“Today's forum is dedicated to one of the most interesting and globally rapid developing industries – healthcare. I have a little bit of a sweet spot for healthcare because aside from Credit Suisse, I'm also on the board of GlaxoSmithKline as a non-executive Director. There I deal with healthcare issues as part of the remit and I find it absolutely fascinating.

The topic that you will be dealing with today is a topic that, as you would expect, is of great interest to the pharmaceutical industry. In our own strategy offsite at GSK for instance, we spent the last week in Silicon Valley. And this was not because we wanted to find out how driverless cars work, but because we're very interested to learn how the people in Silicon Valley think about the future of pharma research and of healthcare globally.

For more than three years, Credit Suisse has been working very closely with CEIBS. We noted with pleasure that you have moved up nine spots to number five in the Financial Times 2018 ranking of the Top 100 EMBA programmes. That's a huge achievement, and I would like to congratulate all of you who have contributed to that. I know that this is not easy, and we are very happy to hear that this was the case.

Since 2010, China has been Switzerland's most important trading partner in Asia. Our own bilateral relationships date back to 1950 and cover more than 30 areas such as finance, environment, and sustainable development, as well as education and science.

The relationship between our two nations has a long history, and as you probably have noted, increasingly intensified over the past few years. In particular, I'm thinking of the Free Trade Agreement established in 2013 and the Sino-Swiss Innovative Strategic Partnership established in 2016. As part of this initiative, two countries held the first edition of the strategic dialogue and introduced an innovative high-level strategic platform.

If you go a bit deeper into the Free Trade Agreement that was established in 2013, you will easily note that this is arguably one of the best, if not the best, free trade agreement that was concluded between China and another country. It's a really good one, and we are very happy and proud.

I've spoken to many people in the government, in Swiss government as well, and I know that because we were able to achieve that, it also then paved the way for a lot of other things that happened. For instance, Credit Suisse is now also a Renminbi hub. It has very good institutional relationships between the central banks, People's Bank of China, and our Swiss National Bank. And we have a strategic dialogue, not only in this area but also in the area of finance, which, if I'm not mistaken, will occur again in a couple of weeks.

[As it relates to] our own strategy in China [it] may surprise you if you don't know our company too well. We have been active in China for over 60 years, which is quite remarkable for a western bank. We began as a correspondent bank with Bank of China in 1950 and we are the first international bank to open a rep office in Beijing, which we still have.

In addition, we have a couple of other things that we're doing in China. In China itself, we have two joint ventures in the asset management field and the securities field, which we hope we can gradually expand over the next couple of years. We work quite hard on that, we believe that China is very important for us.

Why do we do that? Because we strongly believe in China's economic development. And as stated in our Global Wealth Report 2018, which we published last week, total wealth in China has risen from USD 3.7 trillion to over 51 trillion in the last 18 years, a multiple of more than 14. This is double the rate of any other nation and three times the rate of most. And this makes China the ultimate growth champion, certainly over the last 15 years.

Our ambition is very modest: to be the best bank of entrepreneurs in China with strong wealth management, and investment banking capabilities. This ambition is a long-term commitment to China, which we have at all levels, not only business-wise. I'm a member of the Advisory Board for the Mayor of Beijing, and we have other people in our organisation who are actively involved in China matters.

With assets under management of about 1.4 trillion, Credit Suisse is one of the leading wealth managers in the world with approximately half of our assets under management entrusted by ultra-high net worth clients, benefiting from strong underlying growth trends. In particular, in Asia, the region with the strongest growth outlook globally, we are very well positioned, and we have been able to build out our business over the last 10 years quite remarkably.

Our track record in China leads us to three strategic areas, and in the future we will focus on entrepreneurs as I said. We will try to leverage the success of our Greater China franchise, and we would like to capture the huge business opportunities in the onshore China market.

As you know, China has been opening up in the last couple of years, is continuing to open up, and we certainly want to play a role there in the years to come. That may not be something which you see overnight. We know that. But it would absolutely be remiss if we didn't now seed the necessary money at this point in time to make sure that over the years we can grow the business. We are absolutely convinced that this is the right way going forward. There is unanimous consent among the board and the executive board.

A common challenge incumbents are globally facing along all industries is incredible fast movement of digitalisation and the involvement of innovative technologies as a game changer. The financial sector has changed the way it operates and services its clients quite fundamentally. We see great potential in these movements, [and we] are strongly supporting in-house innovation initiatives.

We have a standalone lab, for instance, in order to disrupt and constantly challenge our own established business models outside of the everyday business processes. We expect going forward that the use of digital technology will help our bank to further increase efficiency, simplify our global access for clients, and to address, in particular, also reputational and conduct risks at an early stage.

And here, similarly, smart healthcare is rapidly growing and probably one of the most promising industries at the moment. This leads us to today's main topic. Smart healthcare is the driving force behind the transformation of the healthcare industry in China, but also in Switzerland.

Global healthcare spending is projected to increase at an annual rate of 4.1% in 2017 to 2021. And thereby innovative technologies are key in this sector to reduce costs, increase access, and improve care.

Just to give you an example, the cost to generate a human genome sequence decreased 300,000 times from 300 million to roughly $1,000. And I'm pretty certain that's not the end of it yet. So I'm quite positive that with help of new technologies, costs will decrease even more in the future, thereby making healthcare accessible to an even broader mass than it is today, which is absolutely essential, particularly for a country that is evolving and growing.

China, as well as Switzerland, are pioneers in this industry to provide new and innovative solutions. I have just read about this $6 billion Chinese start-up called We Doctor, which is building artificial intelligence to parse data, helping detect ailments like cervical cancer and others.

We partnered up and supported clients globally on 70 billion US dollars for the healthcare sector in 2017. And that's certainly a trend we will continue to do as we go forward. There will be a lot of interesting topics to discuss this afternoon. I'm very curious to hear from the experts in the field. I wish you a truly rewarding as well as interesting forum today, filled with engaging dialogue and enhanced insight into new opportunities.”