CEIBS President & Chengwei Ventures Chair Professor of Entrepreneurship Pedro Nueno
~ Zurich, October 18
“China will continue to be a huge market for healthcare. But it’s not the last market. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, CEIBS also has a campus in Africa in Accra, so I have to go meet companies there from time to time. I was really surprised to see that a company like Vodafone was supporting a telecom company project against yellow fever, where people could, through the mobile, know exactly where they could find pharmaceutical products. In Africa if you have a problem you dial a number with your mobile and you get a location for the nearest clinic. It may be 500 metres ahead, outside of a petrol station; you will find a truck that has products. One of the speakers today held up his mobile and said, ‘this is your hospital’. Well, in Africa [your mobile phone] is your pharmacy.
China is a big opportunity, but there are more coming. Anything that we do in China can be applied later in other markets. A question that does not get asked very often, and which to me is a big concern, is the financing of all of this. Many of the solutions that were presented today were solutions that made costs cheaper; technology was applied to lower the cost of a service. But still, financing is a big problem. If we combine the ageing population and large market size, who’s going to pay for healthcare?
In any case, I think that today’s forum was excellent, and provided many opportunities for networking, which I think is one of the objectives that we have with these type of events; people come together to share their concerns…, to help each other, and develop new ideas. At minimum it’s an opportunity to explore.”