(new: share prices, more details and background)

FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) - Studies by the major Swiss bank UBS sent the share prices of Redcare Pharmacy and DocMorris plummeting on Tuesday. In its first study on the mail-order pharmacy Redcare Pharmacy, UBS immediately recommended selling the shares with a target price of 86 euros. UBS confirmed its sell recommendation for DocMorris with a target price of 31.90 Swiss francs.

The Redcare share fell by 11 percent to around 98 euros on Xetra in the early afternoon. At the day's low, the shares had cost as little as in September. Since the beginning of the year, the Dutch company has lost around a quarter of its share price.

DocMorris shares also fell by 11 percent to around 62 francs on the Swiss stock exchange SIX. In the meantime, the Swiss company fell to its lowest level since December. DocMorris has lost 15 percent since the beginning of the year.

The introduction of electronic prescriptions as a growth driver for Redcare Pharmacy is now "more than priced in", wrote UBS analyst Olivier Calvet in a study. He is issuing a sell recommendation even though he considers Redcare to be a high-quality online pharmacy retailer and even though the share has already fallen by around 20 percent in the past month.

Among other things, Amazon Pharmacy is potentially a significant long-term threat, as German regulation has turned Redcare into an online-only provider. In the first quarter of 2024, 80 percent of electronic prescriptions were still filled with a health insurance card at the local pharmacy, while the majority of the rest were filled with a paper printout of the e-prescription.

UBS expert Sebastian Vogel also wrote that, according to the latest data, downloads and usage of apps for health insurers are significantly higher than those of online pharmacies. Health insurers' apps are therefore likely to act as gatekeepers due to their wide reach and discourage the use of mail-order pharmacies' own apps./lfi/bek/jha/