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TL;DRParallel import (Parallelimport) refers to a medicine authorised and first placed on the market in one EU or EEA state, then bought there by an independent trader and imported into Germany to be sold in parallel to the original manufacturer's product, exploiting price differences between national markets.
The trader, the Parallelimporteur, is not the marketing authorisation holder and acts without that holder's involvement. Parallel import is lawful because the EU treats medicines as goods that may move freely once they have been placed on the market anywhere in the internal market. The mechanism is often confused with a Reimport, and the difference decides how you read prices, identifiers and import groups in an article list.
Both are the identical medicine sold in Germany under an importer's own Pharmazentralnummer at a price below the domestic original. The dividing line is origin, and everything else follows from it.
| Feature | Parallel import | Reimport |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Authorised and first placed on the market in another EU or EEA state, never made for Germany | Originally made for the German market, exported, then brought back to Germany |
| Product | Same medicine as the German reference product | Same medicine as the German original |
| Trader | Independent of the marketing authorisation holder | Independent reimporter |
| Identifier | Own PZN, linked to the reference pack | Own PZN, linked to the PZN der Originalpackung |
| Price logic | Below the German list price, driven by cross-border price gaps | Below the German original, driven by cheaper foreign purchase |
In everyday German usage the two words are frequently treated as one category, and both are captured by the same import preference and the same identifier fields. The distinction only becomes sharp when you trace where the pack was first placed on the market: a Parallelimport was never a German pack, while a Reimport started as one. For the reader who just needs to identify or exclude imports, the practical handle is the same in both cases, namely the identifier link back to the original, not the trade name.
Parallel import rests on the free movement of goods under Articles 34 and 36 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, combined with the exhaustion of trade-mark rights: once the manufacturer has placed a product on the market in one Member State, it cannot use its trade mark to block that same product moving to another Member State. The Court of Justice of the EU has, since the Bristol-Myers Squibb ruling, allowed the importer to repackage or relabel the pack, but only when a set of cumulative conditions is met.
These conditions are why a parallel-imported pack always carries a German leaflet and Fachinformation, a German-compliant pack, and a statement of the repackaging company, and why the importer remains subject to pharmacovigilance obligations for the product it places on the market.
A parallel import may not be placed on the German market until the importer holds a national authorisation, but that authorisation runs through a simplified route rather than a full dossier. Which authority and which route applies depends on how the original product was authorised.
For nationally authorised products the importer applies to the competent federal authority, the BfArM for most human medicines or the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut for biologicals such as vaccines and sera, and obtains a marketing authorisation in the simplified procedure. The product must hold a valid authorisation in the EU country of origin and must correspond in essentials to a German reference medicine that itself holds a valid authorisation. For centrally authorised products the picture is different: there is no separate import authorisation, and the activity runs as parallel distribution, notified to the European Medicines Agency rather than approved nationally.
Yes, but the mechanism was reformed and the old numbers no longer apply. Paragraph 129 Absatz 1 SGB V still directs pharmacies to dispense a lower-priced imported medicine where one is available, and the import channel it steers towards includes both parallel imports and reimports. The current text sets a tiered price-advantage test against the reference pack, after the discounts under Paragraph 130a: for a reference price up to and including 100 euros the import must be at least 15 percent lower, above 100 up to 300 euros at least 15 euros lower, and above 300 euros at least 5 percent lower. Any working list logic still built on the earlier flat threshold or the old fixed import quota should be rechecked against this reformed clause, since the import is by definition the identical product from the same manufacturer sold below the domestic Originalpräparat.
On pharmazie.com an import pack is marked as such and connected to the pack it derives from through identifier fields in the article comparison block, so you can move from an original to its imports and back through the PZN rather than by matching trade names.
One honest limitation: these fields tell you that a PZN is an import and which original it links to, not whether that import is currently the cheapest available or in stock. Whether a given parallel import meets the Paragraph 129 price advantage today, or is affected by a supply shortage, is a separate and fast-moving question you settle against live price and availability data.
