On December 1, GE Healthcare officially announced that it will acquire the remaining 50% of Nihon Medi-Physics ("NMP") from Sumitomo Chemical. The transaction is expected to be completed in early 2025.

NMP was founded in 1973 and is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It was originally jointly established by British life science company Amersham and Sumitomo Chemical. In 2004, GE Healthcare acquired Amersham and thus held a 50% stake in NMP. If this acquisition is completed, GE Healthcare will have full ownership of NMP.

GE Healthcare CEO Peter J Arduini shared on LinkedIn: "By wholly owning NMP, which is already a leader in Japan, we will improve patient access to next-generation radiopharmaceuticals to enable disease detection and diagnosis, and make NMP the preferred partner for global innovators seeking to introduce new radiopharmaceuticals to Japan and other Asian markets." According to public data, NMP directly holds multiple nuclear medicine approvals and occupies 70% of the market share in Japan, of which SPECT diagnostic medicine market share is about 60% and PET diagnostic medicine market share is nearly 100%.

NMP's products are divided into two major areas: diagnostic (SPECT and PET) and therapeutic (radioactive medical devices and radiopharmaceuticals), and are widely used in clinical imaging in fields such as neurology, cardiology and oncology. With the help of NMP's technological advantages, GE Healthcare's leading position in molecular imaging will be further consolidated. In recent years, GE Healthcare's layout in the field of nuclear medicine has accelerated significantly. In the Chinese market, GE Healthcare has achieved full localization of nuclear medicine molecular imaging products, and high-end nuclear medicine PET/CT has been put into production at the Beijing base.

At the 7th CIIE, GE Healthcare China and Novartis China signed a strategic cooperation memorandum, focusing on radioligand imaging and radioligand therapy, and jointly building a nuclear medicine precision medicine ecosystem combining molecular imaging with radioligand therapy; GE Healthcare's latest nuclear medicine molecular imaging device PET/CT Max Apollo also made its debut in China.

According to Frost & Sullivan data, the global medical imaging equipment market has maintained steady growth and is expected to reach US$81.9 billion in 2025. China's medical imaging equipment market will also continue to grow. The market size has reached RMB 53.7 billion in 2020, and it is expected that the Chinese market size will be close to RMB 108.5 billion in 2030, with an average annual compound growth rate of 7.3%.

Among them, nuclear medicine imaging PET/SPECT/CT equipment is an important part of the medical imaging equipment industry. According to Frost & Sullivan data, the global PET/CT market size is expected to reach US$5.8 billion in 2030, and the global PET/CT market size will grow at an annual compound growth rate of 6.5% from 2020 to 2030. According to the "Medical Device Blue Book 2023", the nuclear medicine equipment currently available in Chinese hospitals is mainly monopolized by GE, Siemens, Philips and other companies, and the ownership rate of foreign-funded enterprises exceeds 90%.

With the gradual "unbundling" of the configuration management of large medical equipment in recent years, domestic brands have gained more opportunities to enter hospitals than before, and various policies to stimulate volume have been implemented one after another. Domestic nuclear medicine imaging equipment has ushered in a breaking moment, and local manufacturers represented by United Imaging, Neusoft, and Mingfeng are ready to go. At this stage, the potential demand in my country's nuclear medicine field has not been fully released, and the number of related examinations is far lower than that in the United States, Japan, the European Union and other regions. In addition to cognitive problems and consumption capacity, insufficient department construction is also an important influencing factor.

The "Medium- and Long-Term Development Plan for Medical Isotopes (2021-2035)" released in 2021 proposes that by 2035, "one county, one department" will be achieved, and at least 2,500 nuclear medicine departments will be added to the 2,800 counties and cities across the country, and the localization of high-end molecular imaging equipment will be clearly proposed. According to data disclosed by the Chinese Nuclear Medicine Branch, the number of nuclear medicine equipment inspections nationwide has increased significantly.

At the end of last year, the National Health Commission issued the "Healthy China Action-Cancer Prevention and Control Action Implementation Plan (2023-2030)", requiring qualified secondary and above hospitals to set up oncology departments to carry out cancer screening and general diagnosis and treatment of common and multiple cancers.

Nuclear medicine is known as the "nuclear weapon" for early tumor screening and is expected to benefit directly from this round of actions. According to data from Zhiyanzhan Industry Research Institute, the market size of China's early cancer screening industry in 2020 was 3.009 billion yuan, and it is expected to reach 9.357 billion yuan by 2025, with an annual compound growth rate of 25.6%. With the continuous expansion of usage scenarios, the opportunity for domestic nuclear medicine equipment to break through may not be far away.

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