
How competitive is China's pharmaceutical market compared with other global industry leaders? Explore our insights to see how China is grappling with challenges like experience gap in product development to drive innovation in a highly competitive field.
One question and commentary and even some challenges that we get, whether it's from Chinese companies, from international companies, or from investors, is how competitive the China landscape can be. Whether that's PD L1 PD-one or GLP-one or any of the targets that's currently being commercialized or developed or even in preclinical. If you look in the databases, you will see a very long list of the Chinese companies and institutions trying to develop that. So that level of intensity in terms of competition is good in that, right, we know that there's always failures in pharmaceutical development. So the more you start with, the more you're likely to have. But that also means that at the end, it is a very competitive field and perhaps then commercially it makes it, more difficult, for you to get good pricing, good market share, and having the proper return on investment.
Well, as an innovator, China is relatively new in the world scene. As new companies, new innovators, perhaps they don't have nearly as much experience as international companies in terms of deciding on what is the right product to take forward. Our experience shows that the multinational pharmaceutical companies, as well as experienced smaller companies, are much more rigorous in terms of their product development committee decisions. Not only do they look at clinical unmet needs, their ability to develop, they also look at the competitive intensity as well as timing and future commercial considerations as they consider moving assets forward.
Sometimes products are dropped, not necessarily because it doesn't work, but it is because the return on investment or the cost of development is not going to provide sufficient return and the valuable funding the company can have may be better placed in a different asset. Well, our experience is that the Chinese bio pharmas, because they're newer, less experienced, and perhaps have fewer assets, and their investors and board are also less experienced, they may not have the ability to judge or generally different set of considerations. Patient unmet needs are certainly there. Whether they have the ability to develop the asset is certainly there.
But perhaps they have not yet looked at the considerations around competitive intensity, likely pricing, and the future commercial potential. Because as a start up biotech, if a product moves to next phase, that enhances the company valuation, even though the asset might be very competitive. We have seen demonstrations of that from a survey LUK did with one hundred multinational and Chinese pharma executives around the decisions they make as they consider moving products into a continued development and commercialization.
And most of the decision choke points are very similar and the two big differences are around the thinking around competition and the market. And hence, you will find the very competitive landscape here in China. So our wish and our work in some cases with Chinese companies is to help them understand more of these decision making, as well as these evaluation and portfolio prioritization, so that they could not only evolve in innovation scale, but become more commercially viable companies by making better decisions, understanding how decisions could be made, and considering the future impact not only in China as well as worldwide for the potential of their products as part of their corporate strategy.