Monopoly distributors make the most money on medicines – Amelin
28 September 2025 10:34
Ukraine’s two largest pharmaceutical distributors, BaDM and Optima-Pharm, enjoy the highest margins in the market with minimal risks. Their revenues in 2023 exceeded UAH 114 billion. Anatoliy Amelin, executive director and co-founder of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future think tank, wrote about this on his Facebook page, Kommersant Ukrainian reports .
“The oligopolistic structure of the market is that more than 90% of the pharmaceutical market of Ukraine is controlled by two distributors – BaDM and Optima-Pharm,” explained Anatoliy Amelin.
According to him, they have significantly raised their margins.
“Distributors have increased the average margins from 4.5% in 2021 to 12% in 2024, a 2.7-fold increase in just 3 years,” the expert noted.
“The main beneficiaries of the conflict are monopoly distributors, who get the highest margins with minimal risks and investments, controlling the bottleneck in the supply chain,” Amelin emphasized.
Conflict in the pharmaceutical market
The root of the conflict lies in the changes in the regulation of the pharmaceutical market initiated by the government to reduce drug prices.
on February 12, 2025, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy enacted the decision of the National Security and Defense Council on additional measures to ensure the availability of medicines, which provided for a 30% reduction in prices for the top 100 drugs and a ban on marketing payments between manufacturers and pharmacies.
However, even before these measures formally came into force, Darnitsa raised the prices of its drugs by 120% at the end of 2024, which became a catalyst for the conflict.
On March 1, 2025, the five largest pharmacy chains – ANC, Podorozhnyk, Pharmacy 9-1-1, Wish You Well and Dobroho dnia – drastically reduced purchases of Darnitsa’s products, controlling about 70% of the retail pharmaceutical market.
Since then, public battles between manufacturers, pharmacies and distributors have been going on. And all this has already led to significant economic losses, Amelin emphasizes.
Economic losses include:
– Loss of jobs (over 1000 layoffs at Darnitsa alone)
– Reduced tax revenues from falling sales
– Risks to exports (the company operates in 20 countries)
– Threat to the country’s medicinal safety in wartime
As Kommersant Ukrainsky wrote, ordinary Ukrainians are losing out on the country’s pharmaceutical market because of the war.
