Steve Collis, CEO of Chesterbrook-based AmerisourceBergen, addressed speculation that Amazon is preparing to expand into the business of pharmaceutical distribution during the company’s third-quarter earnings call, writes John George for the Philadelphia Business Journal.
Collis informed analysts that Amazon has been discussed extensively among AmerisourceBergen’s management.
“We are always interested and aware of what competitive threats could come in,” said Collis, “and we face them, say, on a technology front in some of our commercialization.”
He said that the amount of distribution AmerisourceBergen is doing is enormous, covering close to “100,000 sites between all the different companies that we have within AmerisourceBergen.”
[uam_ad id=”58459”]
Advertisement
During the call, Collis also told analysts that simply labeling AmerisourceBergen’s work as only distributing pharmaceutical products simplifies and degrades a very complex service. For example, he pointed to the company’s recently opened facility in Olive Branch, Miss., that required attaining around 70 licenses.
“Do I think that a company (such as Amazon) would have a problem getting 70 licenses?” he said. “Absolutely not, but I do think that the generation of services that we provide, say to community pharmacy, these are not services that are easily replicable.”
Read more about the earnings call in the Philadelphia Business Journal here, and check out previous VISTA Today coverage of AmerisourceBergen here.
[uam_ad id=”58462″]
