China’s pharmaceutical industry, whose revenue is projected to rise by 50 per cent between 2024 and 2030, has emerged as a new growth engine for the national economy as leading players ramp up investment in research and production.
The country’s drug and medical device businesses were forecast to top US$2.1 trillion in revenue by 2030 and US$3.2 trillion annually by 2050, according to estimates by UBS. In 2024, the sector generated about US$1.4 trillion in sales.
“An ageing population offers the biggest boost to pharmaceutical firms,” said Chen Chen, head of China healthcare research at UBS. “China’s per-capita spending on medical care has also been rising constantly.”
Innovative drugs – novel medicines targeting unmet medical needs, including new chemical entities and advanced biologics – were expected to outpace other segments with an annualised growth of 20 per cent between 2026 and 2030, before slowing to 8.8 per cent from 2030 to 2040, she added.
Innovative efforts by biotech firms have also bolstered Beijing’s ambitions of building China into a technology powerhouse with a grasp of core technologies amid an uncertain geopolitical outlook.
“With several products approved for launch in Europe and the US, our overseas business has sustained high growth, and the ability to engineer a comprehensive go-global drive has been fully displayed,” said Zhu Jun, CEO of Shanghai Henlius Biotech.
“Banking on an integrated system that streamlines our management in research and development, drug registration and manufacturing, as well as an increasingly mature global clinical and commercialisation network, we have the capability to continuously sell innovative drugs around the globe.”
Henlius, a Fosun Pharmaceutical spin-off founded in 2010, supplied 10 drugs to 60 markets worldwide, benefiting 95 million patients, Zhu said. The company aimed to double its product portfolio to more than 20 by 2030.
“Companies like Henlius provided a vivid snapshot of the growth path by Chinese biotech firms,” said Meng Tianying, a senior executive at Shanghai-based consultancy Domo Medical. “They started from biosimilars and had developed themselves into an innovative internationalised drug player.”
Biosimilars are officially approved versions of original products and can be manufactured when the original product’s patent expires.
Henlius covered areas such as oncology and autoimmune diseases and was investing heavily in antibody-drug conjugates, multispecific antibodies and trichloroethylene drugs to reinforce its international expansion, Zhu said.
In the first half of 2025, Hong Kong-listed Henlius reported a net profit of 390 million yuan (US$56 million), nearly unchanged from a year earlier. Revenue rose 2.7 per cent to 2.8 billion yuan.
Chinese drug makers’ licensing deals hit an all-time high in 2025, spurred by dozens of multibillion-dollar agreements between Hong Kong and mainland China-listed firms and global pharmaceutical giants.
A total of 157 out-licensing deals worth US$135.7 billion were signed, compared with 94 transactions worth US$51.9 billion in 2024, according to data from the National Medical Products Administration, China’s drugs regulator.
Out-licensing agreements typically involve a company granting another firm the exclusive rights to further develop, manufacture and commercialise a drug once it has entered human clinical trials, in return for upfront payments, milestone fees and royalties on future sales.
In December, Innovent Biologics, based in China’s eastern Jiangsu province, became the only new constituent of the Hang Seng Index, the leading benchmark of the Hong Kong stock exchange, one month after signing a US$11.4 billion out-licensing deal with Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceuticals to co-develop and commercialise three investigational cancer medicines.
In January, GeneQuantum, based in Suzhou, in central Anhui province, signed a US$13 billion contract with US-based Biohaven Pharmaceutical and South Korea’s AimedBio in an outsourcing deal involving antibody drug conjugates – cancer medicines that use an antibody to deliver the drug to tumour cells.
In May, 3SBio, based in Shanyang, in northeast Liaoning province, signed a US$6 billion licensing agreement with US multinational Pfizer for its SSGJ-707 cancer drug. It was followed by a US$12.5 billion pact under which Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, China’s largest drug company by market capitalisation, and the UK’s GlaxoSmithKline would co-develop a drug called HRS-9821 to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
“What we observed was that China’s innovative drugs were not only growing in numbers, but their depth of innovation and quality had improved over the past years,” said Wang Jin, a senior partner at McKinsey. “China also published multiple policies to support innovation across the supply chain, which largely encouraged entrepreneurship in the pharmaceutical industry.” -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
