Organised pharmacy retail
| Peer | Status | P/E | ROE | Mkt cap | Why we do not hold it (approved text) | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Medplus Health Services | Held | 37.39 | 11.12% | 7,869 Cr | Organised pharmacy retail | |
| Apollo Pharmacy (Apollo Hospitals/Apollo Healthco) | Not held | n/a | n/a | n/a | Apollo's pharmacy is buried inside a hospital conglomerate (and the Keimed/omnichannel restructuring) at a much larger valuation; MedPlus is the only listed pure-play with 5,476 stores at ~Rs 8,000 cr mcap. | Screener · Tijori |
| Wellness Forever | Not held | n/a | n/a | n/a | Wellness Forever (~400+ stores, west-India focus) is unlisted/IPO-bound with a fraction of MedPlus's scale and no proven private-label or franchise model. | Screener · Tijori |
Peer numbers are shown only where the peer is in the security master (fundamentals pulled); "n/a" otherwise — a peer is not added to the data pull without a research request. Reasons are quoted from the one-pager (8 Sep 2026).
Sun Pharma is the quality leader but at 35x+ already prices its specialty franchise and is the most exposed to the lenalidomide cliff; Cipla faces a Goa-plant remediation and a respiratory pipeline dependency; Lupin has re-rated to Sun-like multiples on a handful of US launches; Zydus is the closest competitor to our GLP-1 thesis but priced for it. We own no hospital (Apollo, Max, Fortis at 60–80x EBITDA-normalised P/E) and no CDMO at 70x+ (Divi's, Syngene) — the sector can be attractive while individual valuations still matter. Apollo Pharmacy is buried inside a hospital valuation; MedPlus is the pure play.
All sectors we avoid or underweight →Glenmark (2.4%, Turnaround) has converted from a leveraged, litigation-heavy generic company into a net-cash innovator partner: the AbbVie licence for ISB 2001 (a first-in-class myeloma trispecific) brought $700 mn upfront and up to $1.2 bn of milestones, and the base business grows double digits with a 20%+ EBITDA margin. Aurobindo (1.6%, Value) is the largest US ANDA portfolio in India (896 filings) at 20x FY28E, with Pen-G backward integration and a biosimilar and injectables pipeline the multiple ignores. Granules (0.7%, Value) is a low-cost API-to-formulation integrator whose margins are recovering from a compliance reset. Dr Reddy's (0.7%, Cyclical) is bought at the gRevlimid cliff — North America generics fell 35–42% in Q1FY27 — for the semaglutide, biosimilar and NRT (Nicotinell) growth engines that come after it. MedPlus (0.8%, Core) is the second-largest organised pharmacy chain in a market where 1 million unorganised pharmacies still serve most of the country, growing stores ~15% a year with private label ~20% of revenue.