A local pharmacy chain: finding its ground while national chains win on scale

Context

The company is a local pharmacy chain with more than 30 years of history, trusted for having the medicine people need, for pharmacist advice and for loyal regular customers. Its range runs from prescription and OTC medicine to supplements, cosmeceuticals, mother-and-baby and medical devices; it already sells across channels and is upgrading a store format focused on health advice.

The question was which opportunity to pursue and which business model to build on existing strengths, while national chains win on scale.

Four weeks, four stages

1. Market review and customer research designIndustry trends, competitive structure, opportunity hypotheses and the interview guide.
2. Company assessment and customer validationClarifying capabilities that can be carried forward; the pharmacy team interviews customers using the agreed guide.
3. Building and choosing a model directionComparing 2–3 model directions on evidence from the market, customers and the company.
4. Sketching a preliminary business modelTarget customers, value proposition, journey, revenue streams, cost groups, and the assumptions and risks still to test.

Weraki coordinates, researches and analyses; the company provides data, challenges the hypotheses and decides jointly at each milestone.

The market: demand is growing, but not without limits

Long-term needs from midlife

Falling birth rates and longer lives make middle-aged and older people, and the families who care for them, a large segment. Blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and weight build up from middle age, so monitoring is a long journey, not a single check-up.

Policy puts prevention first

Resolution 72-NQ/TW shifts the focus from treatment to prevention: from 2026, everyone gets at least one check-up or screening a year, with a lifelong electronic health record.

Tighter regulation

Decree 163/2025/NĐ-CP and Circular 31/2025/TT-BYT tighten pharmacy oversight, favouring legitimate pharmacies. The Personal Data Protection Law took effect in January 2026, so any model using health data must design consent and security in from the start.

Consumers care more about health but remain price-sensitive, especially for recurring spending; models that are too elaborate or too premium will struggle to reach the mass market. With the legal framework still taking shape, Weraki advised against letting large technology investment run ahead of clarity on demand, processes and compliance.

The industry: from coverage to efficiency

Vietnamese pharmacy retail is past the stage where opening stores meant growth. In 2020–2024 alone, the big chains added about 2,500 stores; since 2022 the market has been shaking out and consolidating, as store productivity, supply and standardization decide the winners. Weraki analysed three national chains using public data:

The market leader What happenedFull prescriptions and competitive prices first, then capital to expand. By June 2026 it had 2,639 pharmacies and 236 vaccination centres, and average revenue still rose to about VND 1.3 billion per store per month. The lessonScale only amplifies a value proposition that is already right. The price is heavy capital, deep standardization and thin margins while expanding.

The second chain What happenedOnce targeted 5,000 stores by 2025, then went back to “medicine first”: restructuring range, inventory and network. Profitable since Q4 2025. The lessonIt recovered when store count became the result of a better operating model rather than a goal in itself.

The third chain What happenedBacked by a major retail group, grew from 178 to over 500 pharmacies within months in 2022, lost about VND 306 billion in 2022 and VND 343 billion in 2023, then shrank to fix its foundations before reopening. The lessonOpening stores is a retail capability; scaling pharmacies also needs a deep medicine range, strong pharmacists and sound store economics.

Five shared shifts emerge from the three chains: from opening more to opening well; from broad retail back to core pharmacy capability; from individual pharmacists’ quality to system-wide quality; from manual management to data-driven operations; and from selling medicine to long-term care relationships.

Where the gap is

A pharmacy chain must solve five problems at once: access (location and coverage), fit (range), trust (service and advice), value (price), and supply and compliance. The leading chain has built fairly even strength across all five, strongest in coverage, range and systems. What remains open is depth of relationship: scale makes service consistent, but continuity between one customer and one pharmacist is hard to keep.

A local chain shouldn’t fight a national chain on coverage,
but on a depth of relationship that scale struggles to reproduce.

Hypothesis one: a metabolic-health spearhead

The company stays a mass-market pharmacy rather than narrowing into a specialist one, but builds a spearhead among middle-aged and older customers starting to manage blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and weight. Technology isn’t meant to out-compete the big chains, but to standardize and offload repetitive work, freeing pharmacists for the interactions that build trust.

Front line: pharmacists make the difference

• Advice based on the customer’s real situation, not only the product being bought
• Following up on what was discussed last time
• Taking time to explain, and referring to a doctor when an issue goes beyond the pharmacy

Back line: the system keeps the relationship

• Purchase history and past conversations stored so each visit picks up where the last left off
• Automatic reminders to refill or re-check readings through a messaging channel customers already use
• Less manual remembering and chasing, so pharmacists aren’t overloaded as customers grow

Illustration: a 52-year-old customer takes blood-pressure and cholesterol medication. On the first visit, the pharmacist notes the medication and the customer’s concerns. Before the next refill, the system sends a reminder; the customer can pre-order or message the pharmacist. On return, the pharmacist continues from last time instead of starting over.

The development order is explicit: attract the right segment, deepen loyalty, grow value per customer (nutrition, monitoring devices, the whole family’s needs), and only then standardize to scale. Scale comes after the model has proved it can keep customers.

Hypothesis two: a regional pharmacy alliance

Across a region of three neighbouring provinces with strong community ties, many independent pharmacies have built regulars and personal reputations but can’t afford to invest in brand, data, marketing and technology at once. National chains are strong in capital and systems, but slow to build local relationships everywhere.

The hypothesis: once the model is proven in its home market, the company could bring local pharmacies onto a shared platform (a common or co-brand, customer care, data, advice standards) and expand cluster by cluster, rather than only opening stores with its own capital. The defensive advantage comes from community relationships that national chains can’t simply buy.

Testing rather than persuading

The next step takes both hypotheses into the field with two groups. With customers, the point to prove isn’t that they “like better care”, but that the experience is valuable enough for them to return more often and bring more of their health needs to one place. With pharmacy owners, an alliance only works under four conditions: enough pressure to change, shared value that is attractive enough, an acceptable level of shared control, and trust in whoever leads it.

1. Ask about past behaviour first, hypotheses laterAsk about the current situation and real choices before putting a hypothesis forward.
2. Don’t introduce the solution too earlyAvoid steering people toward the answer you want to hear.
3. Look for the conditions that make a hypothesis true or falseDon’t look for agreement; a polite “yes” is not evidence.
4. With pharmacy owners, open with the business problemStart with competition, retention, staffing and technology; raise the network idea only at the end, through a trusted introduction and with the actual decision-maker.

In parallel, Weraki benchmarks successful pharmacy chains in Asian markets with similar fragmentation, to separate the patterns that can work in Vietnam from those that can’t.

What to take away

When competitors win on scale, smaller companies are easily drawn into copying scale. The better question is which assets you have that scale struggles to reproduce, and what evidence shows customers actually behave as the hypothesis assumes. Research tells you whether a market is attractive; fieldwork tells you whether the model can stand.

Compiled from Weraki’s project kickoff document, August 2026. The company, its locality and business figures are anonymized; figures on national chains come from public sources. Validation results have not been published.