A5 Group to increase investment program 60% in 2014
MOSCOW. March 26 (Interfax) - The Russian pharmacy chain A5 Group, whose brands include Sotsialnaya Apteka, Mosoblfarmatsia, and Norma, will be increasing its investment program for this year by 60% from last year to 274 million rubles, company General Director Andrei Gusyev told Interfax.
The money will be put into the opening of new pharmacies and re-designing existing outlets.
Gusyev said that the company will continue re-branding its pharmacies. The plan for this year is to change 178 Mosoblfarmatsia pharmacies to Norma pharmacies. Since this year began forty have already been redesigned. In 2013, 222 Mosoblfarmatsia outlets became A5 stores. The A5 chain, with re-branding, is doing away with the Mosoblfarmatsia format, Gusyev said.
The company has upped its store opening plan to 250.
A5 opened 132 stores last year, spending 170 million rubles to increase its chain to 1,052 pharmacies.
The pharmacy chain will grow by 19% next year - to 1,252 sales points. Of 250 of the pharmacies 120 will be feature the Norma format, 60 the A5 format and the mini-discounter format Phyarmadar. The plan is to close about fifty pharmacies, mainly small A5-format outlets, Gusyev said.
"We are now closing out the first quarter with the opening of some forty new [sales] points. But the opening work [involves] about sixty [facilities]. We will definitely [open] 250 pharmacies during 2014. We will be trying to open more, using all possibilities, Gusyev said. He estimated the cost of opening one at from 1 to 1.2 million rubles.
At the end of last year, the company had 784 A5 pharmacies, 178 Mosoblfarmatsia pharmacies, and 80 Norma pharmacies. Now, Gusyev said, the company has about 90 Norma pharmacies. The plan is to increase that number to 220 by the end of this year.
A5 plans to redesign around 140 A5-format pharmacies to Farmadar mini discounters this year. "Farmadar is a replacement [for] A5 in product retail," he said. There are ten Farmadar pharmacies now.
"Each outlet is individual. We are preparing feasibility studies for each outlet [to establish] which format would be right for it. This is [point by point]
work," Gusyev said.
