Segment EuropeBusiness performance
The coronavirus pandemic has significantly accelerated the development of trade towards e-commerce. This is clearly demonstrated by the strong growth of the marketplace business in the Europe segment. Revenue increased by 73.5 per cent year on year to EUR 61.9 million, marked by a peak during the lockdown in spring 2020. This development reflects the enormous online potential of the little-regulated segment of over-the-counter standard pharmacy health and care products. The total market in Europe amounts to around EUR 100 billion.
Capital-efficient business model with major customer benefits
PromoFarma is the leading brand for online pharmacy marketplaces in Spain and DoctiPharma the second biggest brand in France. Through their platforms, the Zur Rose Group distributes over 160,000 over-the-counter health, beauty and personal care products from some 8,000 brands. These products are provided and shipped to customers by a network of currently 1,180 partners, mainly pharmacies, but also pharmaceutical manufacturers. This gives the affiliated partners rapid access to e-commerce for little investment.
New branding for marketplaces in Spain and France
On the way to becoming the European umbrella brand “DocMorris” as the digital healthcare ecosystem, the Zur Rose Group took the next step in implementing its new brand architecture. In February 2021, PromoFarma and DoctiPharma were linked to the DocMorris brand identity. The new brand image adopts this shift in outlook by using the green heart as a symbol for health. The varying shades of green for the heart represent the variety of current and future health solutions, which can be made even more personal and individual thanks to digitalisation. The light green “by DocMorris” lettering forms the brand essence and shows both marketplaces are part of the European healthcare ecosystem.
Digital transformation with three technology hubs
The Zur Rose Group leveraged PromoFarma’s technology expertise to implement a technology development centre in Barcelona. The group now has three technology hubs in Barcelona, Winterthur and Berlin. More than 100 people from 20 nations work at the technology hub in Spain, most of them with a technical background: software engineers, data scientists, UX designers and product managers. In interdisciplinary teams across all tech hubs, the marketplace’s flexible, high-performance and scalable microservice-based platform is being expanded to deploy the model in other countries like Germany and Switzerland.
The main focus is on creating the Zur Rose Group’s European healthcare ecosystem, networking qualified providers with products, services and digital services. The ambition of Zur Rose is to accompany patients and empower them to use products and digital solutions to optimally manage their own health. Zur Rose is also implementing the platform-as-a-service model (PaaS) in its technical hub in Barcelona and is testing various modules of this model in the planned digital healthcare platform with the health insurance partners Allianz Care, CSS and Visana in Switzerland.