The veterinary clinical services sector across Spain and Portugal represents a €2.61 billion market characterized by essential demand, measured growth, and evolving delivery models.
Encompassing high-volume companion-animal primary care, substantial production-animal services, and a growing specialty referral layer, the sector operates within regulated professional frameworks while navigating the dual forces of persistent fragmentation and accelerating urban consolidation.
Current market sizing places the combined Iberian sector at approximately €2.61 billion in 2025, comprising €2.10 billion in Spain and €512 million in Portugal. Growth dynamics remain modest but stable, with a blended compound annual growth rate of approximately 1.3 percent through 2028, yielding projected market values near €2.72 billion by the end of the forecast period.
The sector’s architecture reveals twenty discrete, non-overlapping service segments defined along two primary dimensions: animal type—companion, production, equine, and exotics—and delivery model, spanning primary care, emergency services, specialty and referral hospitals, ambulatory on-farm services, and telemedicine. This segmentation framework supports clear benchmarking of revenue pools, margin profiles, capital intensity, and competitive dynamics across markets, while orthogonal considerations of ownership structure and geography enable deeper analysis of consolidation exposure and regional service density.
The Iberian market remains fragmented at the clinic level, with Spain hosting over 7,000 clinics according to sector analyses. Yet consolidation momentum is visible and growing, particularly in metropolitan areas where corporate networks—including AniCura, VetPartners, and IVC Evidensia—are expanding through acquisitions and greenfield development. AniCura’s 2022 acquisition of Vetsum’s 26 hospitals, which expanded its Iberian footprint to 79 clinics, exemplifies the scale-driven repositioning underway in urban centers.
Competitive intensity registers as moderate to high, concentrated in metropolitan markets where consolidators compete for referral flows, specialty cases, and capital-intensive service lines. Independent single-site and multi-site practices remain numerous and compete on local reputation, continuity of care, and personalized client relationships. This bifurcated landscape creates pricing pressure in high-volume primary care while preserving margin opportunities in specialty, emergency, and referral services.
Structural analysis through Porter’s Five Forces reveals moderate buyer power in companion-animal segments due to price sensitivity, moderate-to-high supplier power in specialized equipment and pharmaceuticals, moderate entry barriers rising sharply in urban high-capital facilities, and moderate threat of substitution concentrated in lower-margin consultation and triage interactions. Overall, the framework underscores a sector with defensible niches but limited uniform pricing power across all segments.
Five observable trends are reshaping the sector’s trajectory:
The sector presents a moderate investment opportunity characterized by durable demand fundamentals, selective growth in high-margin segments, and a clear structural path toward consolidation in urban markets. Essential demand drivers—including rising companion-animal ownership and spend, expanding preventive and diagnostic service adoption, and telemedicine as a scalable channel—support a positive long-term outlook.
However, the opportunity is tempered by pervasive fragmentation, regional density variation, regulatory and licensing constraints, and workforce supply challenges. Profitability outlook is moderate, supported by higher-margin emergency and specialty services in urban settings but constrained by price sensitivity in core primary care and capital expenditure requirements for advanced facilities.
Strategic priorities for operators and stakeholders center on selective consolidation in urban primary-care and specialty networks, investment in capital-intensive hub locations, scaling telemedicine as an integrated delivery channel, developing contract-based ambulatory services in agricultural regions, and standardizing digital practice management across clinic networks. Workforce availability and supply chain resilience remain critical operational watchpoints requiring disciplined mitigation strategies.
The sector’s essential nature, combined with observable growth in companion-animal care, specialty services, and telemedicine adoption, supports a constructive view, provided strategic execution prioritizes high-margin segments, scalable delivery models, and operational excellence in talent and supply chain management.
