The Problem Of Heavy Assets And High Standards Still Remains To Be Solved

The high construction cost and small volume of pharmaceutical warehouse in the early stage, but its relatively stable characteristics make it a special subdivision track in the storage field.

With the rapid development of the e-commerce industry and the continuous expansion of social logistics demand, the domestic warehouse logistics gap is gradually exposed, especially the high-standard cold storage mainly used for storing vaccines, blood products and special drugs. After the outbreak of major public health events, people's demand for medical and health increased, which also led to the "optimistic" mood in the demand market of medical storage.

In recent years, many pharmaceutical enterprises have made great efforts to break the cold chain of pharmaceutical industry by combining the advantages of large-scale pharmaceutical warehouse and warehouse, and strive to break the monopoly of the pharmaceutical industry.

Guangzhou Fuli International Airport Logistics Park, which has been opened for 11 years, is one of the representatives. In 2013, it introduced China Resources medicine, Sinopharm Logistics and other domestic leading pharmaceutical enterprises, and started the road of pharmaceutical industry cluster development. At present, it has become the largest pharmaceutical logistics base in South China.

But on the other hand, different from the ordinary warehouse, the medical warehouse needs to strictly control the temperature and humidity, and has special requirements in the preliminary design and construction. Therefore, compared with the traditional public goods warehouse and e-commerce warehouse, the rental cost of the medical warehouse is higher and the overall volume is smaller.

In addition, due to the strict control of the pharmaceutical market by the state, pharmaceutical enterprises have a higher demand for pharmaceutical storage, and the warehouse enterprises need to bear a higher risk when developing pharmaceutical warehousing business.

Pharmaceutical storage: heavy assets and high requirements

From a technical point of view, pharmaceutical storage belongs to the high-end sector in the warehousing industry, and has higher requirements on the software and hardware of the warehouse.

Professional medicine warehouse generally includes three types of warehouses: Cool warehouse, the temperature of which is between 10 and 20 ℃, which is mainly used to store ordinary drugs; the cold storage, with the temperature of 2-8 ℃, is mainly used to store vaccines, blood products and other special drugs that need to be refrigerated; and the freezer, with a temperature of - 10 to - 20 ℃, is mainly used for freezing ice cubes or storing low-temperature vaccines and other special drugs.

Special drugs are sensitive to the change of temperature. When the temperature rises by 10 ℃, the chemical reaction speed in the drug will be accelerated by 2 to 4 times, which is easy to cause drug deterioration. Therefore, the professional medical cold storage needs to be equipped with independent temperature and humidity system refrigeration unit and standby generator set, and it needs to be subject to the spot check of FDA on a regular basis.

In an interview with the 21st century economic report, Li Rongdong, deputy general manager of Fuli commercial operation management company, also stressed the importance of temperature control for medical cold storage. He said that in order to accurately control the temperature in the pharmaceutical cold storage, the brick concrete structure with stronger thermal insulation will be selected in the construction process of the pharmaceutical cold storage in the Fuli logistics park.

At the same time, it is necessary to ensure the accuracy and safety of the data storage system. The strict standards of software and hardware doomed the logistics park to invest a lot of funds in the construction of pharmaceutical cold storage.

In fact, the heavy asset attribute of the pharmaceutical storage industry is not only reflected in the cost of building pharmaceutical cold storage in the logistics park, but also in order to avoid the investment of heavy assets at the pharmaceutical enterprise level, they will rent the ordinary medicine warehouse in the logistics park according to their own needs and rebuild it into a medical cold storage. Therefore, heavy assets also cause the characteristics of strong stability of pharmaceutical storage.

Zhang Min, vice chairman of Guangzhou Fuli International Airport Integrated Logistics Park Co., Ltd., told the 21st century economic report that Sinopharm group, for example, has invested one million yuan in the reconstruction project of Guangzhou Fuli pharmaceutical cold storage. Therefore, pharmaceutical enterprises need to spend a long time to recover the cost of reconstruction projects, and will not change the warehouse frequently in a short period of time, which is also the reason why the customer demand of pharmaceutical storage industry is relatively stable.

The high technology and capital threshold of pharmaceutical cold storage "blocks out the door" of General Logistics Park. The majority of fresh food retailers prefer to choose food cold storage with lower construction cost and rent, so the overall volume of pharmaceutical cold storage is always relatively small. Relevant data show that the demand of pharmaceutical cold chain only accounts for 9% of the total demand of domestic cold chain logistics.

But on the other hand, the growth of pharmaceutical cold chain logistics is fast. In an interview with the 21st century economic reporter, Li Rongdong predicted that with the normalization of the epidemic prevention and control, the global cooperation in the field of public health will be strengthened, and the flow of medicine will be accelerated, which may promote the sustained growth of the demand for medical storage.

The advantages of platform agglomeration are beginning to show

Before 2018, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, the world's top pharmaceutical companies, generally only use the warehouses of global well-known warehousing brand in mainland China. There are many reasons for this phenomenon.

From the perspective of the storage demand of pharmaceutical enterprises, different from the retail market, the pharmaceutical market is under the control of national dispatching and has strong planning. Therefore, the storage demand of pharmaceutical enterprises is greatly affected by the national import and export policy and approval cycle, and the logistics park, as the supplier of warehousing services, naturally bears greater risks.

Taking Guangzhou as an example, although the biomedical industry in the region is developing rapidly, and it is the largest Baiyun International Airport in Asia, it has a unique advantage in the import and export of drugs, but there are still some medical cold storage vacant.

In the face of such high market risk, ordinary Logistics Park dare not enter the Bureau easily, so the domestic high-end pharmaceutical storage market has been monopolized by international brands for a long time.

According to Zhang Min, Guangzhou Fuli International Airport Comprehensive Logistics Park attracted AstraZeneca and Pfizer to settle in last year, which has also become a new industry development sign.

In recent years, with social capital entering the pharmaceutical storage industry, more and more large-scale modern high-end logistics parks have begun to explore this blue ocean relying on the accumulated pharmaceutical industry and storage demand in the park.

Compared with the pharmaceutical cold storage built by pharmaceutical enterprises in different places, the modern logistics park has more obvious platform agglomeration advantages. Zhang Min believes that the platform agglomeration advantage of pharmaceutical warehousing logistics is mainly manifested in cost reduction and efficiency improvement, that is, by gathering upstream and downstream enterprises in the pharmaceutical industry, reducing the operating costs of pharmaceutical enterprises and improving operational efficiency.

Specifically, as a storage platform, the logistics park can gather pharmaceutical enterprises, third-party logistics providers, pharmaceutical e-commerce platforms and other links in the pharmaceutical industry supply chain to integrate resources and improve the efficiency of pharmaceutical logistics distribution.

For pharmaceutical enterprises, it costs a lot to build pharmaceutical cold storage relying on their own strength, and it is easy to waste cold storage resources after the expiration of the project contract. Therefore, leasing the pharmaceutical cold storage in the logistics park can effectively reduce the cost of pharmaceutical enterprises. At the same time, international pharmaceutical enterprises can also directly carry out unified assessment and evaluation of warehousing services of domestic partners in the park.

In terms of the scale of the logistics park, the area of the single park is about 30000-100000 square meters, and the distribution of the park is relatively scattered, so the single park can not meet the growing storage demand of pharmaceutical enterprises. In large-scale modern logistics park, dry warehouse and cold storage in different temperature areas are equipped. Pharmaceutical enterprises can store drugs or preparations in a centralized way, and the operation cost will be reduced accordingly.

In addition, in the case of emergency health emergencies, the pharmaceutical cold storage in the logistics park can also provide a place for pharmaceutical enterprises to mobilize and store drugs in a short time, so as to improve the operation flexibility of pharmaceutical enterprises. After that, how to make good use of the advantages of the pharmaceutical intensive industry has become a key industry.