Revealed: the companies cracking China
Today we reveal our latest data focused supplier performance in the Chinese antibody market. Find out which companies are the clear winners and which might be struggling to make inroads.
Over the last two years we have commented on the rise of research antibody use in China. In February 2014 our data suggested that China was set to claim the lion’s share of the global antibody market, and we’ve seen the country grow rapidly since then.
Dr Andrew Chalmers, founder of CiteAb, said: “China’s huge growth in its use of research antibodies pinpoints it as significant opportunity for suppliers. However, breaking into the Chinese market also comes with significant challenges, and suppliers have used a number of different business models to overcome these. Today’s data shows which suppliers are seeing success, and which might be struggling to crack China.”
The three largest antibody suppliers, Abcam, Cell Signaling and SantaCruz are all doing well, with each claiming a greater percentage of their citations coming from China than the average for all companies (10%). Abcam leads the way, with 13% of its citations from China, followed by Cell Signaling with 12% and SantaCruz with 11%.
Andrew said: “Abcam opened offices in Shanghai in 2013, with the aim of providing dedicated support to its Chinese customers. The office is very close to Abcam’s production facility in Hangzhou, which develops pioneering research tools such as RabMAb®, its proprietary rabbit monoclonal antibody technology, and provides customer and technical support functions, provided by native Mandarin speakers.”
However, outside the big three, which suppliers are really succeeding in China? Of the top 20 companies claiming Chinese market share, we see Protientech come out highest with 22%, and eBioscience just behind with 18%.
But perhaps the real king is Bioworld, a company we spotted as a success story in our September company highlight blog. The company has an office in Nanjing, China, and data we’re releasing today shows that a massive 87% of Bioworld’s citations come from China, demonstrating that its success is based on conquering this market.
We spoke to Anne, who works in the International Business Department at Bioworld. She told us: “We manufacture over 15,000 highly purified monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies, peptide, proteins and other related research products which cover almost all biological fields, mainly focusing on signal transduction pathways, cardiac markers, stem cell and neuroscience.”
When asked what has been key to the company’s success in China, Anne told us: “Our quality assurance and our after sales service. Every antibody we sell has been WB-tested more than 10 times, certifying the higher specificity, sensitivity, stability between batches, and Bioworld antibodies are applied in over 4000 publicated research reports. We also assure the customers with professional technological support and excellent after-sell service.”
So which companies are finding it harder to make the most of the emerging Chinese market? There are several top 20 global companies who have a much lower percentage of their citations from China when compared to peers.
These include ThermoScientific with just 5% and R&D, again with 5%. We also see Bethyl labs, AbD Serotec and Synaptic Systems at the lower end of the market share table. These companies are not doing as well in China as they could and as the market is growing so fast there is a huge opportunity for them to increase their sales if they could improve their performance to match their peers.
Look out for future country highlights, where we will examine other growing markets revealing those companies that are succeeding and those that have work to do.
A unique view of the Chinese antibody market
Unlike common questionnaire based datasets, which are often subjective, our data was formulated through analysing hundreds of thousands of antibody specific peer reviewed academic papers from the last three years from China. This has allowed us to produce what we believe is one of the most comprehensive datasets available covering the state of the Chinese research antibody market.
The share that Chinese citations make of the total citations from each company was then calculated using this dataset. This shows what % of the total of each individual company’s citations come from China. Its also possible to calculate the share each company has of the total citations from China, this shows a similar result, with certain companies doing well and others not so well in China.
If you would like to know the value for your company or if you would like a quote for the full Chinese antibody dataset simply drop Matt an email.
– David and the CiteAb team
