Mindray Grew Share in a Market That Fell Twenty-Three Per Cent

The most informative number in Chinese diagnostics is not a market size. It is a comparison between two lines inside one company’s annual results.

Shenzhen Mindray’s 2025 disclosure puts international revenue at RMB 17,650 million, up 7.40%, and domestic revenue at RMB 15,632 million, down 22.97%. Its in vitro diagnostics line fell 9.41% to RMB 12,241 million. Same products, same catalogue, same manufacturing base. One geography grew, one contracted by nearly a quarter, and the only variable that moved was the price regime the products were sold into.

That is what a volume-based procurement does to a market, and haematology and coagulation is where China ran the experiment first.

Anhui, January 2023: the ceiling was not a government formula

China’s first volume-based procurement for coagulation and cardiac-marker IVD reagents was designed with a detail worth reading twice. Bidders self-declared products onto a provincial procurement list. The price ceiling was not set by a government formula. It was the volume-weighted average of what Anhui hospitals had actually paid on the provincial platform the previous year. Bidders then competed on the size of their reduction against that ceiling, with 90% of the prior year’s platform volume committed as first-year purchase volume.

Read the mechanism rather than the reduction. This is not a negotiation between a buyer and a supplier; it is a price-discovery exercise in which the state obtains the disclosure the market had been withholding. The ceiling is what hospitals were already paying. Once that number is published and used as a reference, it stops being private commercial information — and every subsequent tender in every province starts from it.

Three disclosures confirm it was the price, not the demand

Chinese test volume did not collapse in 2025. The price did. Three companies say so, from three different positions in the market.

Sysmex attributes its China RHQ decline of 24.2% — segment sales JPY 89,269 million — to “policies to curtail medical expenses,” and names the product lines: “hematology instruments and reagents, as well as hemostasis reagents.” Within that, its overseas hemostasis reagent sales fell while overseas haematology reagent sales rose. Same reagent categories, different tender coverage — the procurement programme reached haemostasis before it reached haematology.

Werfen grew 6% organically everywhere except Asia, and states that the industry “faced a widespread adjustment within the In-Vitro Diagnostics market in China.” Asia-Pacific fell 10.9% against North America up 8%, Latin America up 10%, and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa up 7%.

Mindray is the third, and it is the interesting one, because Mindray is the domestic challenger the policy was designed to favour. Its international line grew 7.40% while its domestic line fell 22.97%, and it names immunoassay, chemistry and coagulation as the three core businesses in which it intends to double domestic share within three years.

That target only makes sense under one reading: Mindray expects the price reset to have cleared out competitors it could not have displaced on price alone. Volume-based procurement is designed to reward domestic scale, and Mindray grew share inside a shrinking domestic market. Both things happened at once, and they are not in tension.

The distinction that changes the forecast

This discipline is not losing China. It is losing the China price. Those are different forecasts, and conflating them is the most common error made about this market.

China is 11.81% of the discipline’s value — USD 900 million of USD 7,620 million in 2025, rising to USD 1,250 million by 2033 at 4.20%. In value terms it is a modest share of a discipline that is 30.05% North American. If the story ended there, an investor could treat it as a regional problem already marked.

It does not end there, because of what the Anhui ceiling is. A discovered price is portable. It becomes the reference in the next province’s tender, the benchmark in a Gulf Cooperation Council procurement, and eventually an anchor in an export negotiation. The risk to a Western vendor is not that it loses a Chinese tender. It is that the Chinese tender price becomes the price.

That is why the discipline’s own sensitivity band is built around Chinese normalisation rather than technology adoption. The base case has China stabilising from 2027 and produces USD 10,630 million at 4.25%. If further provincial rounds run through 2026 and 2027 before stabilising, the market lands at USD 10,180 million at 3.69%. If the tender anniversary effect rolls off and volume recovery is faster than assumed, USD 11,020 million at 4.72%.

What the American fee schedule adds to the same story

The mechanism is not uniquely Chinese, and 2026 supplied the American half of the comparison. The preliminary CY 2027 Medicare Clinical Laboratory Fee Schedule cuts the complete blood count — code 85025, 36 million Medicare tests a year — from USD 7.77 to USD 6.89, an 11.3% reduction in the weighted median and 35% below its 2018 level. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 caps any single test’s annual reduction at 15% through 2029, which defers a 35% gap rather than forgiving it.

Two administered prices, then, on two continents: a 40.16% average reduction on Chinese coagulation reagents and an 11.3% cut on the American blood count. Neither is a market outcome. Both are prices set by a document.

What to watch next

The scope of the next Chinese round. Anhui covered coagulation and cardiac markers. Whether routine haematology reagents enter provincial scope at the same reduction depth is the largest single variable in this discipline’s China line — and Sysmex’s own product-level disclosure already shows haemostasis reagents taking the first hit.

Whether Mindray’s share gain converts to price. A domestic challenger that doubles share in a tendered market is winning volume at an administered price. The question for 2028 is whether it can hold margin at the price it won, or whether the next round asks it to cut again — which is the normal trajectory of a procurement programme that has established its ceiling once.

Whether the Anhui ceiling travels. Watch export pricing and non-Chinese emerging-market tenders for reference to Chinese levels. A price discovered in one province and applied in another is a regional story. A price discovered in China and applied in a Gulf tender is a global one.

Method and disclosure

This analysis is built on a 70% secondary and 30% primary basis. The secondary layer is disclosure read directly from the issuing body: Mindray’s 2025 annual results, Sysmex’s consolidated results and net-sales-by-product table, Werfen’s annual review, the CMS preliminary CY 2027 fee schedule and the Anhui procurement notice. The primary layer — 47 depth interviews across 13 markets and 29 open-ended interviews conducted around Chinese provincial and Gulf Cooperation Council tender cycles — establishes mechanism only and carries no figure.

Vendor attributions within the discipline are ours, computed on disclosed revenue and labelled as estimates where the company does not publish the line. FX basis JPY 148/USD, EUR 1.13/USD and RMB 7.20/USD. No third-party market-research material is cited anywhere in this piece.

Sources

• Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics — 2025 annual results briefing (31 March 2026)
• Sysmex Corporation — Summary of Consolidated Financial Results, FY ended 31 March 2026 (14 May 2026)
• Sysmex Corporation — Net Sales by Destination, Business and Product Type
• Werfen — Werfen reaches EUR 2.1 billion in sales (9 April 2026)
• People’s Daily, Anhui — Anhui province completes China’s first coagulation and cardiac-marker IVD reagent volume-based procurement (20 January 2023)
• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — Preliminary CY 2027 Medicare CLFS Payment Rates (21 September 2026)
• Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 — 15% annual laboratory payment reduction cap, 2027–2029

Companion reading

• Global Haematology and Coagulation Diagnostics Market, 2026–2033 — the report this analysis comes from, including the full Anhui mechanism and the China sensitivity band.
• Global In Vitro Diagnostics Market, 2026–2033 — the USD 108.0 billion base and the Jiangxi biochemical alliance, where 154 manufacturers won 2,314 specifications at an average cut of 70%.
• Global Clinical Chemistry and Urinalysis Market, 2026–2033 — the open-channel chemistry market where price competition and volume-based procurement hit together.
• Global Immunoassay Market, 2026–2033 — the discipline where Mindray’s doubling target is most directly aimed.

Related analysis

• Haemostasis Is Forty-Three Per Cent of This Discipline and Fifty-Seven Per Cent of Its Growth — why the Anhui cut landed on the half of the discipline that could not re-mix its menu, and how a DOAC deleted the PT/INR annuity that the tendered base was built on.
• The Mix Engine in Infectious Disease Diagnostics Stalls at Twenty-Six Per Cent of the Base — a field where the administered price is cut without a single dominant vendor, which is the opposite structural condition to this discipline’s 46.5% haematology leader.