00:00Now, China's biopharma industry is booming.
00:03Homegrown firms that make drugs from biological sources are now eyeing the global market.
00:08According to consultancy firm McKinsey, it's down to steady capital, robust supply chains,
00:15supportive policies, and huge numbers of highly trained scientists.
00:20Back in 2018, the United States dominated the biotech sector, listing 62 companies on the stock exchange.
00:28In Europe, there were 16. In China, just four.
00:32Fast forward to September 2025, it's a very different picture.
00:36The number of US IPOs has shrunk to 36. Europe's new listings are down to four.
00:42But China's, look at this, have grown to 36, neck and neck, with the United States.
00:48China is also becoming the place for clinical trials.
00:52It enrolls patients twice as fast as the global average, and roughly 50% cheaper than in the US and Europe.
01:00Now, Jin Wang is a senior partner at McKinsey and leads its life sciences division in greater China.
01:05I think in 2025, we are seeing an increasingly clear two-part story of China innovation.
01:16One is China as a market, China for China.
01:20The other one is China as a source of innovation, China for global.
01:25There are always going to be uncertainties, right?
01:28Again, even for one single drug, it's meant to be high investment, high risk.
01:34That's the nature of the industry.
01:36So for the entire industry, there could be different uncertainties and scenarios as well.
01:40But again, just given how strong and healthy that ecosystem has become over the past 10 years,
01:48I think there's a lot of conviction in the industry that this momentum will continue.
01:52Let's talk about what this means for patients, because cancer is a central focus for the Chinese firms.
02:01Weight loss drugs, they're also a hot target.
02:04Are there any other specific areas of research where China is possibly creating more competition
02:11for more treatments that are ultimately going to mean smaller prices?
02:16Absolutely, the innovation is so important for the patients, right?
02:24For Chinese patients, but ideally for the patients around the world.
02:28Cancer is a very good example, because cancer is just such a significant and growing disease burden everywhere.
02:34So again, if you think about China's innovation pipeline assets today,
02:42about 50% of these 2,000 China-based innovative pipeline assets is focused on treating cancers.
02:51That is how important it is.
02:53And if you think about the gap in today's cancer patients' treatment,
02:57China's new five-year survival rates is, for many kinds of types, is still below the level in the U.S.
03:04So there's so much hope and promise that can be coming from this increasing pipeline research innovation developed in China.
03:14And what about investors?
03:16I'm thinking about profits here, because most Western giants took about a century to get to this kind of scale.
03:23Can China close that gap and capture market share?
03:30From investment standpoints, again, this comes back to this notion of ecosystem, right?
03:37This has to make sense from the economic standpoints.
03:42When we have increasingly strong ecosystem, all these inputs will translate into this innovation output, right?
03:50All these medicines that are being developed, they'll be launched,
03:52they'll be accessible to patients, and then hopefully when those assets are being used by patients,
04:00it will also generate a reasonable return for the biotech company, for the biopharma company,
04:07but also for the investors who are behind those companies, right, along this journey.
04:11So when those companies are capturing reasonable economic return, this will make the entire ecosystem even stronger, even healthier.
04:21So this is going to be a very positive self-reinforcing mechanism going forward.
04:26If Chinese biopharma is moving beyond in China for China, what does it mean for the rest of the world?
04:34It means more hope for patients, right, globally.
04:41And it will create more competition, but competition has been the basis for this industry over the past centuries, right, as you'll say.
04:48So this is going to be healthy competition, but leading to more benefits of patients.
04:53So this is going to be healthy competition.
