In the blink of the eye, the year 2009 is about to enter its fourth quarter. As consumer electronics, computer and other traditional IT products are making the final dash to come out of the heavy market blow struck by the 2008 economic crisis, medical electronics, especially portable medical electronics continues to make big strides forward based on its good growth in 2008.
Based on the performance of the medical electronics market in 2009H1, CCID Consulting predicts that China’s portable medical electronics market will grow over 30 percent in 2009 -- better than the early forecast of a 28.7 percent growth rate.
Fig. 1 Size of and Forecast for China’s Portable Medical Electronics Market, 2006-2011
Source: CCID Consulting, September 2009Compared with other electronic products, portable medical electronic products have a rather special demand. With social and economic development, people are more aware of their health. Their health demands and ability to pay for healthcare products and services are also rising. The economic situation can hardly affect people’s demand for medical services. This has led to a steady expansion of the market of portable medical electronic products, especially home-use portable medical electronic products.
As the government becomes the dominant purchaser of hospital-use portable medical electronic products, the market has also seen new breakthroughs in its growth, thanks to the continuous efforts to step up livelihood and social security system building in China. All those factors allowed China’s portable medical electronics market to achieve fast growth in 2008 despite the economic crisis.
Portable medical electronics market grows faster than expected, and rural market has become a hotspot
In 2009, the government has introduced a series of incentive measures, and market demand is further released. All these have promoted further prosperity of the portable medical electronics market. In early April 2009, the government released its new healthcare reform plan. According to the plan, the central treasury will allocate 850 billion Yuan of new funds into the healthcare field in the next three years.
In addition, the new healthcare reform policy has stressed the need to speed up the implementation of rural healthcare service system building and development plans, to actively push forward rural healthcare infrastructure and capacity building, and to greatly improve rural healthcare conditions and quality as well as community healthcare, service-based, new urban healthcare service systems.
To match this, the central government will support the construction of some 2,000 county hospitals, 5,000 clinical centers and 2,400 community healthcare service centers. Driven by the above policies, China’s portable medical electronics market achieved fast growth in 2009H1. Meanwhile, some new market characteristics also emerged.
Under the guiding principle of strengthening basic medical system building in rural regions, the demand for medical electronic equipment there is urgent, and the market there is huge. This made rural regions one of the most active segments in China’s portable medical electronics field in 2009H1.
All local governments made large-scale procurement of portable medical electronic products which can both meet the basic diagnostic needs and are relatively cheap. These especially included multi-parameter monitors, portable B ultrasonic and ECGs.
The hospital-use portable medical electronics product market grew fast. Driven by this, the domestic demand for portable medical electronics expanded rapidly. In 2009H1, the domestic demand grew notably faster than exports. This forms a stark contrast to the fact that over 80 percent of China’s portable medical electronic products were supplied for exports in the past.
In addition, what is worth noting is that government procurement is very sensitive to product price. In this round of market growth, domestic medical electronics vendors with notable advantages in terms of product price/performance ratio will get more market share and further establish their market position.
On the whole, China’s portable medical electronics market has been in a period of fast growth in the past few years. However, compared with Europe and the United States, portable medical electronics has a low penetration rate in Tier-2 and -3 cities and rural regions in China. This also shows that the portable medical electronics market in China is still in a starting stage.
With the full release of the potential demand in rural regions, China’s portable electronics market will remain at a high growth level, with very bright prospects. In addition to growing market demand, continuous innovations in portable medical electronics product technologies will greatly promote the development of the market in China. These innovations include the gradual maturing of portable full-body color ultrasonic technology and the integration and increase of monitoring parameters into multi-parameter monitors.
Market growth speeds up industry development, and heats up investment in the portable medical electronics field
Corresponding to the good growth momentum of China’s portable medical electronics market, China’s portable medical electronics industry has also rapidly expanded in size in recent years, thanks to the continuously accelerating increase of market demand, the appeal of high product profits and clearer industry development policies.
In 2008, production value in the industry topped 80 billion Yuan, up 24 percent year-on-year. The number of portable medical electronics manufacturers is also on continuous expansion. In 2009H1, many portable medical electronics enterprises started a new round of production capacity expansion and new product line R&D in an attempt to further meet the growing and changing product demand.
Meanwhile, after withstanding the test of the financial crisis and witnessing good growth momentum in the market and industry, the portable medical electronics field has also seen a warm-up of capital activities. With the opening of the Growth Enterprise Market in 2009H1, a large number of portable medical electronics enterprises spearheaded by Shenzhen Biocare and Edan Instruments have started to explore the road toward listing.
Traditional IT enterprises such as IBM, ZTE and Huawei have also begun to enter the medical electronic equipment field by making active inputs into relevant software and hardware R&D and forging wide cooperation with medical electronics enterprises.
Haier, a leading home appliance maker in China, recently made a high-profile announcement that it may enter the medical electronics field. Good market and industry growth is now attracting capital flow into the field. Active capital operations may in turn further promote the growth of China’s portable medical electronics market and industry.
Note: Classification of Portable Medical Electronic Products
Source: CCID Consulting
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