Thermo Fisher confident in gaining share of blossoming Korean market
CEO Marc Casper said the firm had “delivered another great quarter, with excellent earnings growth on solid top-line results,” and during a conference call last week chose to highlight a recent investment in South Korea as a specific example of demand for biopharma services capabilities.
“South Korea is a key location for clinical trials research because of strong government support, its modern infrastructure and an easily accessible patient population,” he told investors (transcript here).
“During the quarter, we opened a new state-of-the-art facility in Seoul to provide local and global companies with a comprehensive clinical trial support.”
According to Korea’s Biomedicine Industry Association (KoBIA), the country – through investments in stem cells and biosimilars - is positioning itself to be a global biopharma powerhouse.
This is supported by the recently produced Food & Drug Statistical Yearbook published by Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety which tallied the number of biopharma manufacturers in Korea in 2015 at 51, compared with 16 a decade earlier.
“Korea's GDP is growing in line with many developed countries,” said Casper, adding Thermo Fisher is set to gain market share due to: “the size of our sales force, our full suite of products and services and the way we effectively bring it all together to help our customers drive innovation and productivity.
“We have outstanding customer relationships across Korea and are well positioned to continue to gain share.”
Bioprocessing rivals GE Healthcare and Germany’s Merck have both recently upped their local capabilities to support the burgeoning industry.
For the three months ending September 30, Thermo Fisher reported sales across its Life Sciences Solutions Segment of $1.2bn, a 14% increase on the same period 2015, but a slight reduction in operating margin to 30.1% attributed to unfavourable business mix and the impact of acquisitions.