OREANDA-NEWS. August 15, 2012. Due to some media publishing information that the antimonopoly authority forms a new system of control over drug trade in Russia, the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) would like to inform the following, reported the press-centre of FAS Russia:

During the past several years FAS has been exercising continuous control over compliance with the antimonopoly law on pharmaceutical markets and undertaking efforts towards developing competition on these markets.

As part of control over economic concentration on retail drug markets, the antimonopoly body carries out annual studies of the market of retail trade with drugs, medical products and related products. Based on studies findings, FAS identifies economic entities dominating local markets and keeps the Register of economic entities with over 35% share on a market of particular goods. Keeping the Register is required by Sub-Clause “a” Clause 8 Part 1 Article 23 of the Federal Law “On Protection of Competition”.

A specific of such analysis is that regional bodies and the Central Office of FAS have to collect and process a lot of information from numerous market participants, and it requires considerable degree of repetition of similar actions of regional antimonopoly bodies. It takes considerable labour and time resources.

Currently, collection, storage and further processing of information about the market of retail drug trade is based on traditional paperwork. It complicates manual calculations of the market size, shares of economic entities, identifying market entities with over 35% market share and entities that have dominant position on the market, level of market concentration and the state of competition on the markets, markets trends within the period in question. Also, FAS regional offices do not have standardized reporting, which delays and complicates its analytical processing and generalization.

To automate research of pharmaceutical markets carried out by the Antimonopoly Service, FAS announced an auction for developing an information system designed to simplify and reduce the period required to carry such research. Developing such system will also facilitate the most convenient and efficient data storage and accumulation.

FAS would like to emphasize that FAS is not going to create a new system of control over retail drug trade in Russia.