"Few Advantages" In EU Market: Noweda

The Europe-wide grouping of drug wholesaling in the context of thesingle market has brought few advantages, Dietrich Meyer, chairman of Germany's Noweda group, has said. In a European context, the decisive factor in wholesaling success is less a function of size than of growth, and caution is needed when expansion abroad is achieved at the expense of domestic business.

All European Union states have problems with their social systems, he said, and it is far from clear how Germany's neighbors will free their health services from state intervention in future; how difficult the problems of adaptation are can be experienced in Germany itself. Noweda's top priority is not Europe but the German market, which expects major changes, he said, and "all business is local" is to be its strategy now and in the foreseeable future. Noweda has posted above-average growth over the past 10 years; in the year ending June 1996 net sales rose 10.7% to 1.8 billion Deutschemarks ($1.13 billion), compared with market growth of 5%-6%.

Mr Meyer underlined widespread scepticism in the German drug wholesale sector about the reality of the single market. The European wholesalers' federation has said before that, as each country has its own drug approval procedure and price-fixing process, not a single drug would be sale-able and marketable Europe-wide without new manufacturing technical changes and additional approval procedures in the member states.