Pharmaceutical wholesalers are a vital part of the supply chain which sees drugs and medical products delivered to doctors, pharmacists and hospitals.
In the UK, there are two types of wholesalers operating:

• Full-line wholesalers who stock the entire range of over 20,000 licensed medicines, ready for despatch at any time. There are less than a dozen full-liners across the UK;

• Short-line wholesalers who generally carry a much smaller inventory of high-demand products. There are many short-liners operating, principally at local or regional level.

The “Grey Market” is a term used by manufacturers or producers to describe the movements of their goods through distribution channels other than the ones they have authorised.

A typical situation would be where Wholesaler 1 negotiates a favourable supply deal from a manufacturer, but then on-sells some of the stock to Wholesaler 2. When the second wholesaler offers the goods to the retail market, the manufacturer is able to use the WaveData database to identify this “grey” market activity.

A note on terminology:
Some market participants use the term “Grey Market” when they are referring to the occurrence of Parallel Imports (PI).

Information on the PI products in the WaveData database can be found at here.