History

In 1994 United Pharmacists Co-Op merged with Allied Pharmaceutical Distributors (APD) to form the Uniphar Group. APD and UPC were both founded by pharmacists in 1972 and 1967 respectively. Today, the roots of the Uniphar Group remain in community pharmacy and ownership is still held by community pharmacists. In 2012 Uniphar acquired the Chaill May Roberts Wholesale and Pre Wholesale businesses from Celesio.

Headquartered in Citywest Dublin, The Uniphar Group employs over 400 staff with wholesale depots located in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Sligo. We have now built the strongest wholesale depot structure in the Irish market. This ensures that we offer an excellent distribution service to meet the needs of community pharmacy, hospital pharmacy and veterinary surgery across the country.

Our success has come as a result of identifying and meeting the needs of our customer base. Each of our core divisions concentrates on a specific business:

Manufacturing Services provide a pre-wholesale solution for major international corporations such as Alcon Laboratories, Merck Pharmaceuticals and Roche Products.

Our Wholesale division distributes pharmaceutical, healthcare and animal health products to pharmacies, hospitals and veterinary surgeons while our Retail Services division is dedicated to providing high quality, innovative services to pharmacists through the strength of the Link buying group, Pharmasource the leading supplier of Unlicenced medicines and our new launched Ostomy and Category management services.

In April 2014 an entirely new symbol group offering was launched for the independent pharmacy community. Life Pharmacy is a low cost, high quality pharmacy retail brand, which is led by independent pharmacists and supported by the strength of Uniphar.

This initiative has been driven by the need to actively support independent pharmacists, as the pharmacy market becomes ever more challenging and the growth of the chains continues relentlessly. Against this backdrop, the value offered by collaboration between independents under a shared symbol is significant.