Medical equipment meal opens foreign capital to the next monopoly market?

Business News Agency May 3 At present, over 80% of China's high-end medical devices are monopolized by multinational companies, leading to "access to expensive and difficult to see" problems difficult to solve. Multinational corporations have a strong “snapping ring”, and the development of China's autonomous medical device industry is facing a grim situation. How can local companies get out of the predicament? Will localization of high-end medical devices make the path of independent innovation go wider and wider?

Medical Device Market: Foreign Feast?

Since the implementation of the new medical reform program in 2009, it has created a huge demand for medical device products. On April 14th, the on-site exchange meeting of "Domestic Innovative Medical Device Product Application Demonstration Project" was held in Chongqing. According to the data, in 2010, the development momentum of China's medical device industry was strong. The market scale exceeded 100 billion yuan and reached 120 billion yuan, with a growth rate of 23%. It is predicted that in the next five years, the market size of China's entire medical equipment and equipment will double.

At present, apart from the fact that a few technologies such as ultrasonic focusing are at the leading international level in China's enterprises, the gap between the overall level of Chinese medical devices and foreign advanced levels is about 15 years in terms of high-tech products. The medical equipment industry is a highly integrated, comprehensive technology industry involving a wide range of disciplines. With high technical barriers, multinational medical device manufacturing companies have been monopolized in the high-end medical device market, including electrocardiographs, CT, magnetic resonance, and other high-end medical devices. Do not see domestic brands, the monopoly share of multinational companies in the field of ultrasound equipment and even more than 90%. Among them, GE, Siemens, Philips and other major multinational giants basically divided the high-end market for medical equipment in China. Both GE and Philips' medical equipment business in China have seen double-digit growth, and Siemens stated that its goal is for medical imaging equipment. Sales growth in China exceeded the market's projected annual growth rate of 10%.

Multinational medical companies that have always focused on high-end medical devices have begun to pay attention to the research and development of low-end and middle-end medical device products and have successively laid out production and sales of low-end and middle-end products. At the 2011 Medical Devices Expo, GE, Philips, Canon, and Rui Sheng displayed their new products developed for county, township, township and other primary medical institutions, as well as full-service solutions including financial services and medical information services. . In contrast, in recent years, China’s national medical device industry has developed rapidly and has made breakthroughs in the development of some high-end digital medical devices. However, on an overall level, due to late start-ups, enterprises have become “scattered” and have not yet formed. Significant products, core competitiveness, international brands, and developed countries still have a phased gap. "Domestic related companies mostly do low-end assembly without core technology," said Prof. Jianping Dai, vice president of the Chinese Medical Association, at the 2011 Sino-US Magnetic Resonance Summit. The development of China's own industries is facing a grim situation: the medical device market is in danger of being "swallowed" by international giants!

Zheng Quanluo, former vice president of the China Medical Device Industry Association, said that multinational companies have “strongly slopped their enclosures” and “the result has been high prices, and at the same time, it has also aggravated the problem of the 'expensive' doctors.”

Local Enterprises: Relying on Independent Innovation to Break Monopoly

During the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan" period, how will China's medical device industry break through? According to expert analysis, in the future, the development of medical devices in China will be divided into two levels: one is the development of technologies and products, and the other is the establishment of industrial platforms and base construction. With the steady implementation of the new medical reform, increasing the research and development of medical device products is the current focus. The industry's "scattered, chaotic, and bad" situation needs to be improved and healthy development is achieved.

Take magnetic resonance equipment research and development as an example. With nuclear magnetics entering the 3.0T era, high-end nuclear magnetic products will become the focus of hospital procurement. A group of high-end medical device R&D and production enterprises represented by MTS Medical Technology Co., Ltd. insists on independent innovation and strives to develop magnetic resonance core technology with independent intellectual property rights, breaking the monopoly of foreign products.

Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging SNR indicators increased by 100% -200%, a substantial increase in the cost of the hospital ... established in China Medical City, US time medical technology company with its own research and development of high temperature superconducting magnetic resonance coil technology to achieve nuclear magnetic resonance The technological innovation of medical equipment realizes low cost and high quality. William Bradley, former chairman of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance Medical Imaging and Director of Radiology at the University of California, San Diego, highly praised the high-temperature superconducting coil technology standards: “The innovative technology of Mesh Medical – the emergence of superconducting RF coils will be magnetic Resonance brings revolutionary influence, which makes people change the view of low-field permanent magnetic resonance. The signal-to-noise ratio of high-temperature superconducting coil image is enhanced two to five times."

China's 1.3 billion people have only 2,300 nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) equipment. The price of nuclear magnetic resonance is unbearable for more than 20,000 county-level hospitals in China. MTS Medical leads the world in high-temperature superconducting coil technology and adopts the “changing lens” method to achieve a significant increase in imaging quality without increasing the field strength, which can effectively reduce the cost of magnetic resonance diagnostics. At present, Messi Medical has established a phase 1 R&D and production base in China Medical City with an annual production capacity of 180 units. Its completion marks the standardization and scale-up of the development and production of the large-scale magnetic resonance imaging system in China. It is reported that Messi Medical has started to build its second phase of R&D and production base.

In this regard, Professor Dai Jianping believes that "the emergence of new technologies will further promote the development of the magnetic resonance market. Mesitu has its own core technology - magnetic resonance machines for high temperature superconducting coils are inexpensive, cost-effective, and focus on the secondary hospital market. Is very suitable for this trend."

In the future, as the country’s investment in medical reforms continues to increase, the primary and secondary medical institutions in the county and townships in the second and third tiers will be the top priority for the Chinese medical device market. On April 14th, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Health jointly organized an on-site exchange meeting on “Domestic Innovative Medical Device Product Application Demonstration Project” in Chongqing to further promote the implementation of the national innovative medical device product demonstration application project. Some local governments are also promoting home-grown medical device delivery activities and benefiting manufacturers of medical device products and patients.

Professor Ma Qiyuan, president of MTS Medical Corp., called on the country to make use of the opportunity of medical reform to actively support relevant enterprises to strengthen R&D and investment in the field of high-end medical devices, and to guide enterprises to improve their independent innovation capabilities, build their own brands, and encourage medical institutions to prioritize domestic high-end medical care. equipment. At the same time, enterprises with independent intellectual property rights core technologies have seized the opportunity of the new medical reform policy support to transform the technological advantages into market advantages as soon as possible, breaking the monopoly of high-end products of multinational medical device companies and meeting their basic approaches to enter the low-end product challenges.