Venue:  Le Royal Meridien Shanghai (上海世贸皇家艾美酒店), Shanghai, China

              789 Nanjing Road East, Shanghai 200001, China
Brochure: PCAF 2015 Brochure with Fillable Registration Form.pdf
Fees: CNY 5,800 for Pharma China subscribers and employees of RDPAC member companies.
          CNY 6,500 for others

• Contemporary trends & issues in Chinese Pharma in 2014 and early 2015
• Changing dynamics in Chinese pharma/healthcare landscape
• Market, healthcare reform and regulatory outlook for 2015 and beyond
• New trends and strategies for drug pricing and reimbursement
• Expert analysis of hotspot business segments and case studies
• Interactive discussion and brainstorming with our panel of top experts

Introduction

In general the Chinese pharmaceutical sector saw slower but still double-digit growth in 2014 despite a host of challenges stemmed from slowing Chinese economy, regulatory shakeups, cost containment measures and price cuts, as well as healthcare reform turbulences. The slowing Chinese pharma growth has, to a large extent, been driven by: 1) falling government healthcare investment growth as a result of staggering economy; 2) cost containment and activities against healthcare corruption; and 3) intensive and often irregular competition.

Following nearly a decade of healthcare reform, life of the old Chinese pharma business model, which has been overly sales driven and heavily dependent on face-to-face promotions to physicians, is finally coming close to an end.

Under pressures of escalating anti-corruption campaigns, increasingly sophisticated cost containment measures as well as upcoming policy shifts in drug pricing and reimbursements, the pharmaceutical industry in China, especially MNCs and leading domestic players, is now forced to look for a new business approach which is more coherent with the Chinese healthcare business reality today.

China is expected to very quickly transition from a sales-driven culture into a strategic marketing driven one, industry experts pointed out. In fact, some of the business dynamics last year have already reflected this growing shift.

If the Chinese government’s unrelenting anti-corruption campaign was the last straw that broke the old business model of Chinese pharma, the drastic drug price liberalization recently proposed by the NDRC is set to put the final nail on its coffin.

NDRC’s proposal to liberalize government drug price setting is by no means the end of drug price reform. In fact, we are at the beginning of a new reform cycle. Much has to be achieved to replace the dismantled system with a new regime which has no prototype. Without full support of other concerned agencies like the NHFPC and MOHRSS, it remains to be seen if the NDRC can make a major regulatory shift of this magnitude and complexity a success.

Meanwhile, albeit central government’s ambitions palely supported by an increased but tiny healthcare budget, China’s ongoing healthcare reform lost speed further in 2014 amid various old and new challenges including broad economic slowdown, structural flaws, inadequate government financing, failures to coordinate agendas of different agencies and conflicting interests of stakeholders, fiscal challenges of local governments and superficial public hospital reform.

There is no doubt the healthcare reform will go on with unchanged slogans. In the reality, both central and local governments will be more financially strapped this year to achieve original reform objectives and they will be forced to rely on cost containment even more.