Watch this Space: Medtech in the Middle East
Article preview reprinted from Start-Up - September 2008
With all the frenzy of investing, partnering, and joint-venturing in emerging markets like China and India, where can medtech investors still get in on the ground floor?
Article preview reprinted from Start-Up - September 2008
Watch this Space: Medtech in the Middle East
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With all the frenzy of investing, partnering, and joint-venturing in emerging markets like China and India, the Middle East region might provide a medtech investor or company the best opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
While capital for venture firms and their portfolio companies is growing scarcer in the US and Europe, government and private entities operating within the countries of the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region have billions—and in some cases trillions--to invest to further government goals of diversifying local economies beyond oil and real-estate while also improving their health care systems for their growing populations.Health care remains a top priority in Kuwait, Bahrain, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and other countries. The region offers sizeable markets; there are 450 million people in the MENA region, and the population will grow rapidly to 700 million by 2050, according to forecasts. Finally, a youth bulge in the population has created a very large and growing educated workforce; one third of the population is between the ages of 10 and 24, and estimates are that the labor force will expand by 80 million within two decades.
But American and European companies seeking entry to the Middle East will find the unique culture and the health care delivery systems challenging. The government pays, to a large extent, for the health care of citizens, but hospitals are private, not necessarily linked together in any kind of cohesive networks. There are a number of service companies in the health care industry, but there is an almost total lack, apart from some pharmaceutical manufacturing operations, of local medical product companies with which to partner.
Companies mentioned in this article:
StemCyte Inc.
Wyeth Wyeth Pharmaceuticals
immatics biotechnologies GMBH
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