Foreign pharmaceutical firms need to cooperate with locals to crack China market: 3SBio boss

Foreign biopharmaceutical companies will have to cooperate with local companies if they enter the mainland market, says the chairman of the Hong Kong-listed 3SBio.

Dr Lou Jing, the boss of the mainland’s leading drug producer, said he was confident of winning over foreign competitors in the domestic market, adding that “if they choose not to cooperate with local companies, they won’t have a chance”.

His company, based in Shenyang, has the second-highest revenue of mainland biopharmaceutical producers, according to the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.

One of its signature products – recombinant human thrombopoietin (rhTPO) Tpiao – has no rival in China, and another – recombinant human erythropoietin (EPO) Epiao – has captured half the domestic market share.

In June the company listed in Hong Kong by raising US$710 million, two years after it retreated from the Nasdaq.

The manufacturer was established in 1993 by Lou Jing’s father Lou Dan, a biotechnology specialist who had been working in a military medical research institute for three decades.

The junior Lou, now 52, joined the company in the late 1990s after receiving his PhD degree in cytobiology from New York’s Fordham University and finishing his post-doctoral study at the National Institutes of Health. The enterprise’s baton was handed to him from his father several years later.