(Jon Han) 

Gauging Biotech Jobs in the BRICs

From a public-company point of view, the U.S. leads the world in biotechnology-related jobs. It’s not even a competition, because the number of U.S. workers at public biotechnology companies squashes the meager numbers from any other country, even from other regions. To be specific, public biotechnology companies in the U.S. employ 146,098 people, which is more than 15 times as many employees as can be found in all of the public biotechnology companies across all of Asia. The qualifying factor in such comparisons, though, comes from one word, public. To really explore biotech employment in the BRIC nations, public numbers do not provide an adequate view of the industry.

To delve deeper into this topic, we partnered with Monitor, a consulting company that has its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and offices around the world. The graphs presented here all come from information culled from Monitor’s database. Rather than looking at employees from public or private companies, these numbers combine the two. Moreover, the data from Monitor allow us to compare employees from the BRIC nations with those from the U.S. and what Monitor calls the EU-15, which consists of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the U.K. Rather than looking at static measurements, these data also reveal the growth in biotechnology-related employment in these countries from 1999 to 2008.

Biopharma Boon

First, we look at employment in the biopharmaceutical sector. Here, the most obvious element is the gigantic workforce in China. From 1999 through 2008, the number of people employed in China’s biopharma industry grew from 1,128,060 to 1,630,182. Although not shown here, the 2009 number for China increased to 1,739,776. Across that period, China’s biopharma employment experienced a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.43 percent.

The other BRIC nations also increased their numbers of employees in biopharma over the past dozen or so years. In fact, data on India and Brazil’s industries show CAGRs of 5.74 and 5.64 percent, respectively. The number of employees in both of these countries, however, started at much lower levels than China, so their overall contributions of biopharma employees in the BRIC nations lag far behind. Even Russia’s CAGR was 3.61 percent for 1999–2008.

In 2008, China’s biopharma sector employed about 5.7 times as many people as the comparable U.S. sector, which included 284,857 people and rose with a CAGR of 1.79 percent from 1999 through 2008. Moreover, China employed nearly three times as many people as the same sector for the EU-15, which experienced a slightly negative CAGR during this period of time.

A Mover in Medical Devices

For medical-device employees, the U.S. and the EU-15 held the lead in 1999 and kept it through 2008. The lack of growth in the number of U.S. employees—showing a CAGR of only 0.2 percent—allowed the EU-15 to take the lead in 2008. Among the BRIC nations, they all show growth at some point in the plotted time period. Russia, for example, cyclically makes gains and suffers losses, and the number of medical-device employees in Brazil also shows some ups and downs. For India, some growth can be seen from 1999 through 2008, but it’s fairly slow.

China, though, moved the fastest in increasing its medical-device employees since 1999. In fact, for 1999–2009 its CAGR in this industry was an astonishing 12.35 percent. (In some cases, we compare different time periods because of a lack of 2009 data for some countries considered here.) The rocketing growth of employees in this industry, especially since 2005, could be just the beginning. In 2009, China’s government set aside $10 billion for medical devices for hospitals and clinics. Investments like that should spur this industry to grow even more.

The growth in such industries in China also comes from an influx of foreign projects. For example, U.S.-based Thermo Fisher Scientific—a producer of clinical and laboratory equipment, including medical devices and consumables—announced three expansion projects in China in a recent 12-month period. When the company announced its plans to build a manufacturing plant in the Suzhou Science and Technology Town, company president and CEO Marc Casper released this statement: “China continues to grow significantly and is now our third largest country in terms of revenue.”

Calculating the Chemistry

The breadth of biotechnology impacts industries beyond biopharmaceuticals and medical devices, including chemical products, which serves as a benchmark for a country or region’s general technology and innovation potential. The Monitor database for employees in the chemical-products industry covers a variety of specific areas, including chemical manufacturing, dye and pigment manufacturing, explosives, and glass- and mineral-based chemical products manufacturing. Although some of these areas, such as explosives, do not connect directly with biotechnology, some clearly do. For example, a wide variety of biotechnology-related R&D and even manufacturing requires chemicals and dyes.

For nearly all of the countries and regions considered here, the number of employees in the chemical-products industry stayed flat at best or even decreased. In the U.S., for example, the number of employees in this category suffered a –3.17 percent CAGR from 1999 through 2008. Similarly, the CAGR for the EU-15 was –2.13.

In contrast, each of the BRIC nations experienced growth in the number of employees in this industry from 1999 through 2008, but China’s employees in this area really grew—reaching 2,789,208 by 2009, which is nearly nine times as many people as were employed in this industry in the U.S. in 2008. 

In summary, these data from Monitor highlight some recent examples of large growth in employment for biotechnology-related industries in the BRIC nations, but the data also portend even more growth in the near future.