2 October 2025

PRC Consolidates Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Dominance

Daniel Burke

The pharmaceutical manufacturing industry in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) appears to be consolidating around a handful of national giants such as Sino Biopharm and Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine.

These companies occupy a large and growing presence in international supply chains and hold bottlenecks in at least three “essential medicines.”

The PRC government has released a policy initiative targeting the pharmaceutical industry almost every year since at least 2015.

Much of the PRC’s pharmaceutical manufacturing development is also linked to Western investment in Chinese capabilities, with leadership from companies such as AstraZeneca, Roche, and Sanofi contributing billions of dollars to research and development in the PRC and personally meeting with Xi Jinping.

In July, LaNova (礼新医药), a major international supplier of innovative biomedical technology, was acquired by the large Chinese pharmaceutical conglomerate Sino Biopharm (中国生物制药) (Sino Biopharm, July 15; BioSpace, July 16). This move comes amid substantial growth in the burgeoning pharmaceutical production and development sector within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and has the potential to further entrench the country in both international and U.S. supply chains.

LaNova saw major development in late 2024, when Merck, an American pharmaceutical giant, paid the company nearly $600 million to further develop, produce, and commercialize its flagship LM-299 anti-cancer treatment, along with a possible $2.7 billion for technology transfer, development, regulatory approval, and additional commercialization (Merck, November 14, 2024). This agreement followed an earlier deal between LaNova and AstraZeneca for treatment of a certain type of bone marrow cancer that neared $600 million (BioSpace, May 15, 2023). These partnerships and others marked a reversal of the previous dynamics of U.S. innovation and Chinese manufacturing and point to extensive Chinese advancements in the pharmaceutical and biomedical fields. The recent acquisition of LaNova by Sino Biopharm will likely further strengthen the conglomerate and increase its overall innovation potential through LaNova’s staff and patents.

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