The Romanian pharmaceutical market rose by 12% in RON in January against January 2009, to 748.54m RON (180.76m euros), according to Cegedim Romanian data. The market is thus following the same upward trend of recent years, which saw it go up by 13.1% in 2009 year-on-year and by 17.7% in 2008. "Growth in value was due to hopes that debts will be paid off with the new year, which only happened partially and I don't know if evenly for everybody," said Petru Craciun, general manager of Cegedim Romania market research company. In terms of volume, though, the market dropped by 7.7% to 39.4 million units. The contrary trends of sales in volume and value can be accounted for by drug firms' focusing on high price products, a phenomenon that emerged after the Health Ministry cut prices a year ago. Sales of prescription drugs also followed a different trend compared with OTC ones, with the former rising by 19%, while the latter stagnated.