Beware of monopolies! Drug price behavior

The pharmaceutical industry has always been the focus of anti-monopoly law enforcement In the first half of this year, according to relevant media reports, the price of nitroglycerin tablets, which used to be less than 5 yuan per bottle, has recently skyrocketed to nearly 50 yuan per bottle Since this year, the price of nitroglycerin tablets has risen sharply and the news of shortage has appeared As a "life-saving drug" for patients with cardiovascular diseases, the sharp price rise and shortage of nitroglycerin tablets have also attracted great attention of central leaders Relevant parties said, "this is an important issue for people's livelihood To ensure the supply and price stability of drugs, we must not cut off the supply and increase the price arbitrarily." On August 22 of this year, Zeng Yixin, deputy director of the national health and Health Commission, pointed out at the regular briefing held by the new office on measures to strengthen the supply guarantee and price stabilization of commonly used drugs, that in the future, the problem of drug shortage will be solved by improving the purchase policy of short drugs, seriously investigating and punishing the illegal behaviors such as monopoly of APIs and market manipulation For pharmaceutical enterprises, antitrust seems to be a strange term Since the current anti monopoly law of the people's Republic of China came into force on August 1, 2008, it has played an important role in preventing and stopping monopoly behavior, protecting fair competition in the market, improving the efficiency of economic operation, safeguarding the interests of consumers and social public interests, and promoting the healthy development of the socialist market economy At the beginning of 2018, the State Administration of market supervision was established As a unified anti-monopoly law enforcement agency in China, the General Administration of market supervision has replaced the anti-monopoly law enforcement system of three departments (the Ministry of Commerce, the national development and Reform Commission, and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce) The Anti-monopoly Bureau under the General Administration of market supervision has assumed the respective functions of the Ministry of Commerce, the national development and Reform Commission and the State Administration for Industry and commerce Then, what are the main types of monopolies? The author summarizes them as follows Monopoly is mainly divided into horizontal monopoly and vertical monopoly Horizontal monopoly refers to the horizontal alliance of many enterprises in the same industry to achieve market advantage and to eliminate and restrict competition Vertical monopoly refers to the behavior of eliminating and restricting competition between businesses in different economic levels without direct competition in the same industry or brand through some combination, the most common form of which is the producer manipulating the price of resale products of downstream distributors In order to let you have a clearer understanding of the difference between horizontal monopoly and vertical monopoly, we hereby give an example based on relevant information: a certain API is exclusively produced by plant a, and in order to obtain the exclusive right, enterprise B signed the agency sales agreement with plant a, monopolizing the domestic sales of the API The contents of the agreement are as follows: Company B acts as the sole agent for the domestic sales of API produced by company A only with the consent of company B, can factory a supply the API to other manufacturers During this period, enterprise C found enterprise B and wanted to buy APIs Enterprise B requires: the actual market price of finished drugs must be increased by more than n times, and the profits should be shared Since enterprise C did not agree, enterprise B increased the sales price of the API by dozens of times Obviously, B enterprises control the supply of A factories, and B enterprises has the final say to supply C enterprises or not, that is, vertical monopoly For the monopolist, it should be vertical monopoly to force the downstream operators to comply with their trading conditions and control the source of goods by taking advantage of their superior position and threatening to interrupt the supply! However, the unreasonable demand of enterprise B for factory C to raise price and redistribute profit belongs to horizontal monopoly According to relevant data, horizontal monopoly includes: fixed price, market division, joint production reduction, joint boycott, etc But in the above B enterprise raises the price, thus carries on the product control to the C factory, belongs to the horizontal Monopoly! For pharmaceutical enterprises, they often issue price control requirements to agents, and manage agents through price The original intention of pharmaceutical enterprises is to encourage competition among agents and avoid killing the market competition environment with the lowest price At the same time, limiting the minimum price, on the one hand, can ensure the profit of agents, on the other hand, it can also help regulate the market and prevent agents from "fleeing goods" Therefore, in the actual normative behavior, many people think that it is common to not allow sales below a certain price, but from the perspective of anti-monopoly, it is suspected of monopoly In recent years, from the perspective of the punished areas, in the whole pharmaceutical industry, API is the focus of punishment The industry has the characteristics of high market concentration and high market access threshold At the same time, according to the summary of relevant experts, "from the perspective of the punished business behavior, the most punished business behavior in the case is to refuse to trade without proper reason (abuse of dominant position), and to fix the price (horizontal monopoly agreement) Such business behavior should become the self-examination of the enterprise from the anti-monopoly law The focus of the investigation " In recent years, according to the law enforcement situation of the anti-monopoly law enforcement agencies, the monopolistic behaviors that have been investigated include not only the concentration of operators with the effect of excluding or restricting competition, but also the monopolistic agreements involving price, the abuse of market dominant position, the abuse of administrative power to eliminate and restrict competition, which basically cover the main types of anti-monopoly law enforcement Whether horizontal monopoly or vertical monopoly is a way of monopoly, we must consider whether the operators are in a monopoly or market dominant position, or whether there is a monopoly or market dominant position in the same combination of multiple operators Therefore, before making every decision, pharmaceutical companies must carefully study the relevant legal documents The medical behavior is highly sensitive The medical personnel must carefully study the relevant laws and policies in a serious and responsible manner, and do not touch the red line Penicillin is the reprinted content of yaozhi.com, and the copyright belongs to the original author The purpose of reprinting is to transmit more information, which does not represent the view of this platform If the content of the work, copyright and other issues are involved, please contact our website message, we will delete the content in the first time.