Specialist
Former Business Development Manager at Hangzhou Tigermed Consulting Co Ltd
Agenda
- Clinical CRO market size, growth, revenues, service offerings, growth drivers and challenges
- Clinical CRO market competition, and the influence of “4+7” centralised procurement and other policies
- Tigermed’s order volume and growth, and major project and customer categories
- Tigermed’s clinical trial pricing mechanism, cost growth trend and profitability
Questions
1.
Can you walk us through the scale of Chinese and international clinical CRO markets and growth in the past three years? What do you think are the main drivers to boost development of the Chinese clinical CRO market in the next 1-3 years?
2.
How large is the Chinese clinical CRO market? How far can it grow in the future? Will it hit a ceiling? The CRO business has surged. However, in the foreign market, its growth has been slowing down. What about the development stage of the Chinese clinical CRO sector?
3.
How do those promising services contribute to the total revenue generated by CROs in the first echelon such as Tigermed?
4.
China has launched the system to file records of drug clinical trials, accelerated review and approval of new drugs and implemented “4+7” centralised procurement. Consequently, the generic drug industry has become a manufacturing one. Because of lower profit margin, some pharmaceutical enterprises may give up consistency evaluation of certain generic drugs. Which policies do you think have major impact on development of the CRO industry? How do they impact services in the sector?
5.
CROs provide services such as Phase I-IV clinical trials, BE testing, site management and DM. How do large CROs such as Tigermed and WuXi AppTec categorise their services? What is your estimate on revenues generated by Tigermed from those service categories respectively? Will its revenue generated from BE testing reduce by half in 2019?
6.
How much do generic drugs and innovative drugs contribute to Tigermed’s revenue respectively?
7.
Frontage Labs has recently filed to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. You mentioned earlier that the company may extend its reach from generic drugs to innovative drugs in the future. Does that mean there will be competition between Frontage Labs and Tigermed?
8.
Earlier you mentioned that SMO and DM services have been growing the fastest. Can they contribute about 50% of the revenue Tigermed generates from innovative drug clinical research?
9.
It’s learned that Tigermed registered an overall growth of about 36% in 2018. What is your estimate of the annual growth rates of its main business segments? What are some of the segments that have declined a bit?
10.
Shouldn’t CROs oversee the entire process clinical research for their clients? It seems that they tend to focus on SMO and DM services. Is this why the two segments are growing the fastest?
11.
Can you brief us on the pricing strategies for innovative drug clinical research projects? How do you expect their prices to change? Normally how long do those projects last?
12.
You mentioned that the prices charged by CROs include their own income and the fees paid to hospitals. Approximately what percentage of the money goes into the pocket of CROs? Can you break down their costs across Phase I, II, III and IV clinical trials? How high is their overall gross margin?
13.
Does the pricing you mentioned just now cover the whole CRO process including project management, on- site monitor and data analysis or just some services of the whole process?
14.
What do you think of the impact of smaller companies in the field on the likes of Tigermed and WuXi AppTec? Are these smaller companies a big market impact?
15.
What about Tigermed’s order growth in 2017-18 for phase I-IV clinical trials for anti-cancer drugs and drugs for the treatment of non-cancer diseases? What about the overall order volume and growth and the revenue accordingly for 2019?
16.
It’s said that it’s not allowed to outsource SMO and CRO services to the same company. What do you think of this rule?
17.
Do you see any changes to the customer persona of Tigermed in recent years?
18.
As you said, some major pharmaceutical enterprises will conduct some clinical trials by themselves while start-ups usually leave the whole clinical trials to CROs. What’s the proportion of the two types of businesses for Tigermed? Where do you think the future is heading for?
19.
Tigermed is moving to the business development of CRO+VC+licensing+big pharma. Is this a common practice in the sector or the model adopted by major CROs?
