Pharmaceutical industry is an important part of China's national economy, is a combination of traditional and modern industries, primary, secondary and tertiary industries as one industry. Its main categories include: chemical raw materials and preparations, Chinese herbal medicines, Chinese medicine, Chinese medicine, Chinese medicine, antibiotics, biological products, biochemical drugs, radioactive drugs, medical equipment, sanitary materials, pharmaceutical machinery, pharmaceutical packaging materials and pharmaceutical business. Pharmaceutical industry for the protection and enhancement of people's health, improve the quality of life, for family planning, disaster relief and epidemic prevention, military preparedness, as well as to promote economic development and social progress has a very important role. In the fierce market competition, the pharmaceutical industry through various forms of union, mergers and reorganization, to a certain extent, to change the pharmaceutical enterprise scale is too small, the layout of the situation of over-dispersed, and improve the concentration of production. The pharmaceutical industry has 25 enterprises into the ranks of the country's 520 large enterprises. The production concentration of the top 60 enterprises in the pharmaceutical industry sales is 35.7%, 16 percentage points higher than the 19.7% at the end of the "Eighth Five-Year Plan", and a number of advantageous brand-name enterprises have gradually developed and grown in the fierce market competition. The number of enterprises producing large-tonnage products such as penicillin, vitamin C, synthetic vitamin E, aspirin, paracetamol, etc. has been greatly reduced. The production concentration of the top 50 producers of tablets, powder injections, water injections, infusions and capsules reached 44.3%, 97.6%, 66.5%, 58.9% and 56.2% respectively. The ownership structure has been further adjusted, basically forming a pattern of public ownership as the mainstay and multiple ownership economy*** with the same development. Calculated on the basis of output value, the shareholding economy in the industry's proportion has risen from 12% in the early "Ninth Five-Year Plan" to 33.2%, "three-funded" economy from 15% to 18.8%, the state-owned economy from 55% to 36.1%.
Pharmaceutical distribution system reform accelerated the pace of pharmaceutical business to break the long-planned economic system under the formation of state-owned commercial dominance of the pattern, the structure of property rights to the direction of diversification, the formation of a number of standardized shareholding system enterprises and large-scale enterprise groups. The mode of operation began to change, general agent, general distribution, centralized distribution, chain management and other new business methods continue to emerge, especially chain management in the "Ninth Five-Year Plan" period has been a large development, the country has established in some large and medium-sized cities, nearly 200 pharmaceutical chain enterprises, chain of more than 5,000 drugstores. A number of enterprises have actively explored and piloted the pharmaceutical e-commerce.
The western region of the pharmaceutical economy has made great progress. Sichuan has become China's traditional Chinese medicine production province, Yunnan, Guizhou, Qinghai, Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi and other provinces and regions to give full play to the advantages of local resources, has become China's national medicine production base, promoting the local economic development, optimize the regional economic structure.