Now that the Wuhan CMEF has come to an end, it’s starting to fade from the news. That’s why we were pleasantly surprised when a friend forwarded us an article on the CMEF that he found on LinkedIn, and we were even more pleased with the author’s take! Read on to see the great things he has to say about the future of equipment manufacturing in China.

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Last week I visited the 74th China Medical Equipment Fair (CMEF) to catch up with some current suppliers of diagnostic ultrasound machines and see what’s new in the industry. It was my 3rd business trip to China in recent times and you do notice a lot has changed since I first visited more than 10 years ago. Here are 5 things I learned from the trip and from doing business in medical equipment with China in general.

While China hasn’t traditionally been associated with the highest quality in terms of production I was really blown away with the quality and design of some of the Chinese Diagnostic Ultrasound Manufacturers at this year’s CMEF. It’s fair to say that there is some really high quality manufacturing happening in China at the moment.

Many med-tech companies from Europe and America have turned to China in recent years for manufacturing of their own products due to China’s larger scale and lower cost manufacturing. This investment by for eignmed-tech companies and also by the Chinese government means that China now has some of the best resourced med-tech research and development centers in the world.

When the top minds from these research and development (and management) teams then join emerging Chinese med-tech companies, the results are often excellent quality products that are extremely price competitive. Of course I also saw many products that looked absolutely fantastic on the outside, or in the promotional photos, but were in fact complete garbage. There really is no way to know until you test it for yourself or at least see it in action :)

The first thing you notice about the CMEF is the sheer size of it! Like China itself, the expo center was absolutely massive. There were 2800 exhibitors and an estimated 88,000 visitors from over 100 countries. The expo venue itself was made up of 12 exhibition halls, each the size of at least 3 football fields.

It’s fair to say that China is a huge place and Wuhan, where the CMEF was held has a very large emerging medical technology centre as do other cities such as Shenzhen. Because of China’s size and competitive advantage many multinational med-tech companies have been manufacturing in China for years.

Due to the huge Chinese population and emerging middle class many multinationals such as Medtronic are actually now setting up offices in China to cater for the health of the Chinese population directly. All of this leads to a rapidly advancing health and medical technology sector.