R&D Pharmaceutical Professionals in China Under the Microscope

Pharmaceutical companies are currently targeting the emerging markets of China and Africa for their future expansion, with the highest investment – USD 5.32 billion – just in China alone. Around 29 plants with a combination of manufacturing, production units and research & development centers are scheduled to open through the 2015 to 2022 period across regions. In addition to new facility, approximately 5 brownfield expansions and 9 closures are also scheduled within the same period. Figure below shows the various expansions vs. closure regionally planned by the top 10 big pharma companies.

Pharma companies are expanding their manufacturing and R&D facilities at a rate of 32% in China which is 4 times greater than the forecasted investment for USA during the 2015 – 2022 periods. This has in turn caused a surging demand for R&D professionals in China with CROs and Pharma, both local and global, actively hiring in this space. Table below shows all the expansions scheduled in China.

This paper focuses on professionals from the clinical – pharmaceutical field, leaving out organizations whose sole activity gravitates around medical devices. All in all, over 2,000 resumes of Chinese R&D professionals, 33.5% employed at global pharma players and 66.5% at local, China based organizations were considered for this analysis. For starters 45.9% comes from WuXi Pharma, the Shanghai-based and China market leader contract research outsourcing provider. Top-10 companies make for 83.5% of the 2,107 profiles analyzed. They are: WuXi Pharma (as mentioned above), Shangpharma, Pharmaron, Novartis, GSK, Parexel, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, GenScript and Sanofi. Excluding WuXi Pharma doesn’t change fundamentally the patterns identified in our analysis: the few instances in which it does will be properly highlighted.