Right now there are 416 foreign invested R&D centers in Shanghai. The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis is one of them. Their company’s chairman, Dr. Joerg Reinhardt sat down with our reporter -Yang Chengxi, who stopped by asking Dr. Joerg Reinhardt about Shanghai’s environment for innovation.
Dr. Joerg Reinhardt: We have started to invest in research and development in Shanghai ten years ago. We have just opened this new center two years ago. We see an environment that is more and more innovation driven. We see good universities working closely with us. We see the bio-tech field that is evolving. We ourselves now have relationships with 40 different bio-tech companies. It only happened in the last two years. It is already a very vibrant environment.
Yang Chengxi: So what is the role of China for the company as an R&D center?
Dr. Joerg Reinhardt: It’s actually not much localized at all. We have three different R&D centers - one is obviously in hometown or home country, one is in the US, and one being in China. What we do here is global research, with a little bit of Chinese focus. We focus on liver disease not only in China but also for the rest of the world. We also focus on cancer area. So the idea is this center develops products for global use, not only just for Chinese use.
Yang Chengxi: China has sped up policy measures to support the research and development of new drugs in the country. In the past 3 years, R&D investments from local pharmaceutical companies have grown by 10% annually. How has that impacted the competition landscape in this market?
Dr. Joerg Reinhardt: It has certainly impacted on the competition on talent. We see it’s actually difficult to get really good researchers to join us. There is a lot of competition out there. On the other hand, the pharma business is long-term business. When you invest into research today, you may expect a product in five or ten years from now. So from a market competition perspective, business competition is not that much visible yet. But from talent competition perspective, it’s getting more and more intense.
原报道刊登于2017年9月19日CCTV《 全球财经》(Global Business)栏目，记者杨诚曦。
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