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China’s rising MedTech industry and the dilemma facing Western companies

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  • China is seen as a significant growth frontier for MedTech
  • Over the past 2 decades Western companies have derived billions from China
  • But today companies seeking or extending their franchises in China will encounter significant barriers
  • China is successfully decreasing its dependence on Western medical devices and other high-tech products and replacing them with domestic offerings
  • The choice facing Western companies expecting to derive revenues from China is: either localize your value chain and help China achieve its goals to dominate key industries globally or be progressively squeezed out of markets
  • Some Western companies have localized and manufacture their offerings in China
  • Some MedTech companies concerned about China’s weak intellectual property (IP) protection and buoyed by 2 decades of growth and the current performance of the US stock market are turning away from China
  • Could adherence to history dent their futures?
  
China’s rising MedTech industry and the dilemma facing Western companies

 
This is the first of two Commentaries on China.
 
Increased cost pressures, maturing home markets, resource constraints, growing regulatory pressures and rapidly changing healthcare ecosystems are driving Western MedTech companies to seek or expand their franchises in large fast-growing emerging economies. For many, the country of choice is China. AdvaMed, the American MedTech trade association says, “China presents the most significant growth market for the medical device industry today and for the foreseeable future.”

Despite only accounting for 3% of the global MedTech market share, China’s attraction is a US$14trn economy growing at some 7% per annum, a population of 1.42bn with a large, ageing middleclass with disposable incomes, rising healthcare consumption and Beijing’s commitment to increase healthcare expenditure to provide care for all its citizens from “cradle-to-grave”. All these factors drive China’s MedTech market and the certainty of its increasing demand.

Despite this positive scenario, there are an increasing number of non-tariff barriers facing Western MedTech companies in China. This is because Beijing has launched extensive and aggressive initiatives to decrease China's dependence on Western medical devices and replace them with domestic offerings. Opportunities in China for Western players are shrinking and becoming tougher as Beijing’s new healthcare reforms kick-in and Chinese MedTech companies strengthen, increase their capacity, move up the value chain and take a bigger share of the domestic markets. To compete effectively in China, Western companies need to enhance their understanding of Beijing’s extensive healthcare reforms, increase their understanding of the complexities of China’s new procurement processes and be prepared to localize their value chains.
 
In this Commentary

This Commentary is divided it into 2 parts.
  • Part 1: China an ‘el Dorado’ for Western MedTech companies describes the significant commercial benefits derived by some Western companies who, for the past two decades, have supplied high-end medical devices to the Chinese market and benefitted from: (i) Beijing’s commitment to extend healthcare to all citizens, (ii) the country’s vast, rapidly growing and underserved middleclass and (iii) China’s large and aging population with escalating chronic lifetime diseases. These market drivers have profited Western companies because domestic Chinese MedTech enterprises had neither the capacity nor the knowhow to produce high-end medical devices. This gave rise to a bifurcated MedTech market with domestic Chinese companies producing low-end offerings and Western companies supplying high-end products.
  • Part 2: China the end of the ‘el Dorado’ for Western MedTech Companies suggests that commercial opportunities in China for Western MedTech companies have shrunk significantly and become much tougher as domestic manufacturers, incentivized by Beijing, move up the value chain and capture a bigger share of the domestic market. We describe Made in China 2025 (MIC2025), which is a well-resourced government initiative aimed at decreasing China’s dependence on Western MedTech suppliers by enhancing the capacity and scale of Chinese companies. This, together with China’s current 5-year economic plan aimed at a “healthier China” and its 2009 healthcare reforms are already significantly effecting some segments of MedTech markets previously dominated by Western companies.

PART 1
 
 China an el Dorado for Western MedTech companies
 
China’s healthcare market and the MedTech sector
The attraction of China’s healthcare market to Western investors over the past decade is easy to comprehend. In 2013 China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-largest healthcare market outside the US and the fastest growing of all large emerging markets. Healthcare spending is projected to grow from US$854bn in 2016 to US$1trn in 2020. In 2016, China’s healthcare expenditure as a proportion of its GDP was 6.32%, up from 4.4% in 2006, and this is expected to rise to between 6.5 and 7% by 2020. Although this is a lower percentage than that of the US with 17%, Germany with 11%, Canada, Japan and the UK with about 10%; it suggests that China’s healthcare market has a substantial upside potential; especially as the country’s middleclass grows and becomes economically stronger and Beijing’s healthcare reforms kick-in.
 
The attraction of China’s MedTech market to Western investors also is easy to understand. It is one of the fastest growing market sectors, which has maintained double-digit growth for over a decade. In 2016 China’s MedTech market was valued at US$54bn, an increase of 20% compared to 2015; 72% of which was fuelled by hospital procurements. In 2017 China imported more than US$20bn worth of high-end medical devices the overwhelming majority of which was supplied by Western companies.
 
Drivers of China’s MedTech markets
 
Three China market variables making for highly valued Western MedTech businesses include: (i) the country’s vast, rapidly growing and underserved middleclass, (ii) China’s large and aging population with escalating chronic lifetime diseases and (iii) Beijing’s commitment to extend healthcare to all of its citizens.
 
  1. Rapidly growing and underserved middleclass
China’s past rapid economic growth lifted hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty and into the middleclass. As China’s middleclass has grown, its healthcare market has expanded and the opportunities for Western MedTech companies have increased. This partly offsets slower demand experienced by Western MedTech companies after 2009 when middleclass consumers in developed countries were challenged by the shocks to their living standards caused by the 2008 recession and subsequent lower global economic growth.
 
Since 2015, Chinese middleclass consumers have become a significant driver of the country’s economic activity and are projected to remain so through at least 2025. Since 2000, annual real GDP growth per capita has averaged 8.9% while real personal disposable income on average has risen 9.2%. According to Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report, in 2015 China overtook the US as the country with the biggest middleclass, which is comprised of some 109m adults compared with 92m in the US. Today, the Chinese middleclass is facing more lifestyle related diseases, whilst expecting more and better healthcare. By 2025, China’s middleclass is projected to reach 600m and have an annual disposable income between US$10,000 and US$35,000. Further, compared to the US and the UK, China’s middleclass has a low level of household debt. China’s household debt-to-GDP ratio is 40% compared with 87% for that of the US and UK. This suggests that consumer led growth in China still has a significant upside. However, there are cultural obstacles to Chinese citizens assuming more personal debt.
 
  1. Large aging population with escalating chronic lifetime diseases
China has a population of 1.42bn and each year Chinese citizens give birth to some 20m. In January 2016 China lifted its 40-year-old one-child policy, which is expected to increase the country’s birth rate and increase the demand for in-vitro fertilization among older parents. Notwithstanding, partly because of the country’s falling fertility rates and partly the increasing life expectancy of the elderly share of the country’s population (In 2017 total life expectancy was 76.5), the number of elderly Chinese citizens has been increasing. According to China’s Office of the National Working Commission on Aging, in 2017 the number of its citizens aged 60 or above had reached 241m, accounting for some 17% of the total population and this is expected to peak at 487m, or 35%, around 2050, when it is projected that China will have 100m citizens over 80.

This is significant because elderly people have a higher incidence of disease, demand more frequent, longer and more complicated treatment regimens and use medical services more often than their younger counterparts. For example, China’s ageing population is fuelling the rise in demand for orthopaedic devices. Projections suggest that over the next decade China could become the world’s largest orthopaedic device market. As the Chinese population continues to age, demand for healthcare services and medical devices are expected to increase substantially. Notwithstanding, a ‘dependent’ large growing and aging population has a significant economic downside.
 
Further, the 600m Chinese citizens of prime earning age tend to live in large urban centres. China has some 662 cities; 6 of which are mega cities with populations of about 10m. 160 Chinese cities have populations in excess of 1m. Increased urbanization, changing diets and lifestyles and increased air pollution and other environmental hazards are causing a substantial rise in the prevalence of chronic lifetime diseases. It is estimated that 330m Chinese citizens currently have chronic diseases. According to a 2018 study almost 100m adults (8.6%) have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), about 110m have diabetes and more than 80m Chinese citizens are handicapped. Altogether this creates a vast and growing demand for various high-end medical devices.
 
  1. Beijing’s commitment to extend healthcare to all citizens
A 3rd driver of China’s expanding healthcare sector is Beijing’s healthcare reforms launched in 2009 and its current 5-year economic plan, which prioritizes a "Healthy China". According to a 2016 World Bank report, ”Since the launch of the 2009 health reforms, China has substantially increased investment to expand health infrastructure; strengthened the primary-care system; achieved near-universal health insurance coverage in a relatively short period; reduced the share of out-of-pocket expenses - a major cause of disease-induced poverty - in total health spending; continued to promote equal access to basic public health services; deepened public hospital reform; and improved the availability, equity and affordability of health services. It has also greatly reduced child and maternal mortality and rates of infectious diseases and improved the health and life expectancy of the Chinese people.”
 
The share of healthcare expenses covered by the government is expected to increase from 30% in 2010 to 40% in 2020, but current regional differences in access to and quality of healthcare are expected to remain in the near term. China’s current economic plan, which was approved in 2015 and adopted in 2016 is responsible for a number of well-funded and aggressive healthcare reform programs, and increased investment in healthcare infrastructure. The plan also encourages private capital investment to improve service quality and meet the public’s diverse, complex and escalating healthcare needs.
 
Bifurcated MedTech market

These three healthcare drivers have significantly benefitted Western MedTech companies who leveraged their pre-existing products and business models and served China’s fast growing and underserved high-end MedTech markets with sophisticated medical devices. Chinese domestic MedTech companies, which today are comprised of about 16,000 small-to-medium sized light manufacturing enterprises on China’s east coast, participated in the low end of the global value chain and mostly produced Class I and II cheap disposable medical devices, which required simple forms of manufacturing or assembly, but created large numbers of jobs and made a significant contribution to poverty reduction. This mutual dependence gave rise to a bifurcated market and reflected the type of foreign direct investment that China attracted at the time and the relative lack of capacity of the domestic labour force.
 
The foreign sourced market segment has been served historically by large, well-resourced Western MedTech companies such as Medtronic, General Electric (GE), Philips, Siemens, Zimmer Biomet  and DePuy Synthes. Before 2009, such companies enjoyed a near monopoly supplying their pre-existing high-end medical devices to large Chinese hospitals (see below). US MedTech companies were the #1 foreign supplier of such offerings, followed by Germany and Japan. These 3 countries represented the overwhelming majority share of China’s imports of medical devices.

PART 2

China the end of the el Dorado for Western MedTech companies
 
Between 2003 and 2009 foreign direct investment in China’s MedTech sector was concentrated in low-value-added activities. This pattern reversed during 2010-2018 and enabled Chinese MedTech companies to move up the value chain and develop more sophisticated manufacturing processes, increase their R&D capacity, enhance their post-market services and begin to penetrate more segments of the higher-value-added Class lll MedTech markets. As this happened so the predominance of Western MedTech companies providing high-end product offerings was reduced. This shift suggests that late entrants to the China market may struggle.
 
A 2017 survey conducted by China’s New Center for Structural Economics, covering 640 Chinese export-oriented labour-intensive companies across four sectors between 2005 and 2015 suggests that upgrading low-tech industries is pervasive throughout China. “’Technology upgrading’ was the firms’ most common response to their challenges: 31% of firms ranking it top and 54% in their top three responses. Tighter cost control over inputs and in production was next (top for 27% of firms) and changing product lines or expanding markets was third most common (24%)”, says the report.
 
Taking share from Western companies

To-date domestic Chinese MedTech companies have captured about 10% of the technologically intensive segments of endoscopy and minimally invasive surgery as measured by value, and 50% of the market in patient monitoring devices and orthopaedic implants. Only 5 years ago Western companies such as Zimmer Biomet  and DePuy Synthes controlled 80% of the Chinese high-end orthopaedic market segments. Further, about 80% of China’s market of drug-eluting stents, (medical devices placed into narrowed, diseased peripheral or coronary arteries, which slowly release a drug to block cell proliferation), which is another relatively high-end therapeutic device segment, is controlled by Biosensors International, Lepu Medical, and MicroPort. These three Chinese companies market drug-eluting stents, on average, for about 40% less than their Western counterparts. Just over a decade ago 90% of this market was controlled by Western MedTech companies. Similarly, Chinese companies have increased their domestic market share of digital X-ray technologies to 50%. In 2004 they had zero share of this market.
 
Made in China 2025
 
In May 2015, Beijing launched “Made in China 2025” (MIC2025), which is a national strategy to enhance China’s competitive advantage in manufacturing. Increasing competition from developing nations with similarly competitive costs, coupled with technology-driven efficiency gains in developed countries, means that China’s abundance of cheap labour and the competitive advantage of its infrastructure will soon be insufficient to drive sustainable economic growth. MIC25 is expected to redress this by comprehensively upgrading, consolidating and rebalancing China’s manufacturing industry, and turning China into a global manufacturing power able to influence global standards, supply chains and drive global innovation.
 
The strategy names 10 sectors, including medical devices, which qualify for special attention to help boost the country’s goal of accelerating innovation and improving the quality of products and services. The initiative incentivizes domestic Chinese companies, including SMEs, to increase their usage of artificial intelligence and digital technologies to move up the value chain and capture a greater market share from their Western counterparts. MIC2025 is explicit about China reducing its reliance on Western imports and includes subsidies, loans and bonds to support and encourage domestic companies to: (i) continue increasing their capacity, (ii) devise lean business models that emphasize “affordability”, (iii) increase their R&D, (iv) expand their franchises overseas, and (v) acquire foreign enterprises with cutting-edge technologies. The initiative  also addresses issues of quality, consistency of output, safety and environmental protection, which are all considered strategic challenges to China’s development.
 
Beijing expects MIC2025 to increase the market share of Chinese-produced medical devices in the country’s hospitals to 50% by 2020 and 70% by 2025, enable Chinese companies to compete with Western MedTech giants by 2035 and make China a world MedTech leader by “New China’s” 100th birthday in 2049. The initiative is expected to quickly spread beyond China’s borders as its leading manufacturers seek to develop global supply chains and to access new markets. MIC25 is important for the next stage of China’s emergence as an economic superpower and its ambition to design and make the products of the future required not only by the Chinese consumer, but consumers around the world.
 
US attempts to halt MIC25

While many Western countries are debating how to respond to MIC25 Washington sees the initiative as a well-defined, well-orchestrated strategy, which is “unfair and coercive” because it includes government subsidies and the “forced transfer” of technology and IP to enable the Chinese to “catch-up and surpass” American technological leadership in advanced industries.  An August 2018 US Council for Foreign Relations response says, “MIC25 relies on discriminatory treatment of foreign investment, forced technology transfers, intellectual property theft, and cyber espionage”. In June 2018 Washington sought to halt the policy by levying punitive tariffs on Chinese imports into the US and blocking Chinese-backed acquisitions of American technology companies.
 
The commercial effects of increased tariffs are unclear

It is not altogether clear how successful Washington’s punitive tariffs will be because they could unsettle the US medical supply industry given that a growing number of product offerings marketed in the US are made in China. MRIs, pacemakers, sonograms and other medical devices manufactured in China and imported into the US are all included in the list of items subject to the increased US tariffs. Some estimates suggest that the tariffs will cost the American medical device industry more than US$138m in 2018, and about US$1.5bn every year there after. According to AdvaMed, the US enjoys a trade surplus with China for medical products and rather than grow US productivity, the tariffs could result in less trade and a smaller surplus in medical devices. Whilst protectionist, the MIC25 initiative is permitted under World Trade Organization rules as China is not a signatory to the Agreement on Government Procurement, which covers state run hospitals. Further, historically healthcare products have been excluded from tariffs on humanitarian grounds and because they are seen as an asset to public health.
 
Western companies ‘encouraged’ to localize their value chains
 
Although Beijing is seeking to reduce its dependence on imported medical devices, it has not shut-out Western companies who are expected to continue to be significant high-tech market players in the short to medium term. This is because such international trade is crucial to facilitate China’s access to global knowhow and technology. But Beijing has amended its procurement and reimbursement policies to incentivise hospitals to purchase domestically manufactured medical devices and introduced tough conditions on companies seeking to do business in China. To qualify for inclusion in China’s new hospital procurement arrangements Western companies are obliged to localize their value chains and partner with domestic enterprises. Some companies have done so, while others have been reluctant to localize their value chains because of China’s weak record of IP protection. Beijing is aware of this and is streamlining and strengthening its IP prosecution system (see below).
 
Western importers seriously handicapped
 
Importers who choose not to localize their value chains face a number of significant non-tariff barriers. Unlike other Asian countries such as Japan, China has no national standard for tendering and bidding and there are significant differences between its 34 provincial administrations and 5 automatous regions. Further, China has a dearth of large ‘general’ distributors. Western MedTech companies importing product offerings into China are obliged to engage small-scale distributors dedicated to one sector, one imported brand and one type of product. Such distributors are ill-equipped to effectively navigate China’s vast hospital sector (see below) and its complex, rapidly changing and disaggregated procurement and reimbursement processes. A clash of sales cultures is a further disadvantage for Western MedTech companies’ whose marketing mindset is product-centric territory driven, while winning sales strategies in China and in other emerging markets are customer-centric key-account driven.
 
China’s vast hospital sector
 
One dimension of the challenges faced by Western MedTech companies who are obliged to engage small-scale distributors is the enormity of China’s hospital sector. China has about 30,000 hospitals, which have increased from about 18,700 in 2005, serving a population four and a half times that of the US across a similar land mass. By comparison, the US has some 15,500 hospitals and England 168 NHS hospitals. About 26,000 hospitals in China are public and some 4,000 are private. Although public hospitals in China provide the overwhelming majority of healthcare services, this is changing.  Recently, Beijing has loosened its regulations and private sector healthcare has witnessed an influx of private capital. Over the next decade, China’s private healthcare sector is expected to see new hospital chains, expansion of existing hospitals and improvements in a range of private healthcare services. Currently, Western participation in the Chinese private healthcare market is nascent but expected to grow over the next decade.
 
China’s hospitals provide about 5.3m beds, compared with about 890,000 in the US and 142,000 NHS beds in the UK. Chinese public hospitals, which are the biggest consumers of Western medical devices, are categorized into 3 tiers according to their size and capabilities. The largest are tier-3 hospitals of which there are about 7,000. These are 500-bed-plus national, provincial or big city hospitals, which provide comprehensive healthcare services for multiple regions as well as being centres of excellence for medical education and research. There are about 1,500 tier-2 hospitals, which are medium size city, county or district hospitals. Together teir-2 and 3 hospitals represent about 3.5m acute beds. Tier-1 hospitals are township-based and do not provide acute services. There is a range of specialist hospitals, which are also significant users of imported high-end medical devices. Further, Beijing is beginning to develop primary care facilities, which are normal in North America and Europe, but underdeveloped in China.
 
Mega private hospitals
 
Healthcare in China has traditionally been the monopoly of the central government. However, Beijing’s recent relaxation of the rules on private investment referred to above has triggered an explosion in the number of private healthcare facilities and the development of mega hospitals on a scale not seen elsewhere in the world. For example, Zhengzhou Hospital, which is nearly 700km south of Beijing and can be reached by bullet train in under 3 hours at a cost of about US$45, was officially opened in 2016 and was dubbed the “largest hospital in the universe”. Zhengzhou is a mega-city with a population of 10m and is the capital of east-central China's Henan province. The hospital has some 10,000 beds, facilities are spread across several buildings and over 28 floors and it has its own fire department and police station. In 2015, the hospital admitted some 350,000 inpatients and treated 4.8m people. In one day in February 2015 the hospital received 20,000 out-patients. 
Centralizing procurement
 
Most noticeable among the changes taking place in China’s procurement processes for domestically produced medical devices is the development of centralized e-commerce facilities, which are expected to increase efficiency and reduce spiralling hospital costs. The initiative is a partnership, announced in 2018, between IDS Medical Systems and Tencent’s digital healthcare subsidiary WeDoctor, to establish China’s first smart medical supply chain solutions and procurement company, which in the near term, is expected to dominate the Chinese market by becoming the “Amazon of healthcare”. Tencent is the world’s 6th largest social media and investment company and IDS Medical Systems is a Hong Kong based medical supply company with an extensive Asia-Pacific distribution network, which represents over 200 global medical brands in medical devices and consumables. 
 
WeDoctor, was founded in 2010 to provide online physician appointment bookings, which is an issue in China and patients often stand in-line for hours from 2 and 3 in the morning outside hospitals to get brief appointments with physicians. From this modest beginning WeDoctor has rapidly evolved into a US$5.5bn company, which employs big data, artificial intelligence and other digital tools to deliver cutting-edge healthcare solutions and support services to over 2,700 Chinese hospitals, 240,000 doctors, 15,000 pharmacies and 160m platform users; and these numbers are expected to increase significantly in the next few years.
 
Underpinning WeDoctor’s business model and differentiating it from Western endeavours such as Google’s DeepMind, is the freedom in China to collect and use patient data on a scale unparalleled in the West. WeDoctor is designed to leverage Tencent’s significant complementary strengths, innovative resources and networks in order to centralize device procurement by connecting domestic MedTech companies with China’s vast hospital network. WeDoctor’s ability to manage petabytes of patient data, its knowledge of and favoured position in China’s hospital procurement processes, its rapid and sophisticated distribution capacity and central government support, positions WeDoctor to have a significant impact on the procurement of medical devices in China and beyond in the next five years, and this is expected to provide domestic companies with a further competitive edge.
 
Localizing the value chain in China

Manufacturing in China has been an option only for larger Western MedTech companies with the necessary management knowhow, business networks and finance to bear the costs. Companies which have localized their value chains and support the MIC25 initiative include Medtronic and GE Healthcare.
 
Medtronic
Medtronic, the world’s largest MedTech company, has had a presence in China for the past 2 decades and has established local R&D facilities to design products specifically for the needs of the Chinese market and crafted partnerships with provincial governments to help educate patients about under-served therapeutic areas. In 2012 Medtronic acquired Kanghui Medical, for US$816m. In December 2017 the Chinese government approved sales of a new pacemaker, which is the product of a strategic partnership between Medtronic and Lifetech Scientific Corporation. In January 2012 Medtronic paid US$46.6m for a 19% stake in Lifetech and a further US$19.6m for a convertible loan note. The agreement called for LifeTech to develop a line of pacemakers and leads using its manufacturing plant in Shenzhen, (population 13m). Medtronic supplied “technology, training and support” and LifeTech provided local market expertise, brand recognition and growth potential within China. The alliance has made Lifetech the first Chinese domestic manufacturer with an implantable cardiac pacing system with world-class technology and features. In 2015 Medtronic entered into a partnership with the Chengdu’s (population 14.4m) municipal government in the south west of China to enable people with diabetes in Chengdu and the broader Sichuan province (population 87m) to access a new, locally produced next generation sensor augmented pump system with Medtronic’s SmartGuard technology and software displayed in the Chinese language. Medtronic’s 2017 revenues from its China operations amounted to US$1.6bn, 5% of total revenues, and US$3.4bn from other Asia-Pacific countries, 12% of total revenues.
 
GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare is the largest medical device manufacturer in China and China is a key manufacturing base for GE. GE started conducting business in China in 1906 and today has over 20,000 employees across 40 cities in the country. One third of GE's ultrasound probes, half of its MRIs and two thirds of its CT scanners, which are marketed globally are manufactured in the Chinese cities of Wuxi, Tianjin and Beijing respectively. These devices and others are now subject to a punitive US tariff levied in June 2018. “We remain concerned that these tariffs could make it harder for US manufacturers to compete in the global economy, and will shrink rather than expand US exports,” says Kelly Sousa, a GE Healthcare spokesperson.
 
Rachel Duan, president and CEO of GE China explains that, “GE China has been investing in people, processes and technologies throughout the value chain so that it can design, manufacture and service products closer to customers. This goes beyond market and sales localization, to product R&D, manufacturing and product services." GE has pinpointed localization, partnership, and digitization as the three key initiatives to drive its future development in China. In May 2017 GE opened an Advanced Manufacturing Technology Center in Tianjin, its first outside the US, and has partnered with over 30 Chinese engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies. "With a global footprint and depth of localized capabilities in China, we are partnering with customers and helping them win both in China and worldwide by connecting machines, software, and data analytics to unlock industrial productivity," says Duan. 
 
Changing IP environment
 
Medtronic and GE Healthcare provide object lessons of how best Western MedTech companies might leverage commercial opportunities in China. But many remain reluctant to manufacture in China because historically the country’s legal system has been weak in prosecuting IP infringements and more recently they have been further handicapped by Washington’s response to MIC25. For many years, when dealing with China, Western companies have faced a combination of IP challenges, which included litigation with low level damages, an inability to effectively enforce judgments, an inability to patent certain subject matter and a lack of transparency on legal issues. This amounts to substantial disincentives for Western companies to localize their value chain in China. However, the country’s IP environment is changing. In 2017 Beijing spent some US$29bn for the rights to use foreign technology, with the amount paid to US companies increased by 14% year-on-year. China’s IP legal system is maturing and has improved in the scope of allowable patent subject matter to enhancements of litigation options. However, Western reluctance to localize production in China is not only influenced by the country’s weak IP protection and recent trade tensions with the US, but also by ethical concerns and the perceived need for more predictable rules and institutions about environmental and regulatory issues.
 
All this, together with two decades of growth in developed nations and the continued performance of the US stock market might be enough for some MedTech companies to turn-away from China, but could such a reaction dent their futures?
 
Takeaways

This Commentary describes some of the near-term challenges facing Western MedTech companies looking to offset increasing challenges in their home markets by extending their franchises in China. We have suggested why operationalizing this strategy in the short term will be tougher than 5 years ago, especially if Western MedTech companies are reluctant to innovate and transform their strategies and business models. China presents a challenging dilemma for Western companies: either they manufacture in China and support that nation’s endeavours to become a world class manufacturing platform or they progressively get squeezed out of markets. Whatever Western companies decide, we can be sure that their near to medium term futures will be shaped by maturing developed world markets, encumbered by short termism and aging infrastructures and a rising Chinese economic power with state-of-the-art infrastructures and significantly enhanced capacities and capabilities. But how long can China sustain its rise?
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Who should lead MedTech?

HealthPad
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Medical Technology
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4th Industrial Revolution
commentary
digital healthcare
medical device
medical technology
Medtech
  • The MedTech industry is undergoing an era of unprecedented change
  • Pressure on revenues and margins have forced leaders to cling tightly to business as usual
  • In the next decade business as usual will come with significant commercial risks
  • For commercial success future MedTech leaders will need to be different to past leaders
 
Who should lead MedTech?
 
Questions about who should lead medical device (MedTech) companies in the future and what strategies and business models they should pursue are critical. Over the next decade MedTech faces an era of unprecedented change, when it will be necessary to develop new strategies, new business models, new markets, new capabilities and new technologies, while keeping the legacy business running. Future MedTech leaders will be tasked with bridging the gap between traditional manufacturing and sophisticated, digitally driven services while managing unprecedented change and significant competition. For the past 20 years MedTech leaders have been drawn from a relatively narrow set of people with a relatively narrow set of skills. Although this has served the industry well, it might not be the most appropriate policy to ensure commercial success over the next decade.
 
In this Commentary

In this Commentary we: (i) describe the traditional MedTech market, indicate the structure parameters of the industry and note that there is a rapidly evolving parallel digital healthcare technology market: one that is growing more than twice as fast and soon will be comparable in size to the traditional manufacturing-based market, (ii) suggest that MedTech leaders tend to be men in their 50s with limited understanding of this parallel digital healthcare universe, which is positioned to play a significant role in  shaping MedTech companies of the future, (iii) suggest that because MedTech leaders have performed relatively well over the past two decades, they have tended to become prisoners of their own traditions and felt little or no need to evolve their strategies and business models, (iv) contend that MedTech leaders’ principal response to market changes to-date has been increased M&A activity, which has made companies bigger but not better, (v) suggest that the industry is undergoing a significant market shift from manufacturing to solutions and services driven by the 4th industrial revolution, which is characterized by a fusion of technologies, and (vi) conclude that future MedTech leaders will require a deep knowledge and understanding of the 4th industrial revolution if they are to successfully transform traditional strategies and business models in order to deliver superior healthcare solutions at lower prices.
 
MedTech market and the structure of the industry

MedTech is a conservative manufacturing industry, which produces and markets a diverse group of product offerings predominantly in a few developed wealthy markets. Over the next decade the MedTech market is expected to change significantly. For the past two decades the industry has fallen into three broad segments: (i) diagnostic products, which include imaging devices, with a global market of some US$100bn, (ii) medical aids including consumer durables, such as hearing aids and bandages with a worldwide market of about US$150bn, and (iii) surgical products that include equipment and instruments used in the operating room, which has a global market of some US$140bn.
 
A 2017 EvaluateMedTech report suggests the global MedTech market is projected to eclipse US$500bn in sales by 2021, over 33% of which is expected to be derived from the US. The worldwide market is projected to continue growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5%. Ranked by 2017 revenues, seven of the world’s largest MedTech companies are American and a significant proportion of the world’s MedTech companies trade on Nasdaq. This includes 13 large companies with a market cap in excess of US$10bn, some of which are divisions of even larger corporations such as Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices and Diagnostics, with estimated global sales of US$38bn for 2018; this equates to approximately 7.6% of the worldwide MedTech market. Medtronic, which is the world's largest stand-alone MedTech company, has a market cap of US$117bn and in 2017 recorded revenues of US$29.7bn; 26% of which was generated in the US. Nasdaq has about 24 mid-cap MedTech companies ranging in value from US$2bn to US$10bn. The majority of these are American and tend to be regionally based with relatively small markets outside the US, Europe and Japan. There are some 27 small-cap companies with market caps between US$300m and US$2bn, 46 micro-cap companies ranging from US$50m to US$300m and finally some 28 nano-cap MedTech companies with market caps less than US$50m.
 
In recent years, a digital healthcare technology industry, where medical devices meet innovative software, has grown substantially, but mostly in parallel to the traditional manufacturing-based MedTech industry. According to Transparency Market Research, in 2016 this industry, which is based on healthcare information systems and wearable devices, had annual sales of US$180bn, and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 13.4% between 2017 and 2025, reaching US$537bn in annual sales by the end of 2025.
 
MedTech executive leadership
 
There is a relative dearth of data specifically on MedTech leaders and the demographics of MedTech C-suites (senior executives which tend to start with the letter C). Notwithstanding, there are data on Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company leaders from regular surveys undertaken by executive search firms Korn Ferry, and Spencer Stuart. Some of the larger MedTech companies, such as Abbot Laboratories, Baxter International, Stryker and Boston Scientific, are listed in the Fortune 500 and S&P 500. If we assume a significant similarity between the demographics of Fortune 500, S&P 500 and MedTech company executives, then MedTech leaders will tend to be white males in their 50s, predominantly drawn from similar sector company C-suites and will have an average tenure of about eight years.
  
Middle-aged men
 
Over the past 20 years MedTech leaders have benefitted from the industry’s commercial success, albeit in recent years at a slower pace than before 2007. Most leaders are constrained by quarterly earnings targets, shareholder expectations, regulations and the high risk and cost associated with changing manufacturing systems. MedTech CEOs received their formative education before the widescale uptake of the Internet and email. Many had just started their careers in large corporations when giant technology companies such as Amazon (launched 1994) and Google (1998) in the US and their Chinese equivalents - Alibaba (1999) and Baidu (2000) - were start-ups, and the Chinese and Indian economies were still somewhat underdeveloped and inchoate. Consequently, most MedTech leaders were entering middle-age when US social media giants such as Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), WhatsApp (2009) and Instagram (2010) and their Chinese counterparts such as WeChat (2011), RenRen (2005), Weibo (2009) and Youku (2005), were just taking off.
 
This might partly explain why some MedTech leaders appear to be challenged by the rapidly evolving new digital technologies and the industry’s shift from manufacturing to solutions and services. Such is the pace of change, it will require a shift of mindset among incumbent MedTech leaders if they are to fully grasp this new and significant opportunity set.
 
Similarly, with emerging markets. Most CEOs have knowledge of the wealthy MedTech markets, in particular the US and Europe. Few, however, have in-depth knowledge or first-hand experience of the large and fast-growing emerging economies such as Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). The BRIC countries are at a similar stage of their economic development, and have a combined population of more than 3bn, which equates to about 40% of the global population. BRIC countries are differentiated from other promising emerging markets by their demographic and economic potential to rank among the world’s largest and most influential economies in the 21st century, and by having a reasonable chance of realizing this potential.
 
A future HealthPad Commentary will examine the opportunities for Western MedTech companies seeking or expanding their franchise in China and will suggest that they might not find it as easy as it would have been 5 years ago. Opportunities in China for global MedTech players are becoming tougher as the Chinese economy slows and restructures; Beijing’s healthcare reforms kick-in and local MedTech producers, buoyed by legislation, revenue growth and increased capacity, become commercially stronger, more technically sophisticated and take a bigger share of both the Chinese domestic and international emerging MedTech markets.
 
Underrepresentation of women
 
Not a single woman serves as CEO of a large MedTech company. Only 22% of their board members are women, which is about the same proportion as the Fortune 500 overall (20%), and about 22% of MedTech C-suites are women. In 2017, nearly 50% of the US labour force were women and 40% of these worked in management, professional and related occupations.  Although women are underrepresented in MedTech leadership positions they are key stakeholders in healthcare. About 35% of active US physicians are women. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, (AAMC), 46% of all physicians in training and almost 50% of all medical students in the US are women.  60% of pharmacists in America are women.

It should not be forgotten that women have played significant roles in medicine and healthcare. For example, Marie Curie, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, pioneered research on radioactivity. Curie made a significant contribution to the fight against cancer and is credited with having created mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field-hospitals during World War I. Sussman Yalow, was awarded the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1977 for the development of the radioimmunoassay technique, and Gertrude Elion won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988 for her work in helping to develop drugs to treat leukaemia and AIDS. More recently, Jennifer Doudna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, were credited with the discovery of the ground-breaking CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology, which effectively changes genes within organisms and is positioned to radically change healthcare and MedTech in the 21st century.

In addition to under-representation, which suggests that the pipeline of women candidates for top jobs in MedTech is weak, there is some evidence to suggest that the MedTech industry does not have a positive attitude towards women. Findings of a 2015 survey conducted by AvaMed, the industry’s principal trade association, suggest that women in the industry feel discriminated against. Some 42% of women respondents of the survey said they, “felt held back from senior leadership positions” and 37% felt “overtly discriminated against”. "The world cannot afford the loss of the talents of half its people if we are to solve the many problems which beset us,” said Yalow in her 1977 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
 
MedTech’s business model
 
Over the past two decades MedTech leaders have drawn comfort from the fact that the global MedTech market is highly centralized. The US, Western Europe and Japan, which represent only about 13% of the world’s population, account for more than 86% of the global MedTech market share (US: 42%, Europe: 33%, Japan: 11%). Conversely, the BRIC countries, which represent about 40% of the world’s population, currently only account for about 5% of the global MedTech market. This has enabled MedTech leaders to market their product offerings to healthcare providers principally in a few wealthy developed regions of the world via well-compensated sales representatives with deep product knowledge and expertise. The industry’s predominant business model has been to raise prices on existing products and market new offerings at higher prices than the products they are meant to replace. This worked very well before 2007 during a period of sustained global economic growth, predominantly fees-for-service healthcare systems and relatively benign reimbursement policies; all of which contributed to high margins and significant sales growth.
 
Market changes not perceived as acute enough to trigger transformation
 
Since the 2008 recession the MedTech market has changed. The global economy has weakened, debt (sovereign, corporate and personal) has escalated, populations have continued to grow, and the prevalence of chronic lifetime diseases and multi-morbidities have increased. Over that period, healthcare systems have become fiscally squeezed, costs have become pivotal and impacted all stakeholders. This has led to: (i) a shift in healthcare systems from fees-for-service to fees-for-value (ii) increased consolidation, convergence, and connectivity of stakeholders and a consequent change in purchasing decisions from individual (fragmented) hospitals and clinicians to centralized procurement bodies, which can leverage economies of scale and negotiate for larger purchases at volume discounts, (iii) the decline of MedTech R&D productivity, and (iv) increased competition from new market entrants, often from different industries. MedTech’s gross margins have been squeezed and annual growth rates have slowed to a CAGR of between 4 and 5%. Notwithstanding, MedTech leaders, buoyed by continued but slower revenue growth, and doubtless comforted by a prolonged surge in US equity markets, have not perceived these market changes as being with sufficient acuity to transform their strategies or business models.  Their principal response has been to increase M&A. 
 
M&A main strategic response to market changes
 
Over the past decade M&A has provided MedTech leaders with a means to: (i) increase scale and leverage, (ii) drive stronger financial performance, (iii) obtain a broader portfolio of product offerings, (iv) enhance therapeutic solutions and (v) increase international expansion; without changing their companies’ fundamental manufacturing structures and strategies. According to a January 2018 McKinsey report, between 2011 and 2016, 60% of the growth of the 30 largest MedTech companies was due to M&A. The report also suggests that between 2006 and 2016, only 20% of 54 pure-play publicly traded MedTech companies, “mostly relied on organic growth”.  M&A activity has resulted in bigger MedTech companies but not necessarily better ones. This is because M&A and collaborative relationships have not encouraged healthcare providers to change their strategies and business models and develop powerful data-sharing networks, which help drive integration across the continuum of healthcare.
 
Need for portfolio transformation
 
Encouragingly, the 2018 McKinsey report also suggests that some MedTech companies are beginning to use M&A to acquire “non-traditional” assets, such as software and service companies, to assist them in transforming their portfolios. Notwithstanding, portfolio change in a rapidly evolving and increasingly competitive healthcare ecosystem requires a sound strategic understanding of the potential role that the 4th industrial revolution can provide for MedTech. Given our discussion so far, it seems reasonable to assume that many current MedTech leaders and C-suite executives might not have fully grasped the commercial implications of this revolution for their industry. Portfolio change in the MedTech industry is arguably more likely to be led by executives from, or with an intimate knowledge of, adjacent, service-based companies; those who have successfully employed sophisticated digital technologies and big data strategies to transform their business models and who are now looking to do something similar in MedTech and healthcare markets.
 
The relative slowness of the MedTech industry to transform its strategies and business models is perceived as an opportunity by giant technology corporations. They sense the disruptive potential, just as they do in financial markets due to Wall Street’s inertia to digital change.  For example, in early 2018, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Uber announced their intentions to enter and disrupt the healthcare market by leveraging digital technologies to provide quality healthcare solutions and services at lower costs.
 
Rather than marketing products, MedTech companies are now increasingly being tasked with marketing solutions that can deliver better care at lower prices. The 4th Industrial Revolution is a primary enabler for achieving this. However, given the demographics and the conservatism of the MedTech industry, it seems reasonable to suggest that companies in the sector, which do not adapt, run the risk of becoming simple commodity producers stuck in the middle of a new and rapidly evolving value chain.
 
The 4th Industrial Revolution

The 1st industrial revolution used water and steam to mechanize production, the 2nd used electric energy to create mass production, the 3rd used electronics and information technology to automate production. The 4th industrial revolution, also known as ‘industry 4.0’, is characterized by a fusion of technologies, which is blurring the boundaries between medical devices, drugs, software and patient data and redefining relationships between the physical, biological and digital worlds. These exogenous shifts are likely to demand different strategies, different business models and different leaders for the MedTech industry.
 
Industry 4.0 provides MedTech with an opportunity for portfolio transformation by developing sophisticated data and digitization strategies to enhance company operational and financial performance. Industry 4.0 is driven by greater connectivity via the Internet and computing devices embedded in physical objects and advanced digital technologies, which enable them to send and receive data to help integrate producers, suppliers, business partners and customers; at the same time providing opportunities for MedTech companies to become smarter, more efficient and fully-networked organizations.
 
Key for superior shareholder returns
 
To date, MedTech leaders have been relatively slow to integrate new and evolving digital technologies into their core business operations, although there are encouraging signs that some companies are beginning to do so. Findings of a 2017 report by the Boston Consulting Group, (BCG) suggest MedTech companies are, “masking unsustainably high costs and underdeveloped commercial skills” and relying, “on an outdated commercial model”.  The BCG findings are based on a survey of some 6,000 MedTech employees in commercial functions, more than 100 interviews with MedTech leaders and benchmarking financial and organizational data across 100 MedTech businesses (including nine of the 10 largest companies) worldwide. According to BCG, although the industry overall has made little progress to change its business model and upgrade its skill levels, the companies, which have done so, are winning in the market and generating superior shareholder returns.

MedTech leaders should not mistakenly think that because their companies hold plenty of enterprise data they are implementing industry 4.0 strategies. Often, enterprise data do not provide any competitive advantage whatsoever but are simply a legacy cost of doing business. New sources of data, and the ability to use data’s power, are essential to enhance a company’s competitive advantage. A next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, launched by SAP in 2017, is already being used by service companies to provide them with a digital core, which helps to create real-time matrixed data produced by social media, third party information, genetics, the Internet of Things, points of sale, etc.
 
Shift from selling products to selling solutions

To remain competitive in the next decade MedTech leaders will need to employ artificial intelligence (Al), augmented reality, robotics, advanced sensors, the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, nanotechnology, 3D printing, petabytes of data, enhanced processing power and storage capacity to help them transform their strategies and business models and enable their companies to evolve from being product-centric to customer-centric, with an emphasis on digitization and the capture and communication of data. Industry 4.0 and the convergence of the physical, biological and digital worlds will fundamentally change MedTech strategies and business models, as decision-making powers continue to shift from manufacturers to other healthcare stakeholders. Critical to this transformation will be those MedTech leaders who are well positioned to ensure that companies remain competitive in their core markets while establishing new markets underpinned by 4.0 technologies.
 
"Out-of-touch leaders" the main cause of company failure

A book published in 2016 entitled Lead and Disrupt suggests that company transformations fail because of out-of-touch leaders rather than competition. According to Michael Tushman, co-author of Lead and Disrupt, “The things that help organizations execute their current strategy - the cultures they build, the structures they forge, the processes that work so well to get today’s strategy executed - actually collude to hold the organization hostage to that soon-to-be-obsolete strategy. The more firms engage in getting today’s work done, it actually reduces the probability of making shifts in innovation and strategy. That is what is so strikingly paradoxical to leaders: The very recipes that work so well for today often get in the way of the future. It’s a challenge to incrementally improve what you’re doing as you’re trying to complement it with something different. The dual strategies are inconsistent.”
 
Takeaways

Over the past two decades MedTech companies have helped to shape healthcare systems in wealthy advanced industrial societies and have been rewarded with commercial success. But just as the fund investment axiom tells us, past performance is no guarantee of future success.

Crucial to the future success of MedTech companies will be their leaders. We have suggested that employing recruiting criteria, which have worked in the past might not guarantee future success. The next 10 years will be an era of unprecedented technological change for MedTech companies when the boundaries between medical devices, drugs, software and patient data become blurred.

Business as usual, which has served the industry well in the past, is unlikely to bring continued commercial success in this new healthcare ecosystem. In recent years, investment in digital healthcare has soared and the momentum towards a digital future has gathered pace. Future successful MedTech leaders will be those who combine a deep understanding of the 4th industrial revolution to leverage sophisticated digital technologies and data to assist them in creating and delivering enhanced healthcare solutions at lower costs, with an ability to keep the legacy manufacturing business running.  

MedTech companies face a stark choice: either appoint leaders similar to those of the past and become challenged or appoint leaders able to integrate new and evolving technologies into the core of the business to create and market cost effective quality healthcare solutions and remain profitable. MedTech leaders might consider adopting the motto: tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.
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