Indian pharmacy retail chain MedPlus is preparing to launch in Mumbai.

The firm, which already has around 1700 locations predominantly in South India, plans to open 100 stores annually in the new territory. A hundred of its current locations are run as franchises.

“In Mumbai, we will be setting up our own stores,” said MedPlus founder and CEO Madhukar Gangadi.

The brand’s stores are serviced by hub warehouses linked via digital technologies to optimise supply-chain management.

Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion data suggests that the Indian pharmacy retail sector is worth roughly US$18 billion, and should reach $50 billion by 2025. There are around 850,000 retail pharmacies in the country, only 6000 of which are structured pharmacy stores.

“The combined market share of the big four e-pharmacies isn’t more than 2.4 per cent,” said Gangadi, “and that is on top of basically losing money like crazy, because they don’t have any value proposition … Now they have started talking about omnichannel; we are already omnichannel.”

The firm raised around US$28.25 million from Wipro Chairman Azim Premji’s family office PremjiInvest last April.