Written By: Benjamin Shobert
Ten years ago, Medtronic’s sales in China amounted to $50 million. Today, the company will sell more than $900 million across China during 2014. The strategy Medtronic has embraced to achieve this stunning amount of growth has been multi-faceted: exporting innovative products from the US to China, establishing a R&D facility in China to design products specifically for the unique needs of the Chinese market, crafting partnerships with government to educate patients around under-served therapeutic areas, and acquiring domestic Chinese medical device manufacturers such asMedtronic’s 2012 purchase of Kanghui Medical for $816 million. Taken together, Medtronic’s China ambitions point towards a company confident in their ability to navigate one of the most complex and turbulent healthcare economies in the world.
The last two years have introduced some turbulence to foreign device manufacturers working in China. Earlier this year, China’s National Health and Planning Commission (NHPC) put in place a new policy that said it would “pursue policies explicitly designed to favor domestic manufacturers over foreign manufacturers.” Since the summer of 2013, when the GSK scandal broke, the device community has kept a watchful eye on whether a similar crackdown would take place within the device space.
