India begins to achieve an exponential growth as the world’s third largest producer of drugs in terms of volume. Back, with three decades, the pharmaceutical sector in India has seen an enhancing growth. According to a report, India has now ranked up among the top five emerging pharmaceutical markets of the world. The pharmaceutical sector in India was valued at $33 billion in 2017 and is now expected to reach $55 billion. Given the recent update in growth, the country is also expected to become the ranker among the top three pharmaceutical markets and the sixth largest market in size by 2020, worldwide.
AIM clarified with Bhaskar Raju Konduru, Chief Engineering Officer who is now also leading the consumer and data platforms at PharmEasy to accept how the health tech platform is lending a hand on developing technologies like machine learning and AI to demanding competition and rank up the operations beyond top metros in India. Konduru, a well-known technologist, as was reported, was tied up, the previous year to set up and lead the technology team at PharmEasy and mount the operations. He has not only built world-class solutions at new age companies but also has architected the B2C and B2B divisions of consumer internet companies from scratch. He was also the founding member at redBus where he developed the international, inventory system and hotel platforms (with multi-language and currency support) from scratch to a massive scale presently.
Konduru shared that the E-pharma market is noticing a lot of notions, buzz and a continuous investment. “We have seen a similar phenomenon in the recent past around e-commerce, but today we are in a consolidated market of e-commerce and the similar thing will happen in the e-pharma market as well as few years down the lane. The market is big enough for three big players and I’m pretty sure that we will be one among them,” Bhaskar Raju Konduru, shared.
The E-pharma companies have also been operating in a grey regulatory area, lately. In the previous year, in December 2018, the Madras High Court enforced a blanket ban on the sale of online medicines until the regulations were drafted which could have affected the investor interest also. Stating about the regulations, Konduru also shared, “Indian Government has already started the process of bringing a regulatory law for e-pharmacies as well. Once that’s out. I don’t think we will be having any regulatory issues further. Investor interest was always intact even when the regulatory challenges are at a peak. Now that they are about to come to an end very soon and the interest may increase”.
On the present scenario, PharmaEasy has up to 80 engineers out of which 15-20 people are specifically focused on analytics. The company has also been continuously summing skilled, dedicated and improved talent to its engineering team to formulate customers’ demands and needs. “In fact, we are adding people to our team and would like to invite all cool tech folks to apply for amazing openings at PharmEasy,” he claimed. Steping forward, the company shall also focus on the evolution from a simple medicine delivery platform to a one-stop solution for all health care needs. In this process of furthering and building a one-stop solution, they have specific dated plans to build excellent rated products on their platform using AI and ML techniques.