Russian pharmaceutical manufacturers are increasingly displacing international companies in the insulin market. Insulin is used for treating patients with diabetes. In 2024, Russian companies accounted for 27.2% (7.4 billion rubles) of the total volume of government procurement of insulin, and 41.7% (5.6 million units) in packages. By the end of this year, local companies alone may account for almost 44% of contracts in public procurement, Kommersant writes, citing industry experts and data from the DSM Group analytical company.
Olga Makarkina, general director of Pravo na Zdoroviye consulting company, explained that such indicators are due to preferences for domestic manufacturers at auctions where more than 90% of insulin is sold. In 2024, the state purchased more than 27 billion rubles worth of insulin products. Taking into account pharmacy sales of such drugs, their total turnover reached almost 30 billion rubles.
According to Makarkina, by the end of 2025, the share of Russian insulin manufacturers in government procurement across the Russian Federation will increase by 2-3 percentage points.
Nevertheless, foreign companies are still the leaders in terms of public procurement volumes, in particular, the French Sanofi and the Danish Novo Nordisk. They are followed by the Russian Geropharm, which has a portfolio of biosimilars of almost all types of insulin existing in the world. The company is significantly ahead of its Russian counterparts, Medsintez and Pharmstandart, in terms of sales.
Sales of insulin in the pharmaceutical retail look less impressive: in 2024, pharmacies sold 1.38 million packages for a total of 2.41 billion rubles, a year-on-year increase of 8.3% and 20.4%, respectively. Geropharm is demonstrating the most impressive successes: last year, the company increased sales by almost 127% in physical terms (to 94,300 packages) and by 138.3% in monetary terms (to 165.8 million rubles). Pharmstandart’s sales grew by 28.3% in packages (to 61,800) and by 24.3% in rubles (to 66.6 million).
Makarkina urged Russian manufacturers not to expect «dizzying successes» in the pharmacy segment. According to her forecasts, the growth will not exceed 1%, as «consumers mainly buy foreign medicines at their own expense, which they trust more».
In early 2025, it became known that Russia’s Ministry of Health issued a registration certificate to Geropharm, a domestic drugmaker, for RinLis Rapid, an ultrafast insulin with the active ingredient insulin lispro. The development is a biosimilar of Eli Lilly’s Lyumjev, which was never launched on the Russian market.
