“We are totally dedicated to French pharmacies”, declares the president of the Cristers laboratory

The Cristers laboratory, a manufacturer of generic medicines, is part of the Welcoop cooperative, owned entirely by community pharmacists. The president of Cristers, Olivier Duclos is the eco guest of franceinfo.

Olivier Duclos is the president of Cristers, a French generic medicine laboratory, unique in France, since it is part of the Welcoop cooperative, 100% owned by community pharmacists, himself being a pharmacist by profession. 4,000 pharmacists are members and the laboratory has between 1,500 and 1,800 customer pharmacies across France.

franceinfo: How many millions of boxes of medicines do you distribute to your customers?

Olivier Duclos: 13 million boxes of medicines per year and these are all generic medicines. Cristers covers approximately 90% of the top 100 references that are most requested by patients and 75% of the overall need for community pharmacies in terms of the need for generic medicines.

What therapeutic areas do you cover?

We will cover all the main therapeutic areas of chronic diseases, diabetes, cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology, the central nervous system. We also have paracetamol and its particularity is that it is made in France, in a French factory.

What pushes a cooperative of pharmacists to create a generic medicine laboratory? How does this work?

The challenge for the Welcoop cooperative is to offer the largest range of solutions for these cooperative pharmacists. We know that generic medicine is an important activity for pharmacies in France and therefore having this solution within the Welcoop cooperative was obvious when they bought the Cristers laboratory in 2008.

Where are your medicines produced?

Our mission and vocation is to develop French production within the framework of industrial sovereignty. So 40% of our production is made in France and overall, 75% of the production of drugs for Cristers is made in Europe.

There is a lot of talk about drug shortages. Have you been confronted with it?

All players have been faced with the shortage of medicines, particularly that of 2023. At Cristers, what has differentiated us during this period is that we have dedicated 100% of our stock to the French market. We are owned by a cooperative and the governance of this cooperative is pharmacists. It is therefore clear that all the stocks we have are necessarily delivered to the services of French community pharmacies. This allowed us for a time to resist in good conditions in the face of these shortage conditions last year. Today, we have returned with a service rate that is among the best on the market since the start of 2024, with less than 10% outage rate across our entire product offering.

After this crisis, did more pharmacies want to use your services?

Last year gave us the opportunity to explain the cooperative model to community pharmacies, some of whom were discovering Cristers. We explained to them why we had the product and what ultimately were the virtues of this model, with this dedicated stock for the French market and the fact of being focused exclusively on the French market. What is important is the notion of price, because we know that the price of the drug in France is relatively low compared to other European markets. However, our cooperative governance with pharmacists means that we will never arbitrate a choice of delivery of a product to another more lucrative country since we are totally dedicated to French pharmacies.

Several market players say that the generic model manufactured in France is not really viable because the policy is too unattractive. Is this a diagnosis that you share?

Generic medicine in France is, indeed, subject to strong economic pressure, this is in essence its vocation, since it is 60% less expensive than the original medicine. It helps save money for the French health system, so, in essence, the price pressure is necessarily high. Today, in fact, the fact of being owned by a cooperative of pharmacists allows us to have profitability thresholds which allow us to maintain certain references. All the money that we can earn within the Cristers laboratory and the Welcoop cooperative will be systematically reinvested to replenish, if I may say so, the pharmacies with money and the health economy.

I come back to a figure that you gave us at the very beginning, you have 90% of the molecules in the top 100 in the generic repertoire. Do you have the ambition to achieve 100%?

We also have 75% of the overall need for community pharmacists and our ambition is to develop coverage of this overall need and reach 85% with generics. But also with hybrids, therefore treatments against asthma, but also biosimilars which are now expected as replacements by community pharmacists.

Watch this interview on video: