The Challenge of the Chinese Medical Device Market

Hi, All

A report from a book "The Challenge of the Chinese Medical Device Market" for your reference.

China, in terms of both its healthcare system and medical market, is a nation of contradiction. As the world's most populous country, and one in possession of the fastest growing major economy in the world, the nation offers a vast array of opportunities for overseas investors, complemented by a massive potential workforce and consumer base. The government has promised large-scale investment in order to improve healthcare.

However, several factors inherent in the nation's make up undermine many of these opportunities.

China may be the 8th largest medical market in the world but that position belies the fact per capita spending on medical devices and equipment is just US$2. Increasingly China is becoming a "two track" country. While there are some very high quality hospitals and clinics in the big cities, in rural areas facilities are badly-equipped and trained staff are lacking.

But that's just part of the story. The role of traditional Chinese medicine in limiting the growth of western medicine, the revised regulatory requirements for devices, the issue of how to fund rural health services, the emerging domestic manufacturing sector and a growing AIDS problem, are all now part of the mix.

POPULATION China is a large and fast growing market, but it is far from being a rich one. Of the population of 1.28 billion, around 870 million live in poor rural areas with little healthcare infrastructure, and have no money to pay for treatments in expensive county level hospitals. The vast majority of the Chinese population, therefore, has severely limited access to healthcare, especially that provided by expensive imported drugs. The government has plans to recreate some form of the defunct rural health insurance scheme, but it is difficult to see how this will generate the cash to provide anything other than the most basic level of care.

MEDICAL DEVICE MARKET ENVIRONMENT The medical device market is concentrated in the larger cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Tianjin. It is here that rapid economic growth has taken place during the last two decades, and where people have higher incomes capable of supporting greater expenditure on healthcare. Not surprisingly, the majority of China's advanced facilities and highly trained medical staff are to be found in the urban areas of the eastern part of the country. The medical market is further fragmented. Local city governments have a great degree of autonomy, and the richer cities are, in many spheres of life, self-ruling. This leads to differences in regulatory policies and attitudes; methods of operating in one city or province have no guarantee of success in another. The language issue must also be taken into account. There are many dialects of Mandarin Chinese, the official language, which can be incomprehensible Cantonese speakers, for example.

DOMESTIC PRODUCTION China has a large domestic production sector, split between locally owned manufacturing and joint venture projects with overseas companies. There are around 2,900 medical device manufacturers in China, most of which are state owned, medium to small companies, with less than 400 employees. Locally owned manufacturing is usually of basic medical supplies such as bandages, furniture, patient aids and medical/surgical instruments. While production quality will not usually be on a par with that of imported products, Chinese goods are cheap and will normally be preferred by State purchasers, who are keen to reduce costs and promote local industries.

MEDICAL DEVICE REGISTRATION China 's State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) issued new regulations in 2004 for the registration of medical devices, simplifying the application and dossier review process. Additionally, the Medical Device Clinical Trial Regulation, effective in April 2004, called for more detailed requirements for clinical protocol, clinical hospitals and clinical reports in China. In March 2005, the SFDA announced new changes to its medical device registration requirements. Under the new requirements, a total of 12 documents must be submitted to the SFDA in both Chinese and English. Owing to the large influx of overseas companies wishing to register healthcare products in China, the SFDA has taken steps to address the previously awkward medical device regulatory environment

Julia Ho

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Reply to
Lucky Girlâ„¢
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Is it that not everyone understands Standard Mandarin then? If I have a product that requires Chinese language then which one should I use? Also what scipt of writing is used? I heard that the Cantonese can understand Mandarin writing but not necessarily the language - is that right?

It's an interesting article but it is not clear whether it is talking about technical medical equipment which is relevant to this group or drugs and clinical products which is probably not.

I thought you wanted to get into automotive markets anyway?

Reply to
Tom Lucas

From what I've heard (we once designed chinese menu's on a piece of industrial equipment), all chinese (that can read) understand the written language. The problem is that the spoken dialects are so different that people from different areas cannot understand each others speech.

--
Stef    (remove caps, dashes and .invalid from e-mail address to reply by mail)
Reply to
Stef

You'd have thought that communism would have brought that into line - just goes to show the limits of its influence I suppose. Mind you, I've experienced this before - I went to Liverpool once and, while they claim to speak English, it is encoded as a high pitched whine interspersed with white noise not dissimilar to a fax machine ;-)

Reply to
Tom Lucas

In an abstract sense, there's really only one set of written characters, however they come in two forms-- simplified and traditional. The simplified characters were developed from the traditional in China after 1949 in an effort to promote literacy. The traditional hanzi have stayed pretty much the same for ages (ancient carvings are not much different from modern writing). Some of the changes to simplify characters follow a formula that makes interpreting them easy for someone used to traditional characters (such as substituting a simplified radical for a traditional radical in a set of characters), others bear little resemblance to the originals.

Simplified characters are used on the mainland and in Singapore (1.3bn people or so), and traditional in HK, Macao, and Taiwan (maybe 30m people). Increasingly, the simplified characters are making inroads in the latter regions. There are a few regional idioms too, but that's a minor detail. So if you are preparing written documents, you can choose depending on the target market (or do both).

For example, at

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you see the foreign language selections at the top right of the page: Simplified Chinese (.cn website), Traditional Chinese (.tw website), Korean, and Japanese respectively (from left to right).

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

I think simplified must be the way to go for any new human interfaces if only to cut down the number of characters to store. In fact, my emWin's font converter has a rather natty feature of only converting the characters actually being used in the system which dramatically cuts down on thespace required.

Reply to
Tom Lucas

Simplified characters can be simpler to write (fewer strokes each on average*), but there are still the same number of total characters. IMHO, it's a bit more important that the end user can actually read them...

  • so maybe the font would be a bit more compact if it's in vector format, or maybe a somewhat smaller bitmap would still be readable even for the monster hanzi with 20+ strokes (the most complex one in existence reportedly has 64 strokes).

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Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

"Tom Lucas" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@despina.uk.clara.net...

Heh. The father of a friend of mine was from Glasgow. Whenever I visited, he'd clap me on the back, tell me a funny story, and laugh heartily. At least I assume they were funny stories - I never did have a clue what he was on about.

Similarly, when I worked in Chicago, I got on fine with the janitor - via an interpreter. I'm a Brit from the South Coast (i.e. proper English ;)), and he was from Mississip'. I'd tell him a funny story, we'd both laugh, and then he'd turn to a colleague and ask "Wut'd he say?".

Liverpudlian is comparatively comprehensible ;).

Steve

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Reply to
Steve at fivetrees

At uni I shared a house with four Germans, a Welshman, an Englishman, 2 Spaniards and a French Girl. Rab C Nesbitt came on the TV and I could understand it fine but no-one else seemed to have a clue, other than the Germans who bizarrely never missed a word.

I grew up on the Shetland Islands surrounded by drunk Glaswegians, Geordies and Shetlanders so I'm quite versatile at understanding British regional accents but I start to waver when foreigners have very thick accents. There is a guy here on the shop floor who has a very strong Bengali accent who wonders why I tend to just stand smiling weakly at him when he talks. He's also the first chap I've ever met who has to shave his earlobes which is just fantastic - I wish I could talk to him about it :-)

It's imperative to understand them - they might be plotting to pinch your trainers ;-)

Reply to
Tom Lucas

What do you want to know - at the risk of revealing a deep personal secret, I am also in the same boat. I would guess it's from Mongol ancestry which also gives me the folded upper eyelid :)

Reply to
larwe

Cool, gross. I've started to sprout ear hair from inside but have never seen hairy lobes before, although I must admit I haven't been looking that hard. I'll bet yours is just a smattering rather than the full carpet this chap is afflicted with but if not, then you have my combined sympathy and admiration :-)

He doesn't look particularly Mongolian but you never know what his past might reveal... Of course, presuming that nature knows what it is doing, one struggles to find an evolutionary reason for a hairy earlobe. Actually one struggles for nose hair too seeing as I've survived for 26 years without but now it has suddenly been deemed necessary.

Reply to
Tom Lucas

No problem there. If my trainers were pinched, they'd just reach out and slap the offenders.

-- Darin Johnson

Reply to
Darin Johnson

  • Hairy-Eared Engineer - definition:
1) An engineer who's old enough to have hair growing out of undesirable places. 2) Who's been practicing engineering so long that he or she has already made all possible mistakes at least once. 3) A desirable person to have on a project to ensure the mission succeeds. 4) Quote: "Every project needs at least one hairy-eared engineer" Marvin B. Davis -1980. (Marvin was one then and 25 years later, my barber can attest that I've finally made the grade).

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Now, is there some place that will laser-zap that coarse stuff permanently? ;-)

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

I think he means "steal your sneakers", but you do paint an interesting picture.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Could also be "feel your knickers". I suspect that would get a slap too....

Reply to
Jim Stewart

Goodness, some people have a rather enthusiastic view of slide rules. I myself have one and, at the age of 27 (next Thursday), I think I must be the youngest person in the universe to have one! I have no idea how to use it though, I haven't even worked out how to turn it on.

Hair from inside the ears is not uncommon in the more senior of engineers but I hadn't encountered it on the lobes before - outside the ear. Surely this comes under the remit of "Hairy-eared engineer" but may be a more specialist case?

Reply to
Tom Lucas

Quite easy. Grasp the center slide. Move it to the right for "on", left for "off". If it goes off in the middle of a calculation, you have to start over. [Reverse the directions if it was made in a former communist-oriented country.]

Reply to
Everett M. Greene

I think my battery went flat

Reply to
Tom Lucas

The battery is self-charging. All you have to do to reactivate it is to operate the sliderule for awhile and it'll be good to go for quite some time.

Reply to
Everett M. Greene

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