China’s rising cancer rates a boon for foreign hospitals

 03-Jun-15, Today 

One of China’s coal capitals, Datong, is paying for years of heavy, gritty pollution. Cancer rates are soaring in the northern city despite efforts to vanquish the smog, and the disease accounted for a third of deaths in 2012.

Image: Bloomberg

By the end of the year, patients in this city bordering Inner Mongolia will get one of its province’s first privately-run, radiotherapy-equipped cancer hospitals, built by New York-listed Concord Medical Services Holdings.

A cancer epidemic is sweeping through China, and with the investment deep in the nation’s heartland, Concord, which supplies imaging and radiotherapy equipment to state-run hospitals, joins a string of companies racing to reach the wave of patients. There is a cancer diagnosis every 10 seconds, and the disease has spawned an ecosystem of new businesses around the rising number of affluent Chinese.

Concord’s Datong investment shows how some companies are reshaping their operations to seek out potentially lucrative new opportunities in oncology. Encouraged by the Chinese government’s efforts to attract private investment to healthcare, the company has now begun setting up its own cancer facilities, planning as many as 10 a year.

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