Singapore billionaire grows Shenzhen Mindray by US$3.8 billion a month and pledges more as ‘golden decade’ beckons

Mindray’s market value has grown by US$3.8 billion a month in the past 12 months amid demand for its ventilators

Billionaire founder sees golden decade ahead in China’s health care industry, eyes targets overseas for their advanced technologies

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A statue of a bull is displayed outside the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Photo: Reuters

Published: 7:30am, 7 Jun 2021Updated: 9:09pm, 7 Jun 2021

In less than three years since its home debut, Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics has handed stock investors greater returns than all the largest companies traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges bar two.

The stock’s 992 per cent total return from mid-October 2018, in US dollar terms, easily surpassed the CSI 300 Index by more than 10 times, based on data through June 4. Only a dozen companies with at least US$20 billion of market capitalisation, such as Tesla and Singapore-based Sea Ltd, have performed better on the global stage over the period.

As China’s health care industry enters its “golden decade”, its 70-year-old billionaire founder Li Xiting has pledged to deliver more to expand its global footprint. Research spending and overseas mergers and acquisitions will be its twin planks to take on the world’s biggest players in the health care industry.

“Medical equipment needs replacement and upgrading, so the demand is not a problem [even after the pandemic] because many new hospitals are being built globally and many others are expanding their sizes,” founder and chairman Li Xiting said in an interview with the Post . “A double-digit growth in sales and profits can be sustained at least over the next three years.”

‘The whole health care industry in China will enter a golden age in the next 10 years,’ Li Xiting says. Photo: Twitter

That would be sweet news for money managers at JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock and others at onshore fund houses, who rode the stock’s more than doubling in capitalisation to US$92 billion from the depth of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. In the past 12 months alone, the stock generated US$3.8 billion of wealth per month for shareholders.