Manufacturers of masks and respirators point to low quality products due to lower prices for public procurement

Manufacturers of medical masks and respirators, faced with a serious drop in demand after the end of the pandemic, are trying to maintain sales volumes through public procurement. But tenders are generally won by the companies that charge the lowest price. The industry association invites legislators to change the current practice, arguing that low-quality products are often sold at low cost. And this, in turn, poses risks to the health of medical staff. However, experts doubt that this trend will be reversed in the near future.

At the disposal of Kommersant was a letter dated June 22 addressed to the head of the State Duma Committee on Health Protection Badma Bashankaev, in which the Association of Developers, Manufacturers and Suppliers of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) asks for consultations with market participants on the current public procurement practice in this segment. The organization, which unites about 500 companies, worries about “an unreasonable sharp drop in price” in tenders, which leads to “acquisition of products with extremely low protective characteristics.” Such products pose a threat to the life and health of medical staff, said Vladimir Kotov, president of the PPE Association.

The situation is aggravated by the lack of unambiguous interpretations of the concepts of “sanitary clothing” and “medical PPE” in the technical regulations. This allows the use of masks, respirators and overalls without confirmed quality in medical institutions. Mr. Kotov said that the manufacturers proposed to Roszdravnadzor to check the quality of products purchased by state buyers with a significant price reduction, and to attract specialists to develop a new GOST for PPE used for medical purposes. It was not possible to get a comment from the department, the State Duma Committee on Health Protection did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

A Kommersant source on the market says that in 2022, the total volume of public procurement of PPE for medical institutions exceeded 6 billion rubles, which is 20% less than it was during the pandemic. According to him, last year up to 40% of tenders were won by companies that offered the lowest cost.

Public procurement experts interviewed by Kommersant acknowledge the existence of a problem that the PPE Association writes about, but doubt that it will be able to reverse the current trend. This is due, among other things, to the incentives by the authorities to reduce prices in public procurement. For example, according to Ekaterina Zadonskaya, Director General of Cursor Marketing, the order of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation dated June 4, 2018 requires suppliers of goods from the EAEU to provide a 15% discount to the purchase price as part of public procurement. Offers of companies from countries outside the Customs Union should be discounted in a similar amount, and often even more, the expert adds.

According to Evgeny Lando, General Director of Contract Systems, customers can fight suppliers of low-quality products by entering such contractors into the register of unscrupulous ones. In addition, Anastasia Taradankina, head of the antimonopoly practice of the Delcredere Bar Association, adds that in the tender documentation, customers can describe in detail the quality characteristics of the purchased goods.

But in the case of PPE, according to Yulia Panina, a leading specialist in the sales department of the Respiratory Complex company, the problem with their quality is exacerbated by the government decree adopted in March 2020 on accelerated registration of a number of medical devices, which is still in force. During the pandemic, this made it possible to first obtain a registration certificate for such products in five to ten days, and only later, within five months, to test its quality, the expert explains.

Now the manufacturers of such funds, which have increased their output during the pandemic, are facing the loss of sales markets with a downtime of part of the capacity, says the interlocutor of Kommersant. According to him, a number of companies that have invested in equipment cannot dump on government purchases, moreover, the demand for products has fallen noticeably in the pharmaceutical retail. So, in Zdravcity, according to the CEO of the network Boris Popov, sales of masks have halved since the beginning of 2023: only about 500 packs were sold in June.

Ekaterina Rakitina, Khalil Aminov