Agilent Technologies eyes Chinese market with tailor-made solutions

Agilent Technologies, an industry leader in diagnostics and genomics solutions, to further tap into China market with tailor-made initiatives to drive growth, making lower throughput but more automated solutions a key strategy in the country over the next few years, its senior executives told China Daily.

A spin-off from the Hewlett-Packard, the company is now a global leader in life sciences, diagnostics and applied chemical markets, and entered China more than 20 years ago.

China is growing more quickly than all of its markets, with double-digit annual growth, said Charmian Cher, director of Clinical Strategy for Asia-Pacific, Diagnostics and Genomics Group, Agilent.

"China market growth is outpacing many other regions. We've separated the China market from the Asia-Pacific as an independent market region," Cher said.

Although not revealing exact figures, Jimmy Jin, global marketing director of Next Generation Sequencing, DGG, Agilent, said China already takes "a significant share" of the global market, and now is seen by the company parallel to the US and European markets.

The company has adopted a different approach in China, focusing more on supporting clinical research and clinical applications of next-generation sequencing by cooperating with local service providers to meet specific application needs and less on providing tools for basic research and discoveries, according to Jin.

In the US and European markets, it is more common for the company to sell products for translational research, in part due to the discovery studies and population studies that have been done in universities there, he said.

In other markets such as Europe, the company's customers are mostly small laboratories that constitute a large number, while in China, the customers are smaller in the total number, but are often large industry players, which is partly because China lacks trained clinical geneticists, said Cher.

Smaller but more automated solutions will better meet needs from Chinese hospitals and other facilities that lack skilled technicians, especially as Chinese authorities have been encouraging clinical facilities to run tests by themselves instead of outsourcing all samples to third-party testing facilities, according to Hou Jun, sales manager of DGG, Agilent Greater China.