Hermes Pardini launches B2B market to extend its addressable market

Waiting for the merger with Fleury, Hermes Pardini puts on the market a marketplace whose goal is to reach up to 10% of the revenue of the B2B area in five years. Know the plans

In the rooms and corridors of Hermes Pardini, expectations are high for the approval of the merger with Fleury, announced in June and valued at R$ 2.5 billion. But while waiting for the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (Cade) to hit the hammer, the diagnostic medicine group continues to move.

In search of new revenue, Pardini, valued at R$ 2.7 billion, launches this Wednesday, September 28, the Pardis marketplace. The distribution company was created in the pandemic, initially, for the delivery of rapid tests for Covid-19, and operates under the umbrella of Lab to Lab, the B2B business unit of the mining group.

With the new platform, whose launch was brought forward to NeoFeedPardini’s initial plan is to expand its share of wallet based on 6,500 active customers served by Lab to Lab, especially small and medium-sized laboratories. This portfolio also includes clinics, hospitals and other links in the healthcare chain.

“Today, with Lab to Lab, we only reach, on average, 10% to 15% of the pocketbook of customers who outsource the processing of their exams to us”, says Fernando Ramos, Lab to Lab business director at Grupo Pardini, to NeoFeed. “With Pardis and the marketplace, we are going to start getting into the remaining 85%.”

The marketplace project began to be developed at the end of 2021, in a partnership with VTEX. As one of the steps prior to the development and validation of the platform, Pardis set foot in digital with its own e-commerce.

Since 2021, this e-commerce has processed more than 7,000 orders for 2,200 laboratories in 1,000 cities, and generated more than BRL 30 million in revenue. More than 60% of these customers made more than one purchase on the channel. From these numbers, the group understood that it was time to take the next step in its online strategy.

“We are already a very relevant buyer in the market. We want to put this expertise and the negotiations we have for our operations at the service of our customers”, says Ramos. “The idea is to stop being just an exam processing company to serve these end-to-end companies.”

Ahead of the project, Mateus Moura, executive business manager at Pardis, adds: “In general, this customer does not have a supply chain area and their purchase journey is very analogical and complex”, he says. “At the end of the day, he deals with a lot of distributors to buy what he needs, and he has disruptions in the process.”

As a counterpoint to this model and towards the concept of one stop shop, increasingly in vogue in the market, Pardis’ B2B marketplace is born with an assortment of 400 products. By the end of the year, the projection is to pass 1,500 items available.

The plan is to cover a wide range of offers. From pre-analytical supplies – such as blood tubes and syringes, to reagents, cleaning materials, team uniforms and even the delicacies served to patients after the exams.

As the platform gains traction, Pardis will reinforce this offering with categories such as furniture, personal protective equipment and courses and training, in addition to software and hardware options used in the sector.

With a model based on charging a take rate of transactions, the marketplace debuts with ten sellers. The list includes names such as Euroimmun, Wiener Lab, Eco Diagnóstica, Neolab and Kolplast. A relationship with 30 new partners is under analysis to be incorporated into the channel.

At this first moment, all the logistics related to the products will be under the responsibility of the partners, with the after-sales in charge of Pardis. By the end of the year, the company will offer the option of carrying out deliveries and, in 2023, it will include as an alternative the fulfillment for these partners.

For this, next year, Pardis plans to invest in four distribution centers exclusively dedicated to the operation, in the North, Northeast, South and Midwest. Today, the operation already has a unit in Vespasiano, a city in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte (MG).

In addition to its own structure and an exclusive team of ten professionals, the company will take advantage of the assets and a good part of the back office of the Pardini group to support its operations. In logistics, for example, this approach involves more than 100 support points and 390 routes carried out daily in the country.

Other numbers give a measure of the importance of the marketplace. In the second quarter, Lab to Lab, which houses Pardis, accounted for around 52% of the group’s revenue, which ended the period with gross revenue of R$558.7 million and a record volume of 41.1 million exams.

The rest of the Pardini Group’s gross revenue comes from the direct patient care unit, through the company’s 182 units, distributed in Belo Horizonte, Goiânia, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belém and Santos.

To gain relevance in this cake, Pardis’ initial focus will be the Lab to Lab portfolio, which, in addition to 6,500 active customers, has around 12,000 companies registered. In the medium term, the plan is to extend the offer outside this universe, which may even involve segments such as dental and veterinary clinics.

“Today, Pardis represents about 1.5% of Lab to Lab’s gross revenue”, says Moura. “In five years, our projection is that this share represents between 7% and 10%.” According to the executive, this estimate takes into account the approval of the group’s merger with Fleury.

The potential partner is one of the examples among the big names in the diagnostic medicine sector that also invests in the marketplace model, but with an offer aimed at consumers and not companies. Named Saúde iD, the platform in question was launched exactly two years ago.

In the B2B offerings, Viveo is one of the companies that has been developing a platform in this direction. Interestingly, the group began to follow this path also at the end of 2021, inspired by the bias of “one stop shop” and, like Pardis, with greater focus on small and medium-sized laboratories.

Source: Neofeed