Market Overview

The market size for domestic logistics services geared to drugs and medical equipment & materials (based on the sales at service providers contracted) for FY2022 rose by 6.8% to 125 billion yen. As the shipment volume of medicines and medical equipment as well as the rate of outsourcing to logistics services continued increasing, together with expansion in the range of contracted work processes, the market has shown steadfast growth, approximately 1.6 times larger than in FY2013.

Noteworthy Topics

The Key is GDP-Oriented Product Quality Management for Medicines

For pharmaceutical logistics outsourcing services, quality control used to be done as a part of warehousing business, but in recent years, integrated management quality throughout the whole processes including transportation and delivery has become important, so that robustness in transportation and delivery networks is valued.

In December 2018, a guideline for Japanese version of Good Distribution Practice (GDP) on the standard of medicine distribution has been issued by MHLW, which requires GDP-oriented quality control for pharmaceutical logistics processes. Whether or not appropriately conform to GDP is the critical factors to select outsourcing service providers.

As the area of pharmaceutical logistics services is expanding, the data platform for visualizing the distribution statuses from the product shipment at manufacturers to delivery at medical institutions can be the peripheral added values for the service.

Future Outlook

The 2024 issue for logistics has started affecting pharmaceutical and medical equipment logistics services. To streamline various logistics processes, reformation in thoughts is needed not only in the logistics companies' side but also in the consigners' side. Targeting those products from multiple pharmaceutical companies or medical equipment manufacturers, shared transportation, relay transportation that establishes a relay base, and modal shift* to utilize railway transportation, etc. have partly begun.

It is true that the clients of medicines and medical instruments are relatively concentrated mainly in hospitals. With the 2024 logistics issue being one of triggers, consideration on building a framework for optimizing the entire industry of pharmaceutical and medical equipment logistics services to reduce man-hours or environmental impact as much as possible is likely to be underway.

*Modal shift is to shift the cargo transportation via vehicles, etc., to other transportation methods that enable mass transportation and give smaller-environmental impacts, such as railways or ships.    

Research Outline