"It's the drop of water that makes the vase overflow!" The delegate of the Pharmaceutical Distribution Union Chamber, Emmanuel Dechin, is upwind. This profession - which buys drugs from pharmaceutical laboratories, stores them and then resells them to 21,000 pharmacies in France - has seen its market share erode in recent years. The fault of particular wholesalers-distributors, the “short liners”. There are only about thirty of them, most of them SMEs, in a sector dominated by seven French or international heavyweights (OCP, Alliance Healthcare, Phenix, Cerp, etc.). Their weight remains modest - short liners hold 6.2% of the market in volume and less than 3% in value - but it has almost doubled since 2009, according to the Court of Auditors.
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These actors take advantage of the legal vagueness to circumvent the public service obligations of the profession, namely to reference 9/10 of prescription drugs or to deliver French pharmacies in priority. For two years,
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