Making up Mindray

Mindray was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2006, raising $311 million, the largest initial offering in the global healthcare industry over the previous two years. The publicity was an international boost for Mindray's brand.

Despite having to compete head to head with international giants such as Philips Healthcare, GE Healthcare and Spacelabs, Mindray has secured many high-profile projects over the years.

One of them is to supply medical equipment to Britain's public healthcare system, the National Health Service, including patient devices, equipment and ultrasound machines.

"We entered talks with the NHS around 2006-07, and they had an open attitude about our products," Yin says.

In 2008 Mindray placed a bid to enter the NHS's procurement system. "We were assessed as a business holistically, including our product quality, commercial qualification and after-sales service. We passed the test and have remained in their procurement system ever since."

Yin says that Mindray's key advantage in Europe is not its price, but its product quality and after sales services.

"Most hospitals have a procurement process whereby prices are not made known at first," Yin says.

For example, the hospital could ask each bidder to send their products to the hospital for one month, during which a technical assistant and an after-sales assistant would be required to stay and teach the doctors how to use the devices.

"The doctors then rate the equipment. So if six companies enter the first round, only the most highly rated two or three bidders are then given the opportunity to tell the procurement department their product prices," Yin says.

"That is why we place great emphasis on product quality and innovation."

According to Mindray's website, it invests about 10 percent of its annual revenue in R&D, and has introduced about eight new products to the market in each of the past seven years.

The company has about 1,550 R&D employees, accounting for about a third of its workforce.

One milestone for Mindray's overseas expansion was its $200 million acquisition of New Jersey-based Datascope's patient monitoring business in 2008, which turned the company into the third-largest player in the global patient monitoring device industry.

Datascope's R&D center in Stockholm, Sweden, became a valuable asset to Mindray. The deal also gave Mindray a direct sales force in Europe and North America, as it was selling through distributors before the acquisition.

"We were able to achieve great synergy in with Datascope in Europe," Yin says, explaining that the two companies have complementary expertise in R&D work and market knowledge.

"Datascope has been in contact with European customers for decades, so they understand the customers' needs. But they couldn't deliver the products needed due to high R&D cost but slow speed," he says.

"Mindray's advantage is the ability to turn R&D results into actual products. For example, if Datascope needs five years to develop a product, Mindray only needs two years to develop the same product."