As of 2021, the average price of a domestic stent is around 8,000 yuan, while imported stents are generally more than 30% more expensive, and the most expensive therapeutic drug stents or radioactive stents can be as much as 20,000 to 30,000 yuan.
In the mid to late 1980s, cardiac interventional stenting began to enter China. At that time, all the stents were imported, and the unit price was 20,000 to 30,000 yuan.
In 1999, China's self-developed cardiac stents were successfully marketed, and the price was reduced to about 10,000 yuan, breaking the monopoly of imports in one fell swoop.
However, there are still very few domestic products among the cerebrovascular stents used in the clinic. Among them, carotid stents mainly rely on imports, and intracranial artery stents have only one domestic brand.
Data from China's General Administration of Customs showed that in 2016, China's imports of vascular stents totaled 472,878,800 U.S. dollars. In the field of coronary stents, the market share of imported stents is around 34%.
The proportion of domestically made stents in use is increasing, and the market share has reached 60%, especially in cardiac interventions, where about 80% of cardiac stents are domestically made. However, the market for supporting medical devices such as catheters and guide wires is still monopolized by foreign brands.
The reasons why stents are expensive
First, the low innovation ability of domestic stents makes import prices constrained. Huo Yong, chairman of the Cardiovascular Disease Branch of the Chinese Medical Association, has publicly pointed out that China's independent intellectual property rights of medical device products are on the low side, and most of them are just copying foreign technology.
Despite some local or detailed improvements, there has not been an overall original product. For his part, Miao Zhongrong pointed out that, due to the approval process, innovative products come out, but cannot form a production scale and go to the clinic as soon as possible.
Second, there are many distribution links, resulting in layers of price increases. The U.S. medical supplies market is a direct sales model, basically from the manufacturer to the hospital direct circulation, while our country is the agency model, the overall supply chain more layers, each link needs to obtain their own profits, the result is inevitably that the product to the terminal after the price is very high.
An analysis by the China Price Association pointed out that high-end medical devices, such as stents, are expensive, with especially many intermediate links. From factory or import to hospital sales to patients, the average markup is 2 to 3 times, of which stents are 2.28 times.