By Joe Palabao, Correspondent
GENERICS Pharmacy made a grand launch in Cagayan de Oro last February 12 with the opening of its six new franchise outlets in various areas in the city.
Now numbering 730 outlets nationwide, Generics Pharmacy simultaneously opened stores at Gaisano Mall, Carmen market, JR Borja-Cogon, Osmeña St., in Barangay Puerto and at the Divisoria Plaza.
During the launching ceremonies, customers buying their generics medicines were provided free services like blood pressure checks and blood glucose tests.
Generics Pharmacy, named as one of the Ten Outstanding Entrepreneurs in the Philippines today and was awarded as “The Most Promising Filipino Franchise of the Year 2009,” has surged to become one of country’s most promising franchising business.
But before its runaway success, the company has had decades of experiences in wholesale distribution of medicines and other pharmaceutical products to drugstores, hospitals and factories.
Parlaying that experiences into providing quality yet affordable medicines to thousands of Filipinos - and livelihood to hundreds more enterprising Pinoys through franchising - has been the job of the Generics Pharmacy’s president and CEO, Benjamen Liuson, for the last 35 years.
Liuson joined the company shortly after his father’s death. Before that, in 1960, his parents bought the company from its original German owners, who founded the firm in 1949.
He continued the family business, selling about 50 pharmaceutical products to big-volume buyer, until he planted the seeds of the Generics Pharmacy’s future success in 1982. That was when the company began selling generic medicines wholesale, seven (7) years before The Generics Act was signed into law in 1980.
However, it wasn’t until 2001 when Generics Pharmacy, seeing the need to serve patients from low-income groups, went the retail route and opened its first and only company-owned drugstore at its head office on Quezon Avenue in Quezon City.
Banking on its strength on distribution,
the company opened its business to franchising in 2007. Incredibly, franchisees own the rest of the Generics Pharmacy’s 500-plus branches and people are still buying into the company. They are now operating into 200 outlets a year.
The generics company aimed at running the country’s largest retail drugstore chain within the next two years by growing more than 1,000 outlets. The franchisees get their investment-ranging from P650T to P850T -back in one to two years.
Through the franchising model, Generic Pharmacy has thus served cash-strapped customers who need not to go all the way to Manila from the provinces to buy generic medicines. They have now have outlets as far as Tawi-tawi in Mindanao, carrying some products that serve 90 percent of the mass market’s medicine requirements. They only sell generics, not branded medicines.
The Generics Pharmacy has grown so rapidly in two years, with a 300-percent increase in sales from 2007.
It is of the fact that their products, made from branded preparations, are effective yet low priced.
Paracetamol for instance costs just one-fifth of what it would be priced at other drugstores. It has attracted budget conscious consumers partly because its shops are usually located near more established drugstore that carry branded medicine, and provide services like free blood pressure checks and blood sugar tests for only P25. Selected outlets also offer free medical check-ups.
In addition to all these services, their business itself is a form of corporate social responsibility, which is why the prices of the Generics Pharmacy’s medicines are kept stable, regardless of demand or shortages in stock. They have been offering low-priced medicines even before the Cheaper Medicines Act was enacted. With its number of branches increasing everyday, more clients will patronize the Generics Pharmacy.
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