A True Health Services Partner: Fangzhou Pharmaceutical Sets an Example

For a long time, internet healthcare has focused on efficient resource linkage and supply-demand matching, with online consultations and online medication purchases becoming an important supplement to public medical care.

However, with traffic growth slowing down, the single-transaction business model has hit a bottleneck. Meanwhile, large AI models have lowered the barrier to accessing health information, and users’ demand for online services is no longer limited to finding doctors or purchasing medications; instead, they expect continuous and trustworthy health support. How Can Platforms Create Long-Term Value for Users? This Has Become a New Industry Imperative.

Fangzhou Pharmaceutical is addressing this issue through a strategic upgrade. The financial report released recently shows that in the first half of 2026, the company achieved revenue of RMB 1.8245 billion, a year-on-year increase of 22.2%. The number of registered users exceeded 59.8 million, with monthly active users surpassing 14.7 million, representing a year-on-year growth of 23.1%. Fangzhou Pharmaceutical’s strategic initiatives are yielding phased results, accelerating its transition toward the new positioning of “partner for personal health services across the entire life cycle.”

This strategic upgrade is more easily understood in terms of its practical significance when viewed within the evolution and landscape of internet healthcare.

Internet healthcare has developed diversified service models and revenue streams through continuous iteration.

Online consultation represents the most fundamental service model in internet healthcare. By breaking through temporal and spatial constraints, internet medical platforms enable users to quickly access medical consultations. With the rapid adoption of AI-powered Q&A tools over the past two years, the efficiency of preliminary screening and triage on these platforms has further improved, thereby broadening the channels through which users obtain health information.

However, consultation services mostly address only isolated, immediate health issues. The service relationship ends once the conversation concludes, which means such interactions do not necessarily translate into long-term user value and make it difficult to generate scalable, recurring revenue.

E-commerce of pharmaceuticals is the primary source of scalable revenue for platforms, making medication purchases more convenient for users and driving the digitalization of drug retail. As medications are an indispensable component of disease treatment, pharmaceutical sales remain an essential business segment for internet healthcare platforms to this day.

However, pharmaceuticals are highly standardized products. With the surge in instant retail, price comparisons have become quicker, intensifying price wars across platforms and channels and squeezing profit margins. Meanwhile, enhancing competitiveness in pharmaceutical delivery by expanding warehousing and logistics networks requires substantial capital investment.

Amid the clear ceiling on traditional business growth, the industry urgently needs to unlock longer-term service value, bringing the advantages of chronic disease management to the fore.

For chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, and cancer, adherence to medication regimens, regular follow-up visits, biomarker monitoring, and lifestyle interventions are essential measures for disease management. From a corporate perspective, chronic disease services can extend the service lifecycle, accumulate substantial real-world user interaction data, and lay the foundation for long-term value creation.

Taking Fangzhou Pharmaceutical as an example, the company focuses on AI-powered chronic disease management services. It has established a comprehensive service system covering consultation and diagnosis, scientific medication, health intervention, regular follow-ups, and data monitoring, thereby creating service premium and enhancing user lifetime value (LTV).

Across the broader health and wellness industry, chronic disease management stands out as a sector with the most stable, long-term, inelastic demand. Characterized by high user stickiness and a willingness to pay for premium services, it represents a highly promising direction for the development of internet healthcare. By making sustained investments and committing to long-term operations in chronic disease services, enterprises can position themselves as users’ “health service partners,” thereby building competitive moats that endure across industry cycles.

“Health Service Partner” is not an abstract slogan; its feasibility has been validated in overseas markets, while the domestic market requires localized implementation strategies.

As a typical representative in this field, Hims & Hers initially focused on men's and women's health before expanding into areas such as weight loss and skincare.

Subscription services are the primary revenue model for Hims & Hers, where users pay on a recurring basis and the platform continuously provides products and services throughout each subscription period. Through paid subscriptions, users purchase not just medications, but a comprehensive health solution that includes online consultations, personalized treatment plan development or adjustment, nutrition and exercise guidance, and health monitoring.

In recent years, Hims & Hers has seen continuous growth in its subscriber base. By the second quarter of 2026, Hims & Hers reached 2.891 million subscribers, a year-on-year increase of 19%; the average monthly revenue per subscriber was $92, representing a 21% year-on-year increase.

The simultaneous growth in user base and average revenue per user (ARPU) indicates strong user recognition and willingness to pay for professional, continuous, and personalized health services, marking a significant milestone in the successful commercialization of the “Health Service Partner” model.

It is worth noting that Hims & Hers focuses on consumer healthcare, a model largely built on users' willingness to spend. This willingness is influenced by factors such as economic conditions and the broader macroeconomic consumption environment, introducing a certain degree of uncertainty.

In China, China is home to the world’s largest population of individuals with chronic diseases, who have more rigid demands for health service partners, thereby creating development opportunities with broader market space and higher growth certainty. Fangzhou Pharmaceutical has established its new positioning as a “Personal Full-Lifecycle Health Service Partner” in response to this overarching trend.

However, there are significant differences between China and overseas markets in terms of medical services, payment systems, and patient healthcare-seeking behaviors, meaning that overseas models cannot be directly replicated. Therefore, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical strives to become a “health service partner” tailored to local realities.

First, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical leverages the H2H model to integrate in-hospital and out-of-hospital services, addressing the shortcomings of in-hospital services.

Compared with the relatively mature primary care and tiered referral systems in some overseas regions, medical resources in China are highly concentrated in hospitals. Hospitals primarily handle diagnostic examinations, surgical procedures, and periodic follow-up visits, leaving a gap in services such as long-term medication management, indicator monitoring, and follow-up care after patient discharge. The expanding population of chronic disease patients amid the aging trend has further exacerbated the supply-demand imbalance.

Fangzhou Pharmaceutical’s H2H (Hospital to Home) model can bridge this gap by extending hospital diagnostic and treatment services to the home setting. By integrating physician services, medication supply, and digital tools, it addresses the needs of chronic disease patients after discharge, establishing a continuous care chain from hospital to home.

Secondly, the "acquaintance doctor-patient" relationship has become the foundation of trust for health service partners.

In China, patients generally prefer seeking care from renowned specialists at major hospitals or from well-recommended physicians endorsed by friends and family. Under Fangzhou Pharmaceutical’s H2H (Hospital-to-Home) model, trust between doctors and patients originates in offline physical hospitals and is continuously reinforced through ongoing online communication, thereby establishing a “familiar doctor-patient” relationship that is difficult to replace with purely online consultations.

As of June 30, 2026, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical’s online platform had onboarded 282,000 physicians, 56.5% of whom were from tertiary hospitals. This strong foundation of trust translated into high user stickiness: the platform registered 59.8 million users during the same period, with an average monthly active user base of 14.7 million, representing a year-on-year increase of 23.1%, and a user repurchase rate of 89.2%.

Finally, a complete and efficient fulfillment network is better suited to the local supply chain and payment systems.

While many overseas subscription models rely heavily on commercial insurance, medical insurance remains the primary payment method for healthcare services in China. Fangzhou Pharmaceutical is strengthening its supply chain capabilities; as of June 30, 2026, it had partnered with over 1,800 suppliers and more than 1,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers, with prescription drugs accounting for 83.1% of its gross merchandise value (GMV), thereby ensuring a stable supply of medications for chronic diseases. Meanwhile, leveraging the upgrade of Guangzhou’s “Medical Insurance System 2.0,” the company is enhancing its medical insurance service capabilities to alleviate the medication cost burden on patients.

In short, while overseas markets have validated the commercial viability of the "Health Service Partner" model, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical has leveraged China’s vast population of chronic disease patients to develop an implementation pathway tailored to the Chinese market, thereby becoming a benchmark for unlocking long-term value in internet healthcare.

Chronic disease management is a direction with significant long-term potential in internet healthcare, but this does not mean that simply entering the chronic disease sector will guarantee long-term value.

For example, under the traditional e-commerce logic, the business pathway for chronic disease management might look like this: selling medications to patients with chronic conditions, driving repeat purchases, and recommending related health products. In this model, after a user completes a medication purchase, the platform relies on coupons or other marketing campaigns to stimulate subsequent consumption. This approach remains fundamentally centered on traffic acquisition and conversion, potentially falling into the price wars described earlier, and fails to reflect the true long-term value of chronic disease management services.

Therefore, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical has moved beyond a pure traffic-driven mindset, leveraging AI-powered chronic disease management services to disrupt traditional paradigms. By deeply embedding AI into post-diagnosis interventions and daily health management, the company has transformed the historically fragmented, passively responsive medication sales process into a high-frequency, sustainable, companion-style service model.

As an industry leader, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical began laying the groundwork for medical AI applications as early as 2022, successively deploying them in scenarios such as intelligent customer service, construction of medical knowledge bases, and production of popular science content. Following the launch of the Xingshi Large Language Model in 2025, the company has built an AI product matrix covering pre-diagnosis, intra-diagnosis, post-diagnosis, and long-term health management, comprehensively integrating it into its business operations.

Since 2026, the AI product portfolio has demonstrated tangible empowering effects across multiple scenarios in chronic disease management services.

In practical applications, AI assists in handling standardized tasks such as follow-up reminders and information organization, thereby alleviating physicians’ workload and allowing them to devote more energy to clinical diagnosis and treatment. For patients, AI tools help with medication reminders and deliver health education content. By employing a combined strategy of “timely reminders + health knowledge dissemination,” these tools effectively engage users and improve adherence to chronic disease management. In the first half of 2026, the platform’s monthly active users increased significantly by 23.1% year-on-year.

It is evident that a win-win situation for patients, doctors, and the platform has been achieved, leading to the formation of a more sustainable ecosystem for chronic disease management services.

Such a service ecosystem provides Fangzhou Pharmaceutical with the confidence to accelerate its transition toward the new positioning of “Personal Full-Lifecycle Health Service Partner,” and will also help the company further expand its commercialization ceiling, demonstrating stronger explosive potential in profitability elasticity.

Returning to the question posed at the beginning of this article: How can platforms create long-term value for users? It is evident that Fangzhou Pharmaceutical’s practice has provided an answer: When “health service partners” become a tangible presence in users’ lives and translate into quantifiable performance metrics for the platform, internet healthcare can break through old models, making the realization of long-term value possible.