People in Public Biotech

In biotechnology, as in other industries, public-company data provide valuable metrics. To gauge a country’s power and potential in any industry, analysts often look to a few basic indicators, such as its number of public companies and how many people they employ. These figures give a basic idea of the level of effort being placed on biotechnology, although they do not capture individual company contributions, which can be significant. To gather such metrics on public biotech firms, we turned to company disclosures and data published by Huggett et al. (Huggett, B., Hodgson, J., Lähteenmäki, R. 2010. Public biotech 2009—the numbers. Nature Biotechnology 28:793–799).

The results show that the U.S. dominates biotechnology from a public-company point of view. In fact, the word “dominates” seems like an understatement. The 234 public biotechnology companies in the U.S. surpass the number of public firms in all of the other regions combined. In addition, there are almost twice as many public biotechs in the U.S. as in all of Europe. Australia, with its 47 public biotechnology companies, boasts a large share of the industry by comparison.

Some regions are home to very few public biotechs. Both Finland and Poland have only a single public biotechnology company apiece. Similarly, Asia does not make much of a mark on the public-company arena of this field, as only six public firms exist in the southern and eastern areas of the continent. As this figure shows, most of the biotechnology companies there remain private.
Not surprisingly, more public biotechs translate into more public employees in the industry. Here, the U.S. leads by an even wider margin, with its 146,098 public biotech employees—2.3 times more than the sum of those from all other regions. Australia has the second largest number of public-biotech workers (10,694), followed by France (8,723) and Denmark (6,300).

When it comes to the number of employees in a nation, even just one large company makes a huge difference. For example, Amgen—the biggest U.S. biotech—employs about 17,000 people worldwide. That number outstrips the total number of public biotech–company workers from any country other than the U.S.

On the low end, China’s total of 4,610 employees at public biotechnology companies comes as no surprise, considering that it contains only three such companies. On the other hand, if the world’s largest country is to have the expected influence on this field, both its number of public biotechnology firms and their total employees should increase. Otherwise, China will fail to show much impact on any metrics related to public business, making it seem even more introverted than it already appears.

These figures indicate that public biotechnology has ample room for growth in terms of the quantity of companies and employees in countries other than the U.S.