brands of the Indian drug industry such as Combiflam and Revital have revitalised themselves to appeal to the new generation of consumers that spend more liberally on healthcare and are now topping the charts.
While the overall economic uptick appears to have a strong hand to play in the performance of brands such as Combiflam painkiller and Becosules multivitamin, companies say they are also stepping up investments in these ageing products.
According to audited retail sales data of market researcher IMS Health, all except two of the top 25 brands were launched prior to 2000 and some as early as the seventies and eighties.
Of the top 25 brands, 22 grew in double digits in 2010 and 13 grew at market rate or faster. Most of these brands are under price control. So, there has been no price increase in recent years. In fact, prices of many of these drugs were cut by the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority .
"Combiflam is priced lower today than when it was launched in 1985 and we have received further price cuts," says Pratin Vete , senior director, commercial operations (tier 2 and internal medicine), at Sanofi-Aventis, which owns the brand. "The growth is primarily volume-driven." This is mostly due to increasing demand from tier-2 towns. More hospitals are coming up in these areas. And, drug companies are gradually venturing out of the metros and taking bets in the rising prosperity of smaller cities and towns.
"Growth has been coming from tier-2 towns and that's heartening," says Pfizer's Strategic Business Unit Director Suresh Subramanian. "Last year, we have increased penetration of the Becosules brand and expanded the field force," he adds. Becosules has gone from decline in the country in 2009 to high growth in 2010.
At GlaxoSmithKline Pharma , a two-and-a-half-year-old 'Reach' initiative is taking a bunch of products such as anti-pyretic Calpol, and cough syrup Piriton to tier 2 and beyond. This is after an earlier attempt was aborted in the early 2000s. "We have renewed our focus," says GSK Pharma MD Hasit Joshipura.