PMR expects 6.6% growth this year, 5% growth in 2016 before rising to about 8% yearly growth between 2017 and 2020, at which point PMR says the market will be worth more than €1bn.
“Non-pharmacy sales will grow more rapidly than pharmacy sales owing to less severe legal restrictions,” the market analyst said.
“The current pharmacy market situation is not at its best. The market growth will be positively influenced by macroeconomic factors, such as disposable income or private consumption expenditure, as well as consumer behaviour.”
Between 2012 and 2014, food supplement sales via pharmacies shrank 2%.
“This resulted from problems caused in the pharmacy market by the Reimbursement Act, lower saturation of the sales channel, as well as introduction of dietary supplements to their portfolios by ever larger number of stores (including supermarkets and hypermarkets).”
“What should be noted at this point are high growths reported in 2014 for single ingredient, infection-related preparations – calcium and vitamin C.”
Products for anti-ageing, weight-loss, wellness and joint protection were the most popular.
Eastern European markets
According to Euromonitor data, retail value growth for the Eastern European dietary supplements market in 2013-14 was 11%, with this forecast to fall to 7.8% by 2017-18. Czech Republic growth was 3.6% in 2013-14, which was forecast to rise to 5.4% in 2016-17 before falling back to 3.6% in 2017-18.
For Poland this was 3.8% for 2013-14, with a slight increase to 3.9% predicted by 2017-18. The biggest rates of retail value growth in 2013-14 was in Belarus (28.9%), Romania (14.1%), Ukraine (13.9%) and Georgia (7.2%).
Eastern European markets showed the greatest growth – Poland adding close to €100m by 2018; Turkey more than doubling to €205m; the Ukraine moving from €126m to €202m; Romania from €48m to €88m and Belarus from €16m to €48.1m.
Mintel observes a smaller market at about €400m and forecast to grow by about 4% to 2018.
Within Poland’s vitamin and minerals market, GlaxoSmithKline held the biggest retail market share in 2011 (10.3%), followed by Aflofarm Farmacja Polska (6.5%) and NP Pharma (4.5%).
PMR’s definition of the market is “understood as the value of sales of products having a legal status of dietary supplement through pharmacies, non-pharmacy outlets and online.”