Obesity and Related Disease Market to Reach $500B by 2015

Private investor are jumping in to invest in Medical Device industry as it heats up for a health care boom in Asia by 2015. 

The increasing incidence of chronic diseases such as Obesity,  diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic wounds, immobility, pulmonary and vascular diseases is enhancing the need for patient care in hospitals, homes and other care facilities, thereby contributing to the demand for medical devices and diagnostics that are capable of enhancing the overall quality of life. The US leads the high-technology medical devices market, but faces fierce competition from emerging economies. Despite being way behind the US in terms of expertise or innovation, these countries compete on basis of production of low cost medical devices. Demand for medical devices in developing countries, especially China and India, is expected to grow at a faster rate than developed countries owing to factors such as rising disposable incomes, increase in patient population, growing waist lines, obesity on the rise and both India and China face an epidemic of diabetes and obeisty. Australia UK , US, Canada and Mexico are already declared an Obesity epidemic.

The obesity device market will be the biggest in the healthcare sector.

Asia is seeing increasing healthcare awareness, improvements in healthcare infrastructure and increase in healthcare spending . In majority of the Asian, Latin America and the Middle East countries, government efforts are focused on improving healthcare services and infrastructure facilities, which is expected to fuel the demand for medical equipment in the next 3 years.

India and china face a problem of metabolic disease. Which is a mix of hypertention, heart disease and diabetes. The smokers in the region have increased the incidence of tobacco related problems.

Coronary stent shown below is one medical device that is implanted every 20 seconds in Asia. 

There is a increased demand in consumables in the medical device sector. Implantables like the lap band will grow in Asia.

Technologies in orthopedics and spine are in great demand. Larger companies cannot compete with small and nimble manufacturers.

Spine surgery is reverting to posterior open repairs due to slower adoption of minimally invasive surgery. The outcomes show little difference between the traditional posterior fixation and minimally invasive surgery. It will take a decade for new technologies to be adopted.

Increase number of private investors are jumping into the space because the institutional investors have not raised new money to invest in early stage technologies.

 Private investors did not have this opportunity until recently.

Private and angel investors understand its a high risk high gain opportunity, accredited investors can take advantage and invest in companies in the seed stage and series A. After Series A  the institutional investors and venture capitalist jump in. Many of the private investors have potential to gain if the company exits in 4-5 years, which can be by virtue of M&A or IPO.