Cegedim SA and Simcere Pharmaceutical Group Presented at 2013 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Meeting

SAN FRANCISCO, January 8, 2013 – Several emerging international healthcare firms presented their information to investors and potential partners at the 31^st Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference held at the Westin St. Francis Hotel near Union Square in San Francisco.

Most of the smaller firms presented their talks at the conference’s smaller rooms.  This is where I found the Cegedim SA presentaiton.

Emerging European Firm

Jan Eryk Umiastowski, Chief Investment Officer gave a talk about his firm Cegedim SA, a private company that is located in France. He said that the company is a market research firm for pharmaceutical market development companies.  The company competes with companies like IMS Health.

He said that Cegedim collects prescribing information from pharmacies and doctors of what pharmaceuticals are being used by patients.  He said that they capture data that includes drug product name, quantity and so on to create databases.

Jan said that the company provides an IT application for claims transaction management.

He showed a bright green, credit card-like, card. He said that the patient goes to the pharmacy and presents the special green charge card, swipes the card and the IT application completes the transaction overnight.  Cegedim receives its revenues from pharmaceutical firms, doctors, doctors office groups, and others.

Jan said that the business model is subscription-based and there is a high switching cost to its business clients.  Jan said that the Cegedim works with Walgreens and is Number One in the countries that they operate in.  Their IT application runs on Windows 8. Their main clients are pharmaceutical companies in North America, Europe, and emerging countries.  In the future, the firm is looking for a 20% margin.  2012/Q3 was the first time that they were receiving pharmaceutical company business.

Emerging Chinese Firm

I learned that another group of emerging international firms was part of the Asia and China Forums. These meetings were located in the Victor’s room on the 32^nd floor. The China meeting hosted fifteen or so presentations from China-based healthcare companies such as Simcere Pharmaceutical Group.

A woman executive gave the presentation about Simcere Pharmaceutical Group (NYSE: SCR).  The firm is located in Nanjing, China.  This young pharmaceutical firm started life as a pharmaceutical distributor.  The firm later became a fully integrated pharmaceutical company and currently has about 4,000 employees. The company recently changed its CEO and its business strategy.  Its disease focus is in oncology, strokes, cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases and pain.

According to the executive, the firm is doing cost cutting of its SG&A, and plans to grow its R&D operations.  She said that the company has partnerships with Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb.  Its pharmaceutical portfolio includes Endostar and others including branded generics.

She highlighted the financial performance and said that 2012/Q3 revenues were RMB 526 million and the first nine months revenues were RMB 1,543 million.  R&D investment has grown RMB 2009 to 2012Q1-Q3 as listed in this table:

Table: R&D Investment

Year	2009	2010	2011	2012/Q1-Q3
R&D SpendingRMB, millions	133	126	199	168

The executive said that market uptake of pharmaceuticals in China is gradual.  The company has eleven drug candidates in the pipeline.

Simcere Pharmaceuticals has several partnerships including:

1. Merck J-V, Signed in 2011, 630 sales reps sell six products.
2. Bristol Myers Squibb, Dev. metatinib, IND 09/2012
3. Apexigen, antibody deal, BD0801 IND, 10/2012

Simcere Pharmaceuticals is looking for manufacturing partnerships to expand its manufacturing base. The company’s listing status in the US is part of its strategy to play in the US-based style of business to attract more US partners