Over fifty years ago, Hengrui Pharmaceuticals began its journey in Lianyungang as a generic drug manufacturer. At the time, China's pharmaceutical industry was still in its infancy, and generic drugs were the primary path for the survival and development of domestic pharmaceutical companies.

As China's pharmaceutical industry gradually shifted toward a strategy of independent innovation, the state's support for innovative drugs continued to increase, and the industry's development focus turned to independent research and development. Seizing the opportunity, Hengrui gradually shed its label as a generic drug manufacturer and began concentrating resources on the field of new drug R&D.

After twenty years of continuous dedication and accumulation, Hengrui Pharmaceuticals has now built a robust R&D pipeline covering small molecules, large molecules, ADC (antibody-drug conjugates), and other areas. With over a hundred drugs in development, the company is advancing more than 400 clinical trials globally. These trials cover major disease areas such as oncology, autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular diseases, and metabolic diseases. Both the scale and speed of its R&D efforts place Hengrui at the forefront of domestic pharmaceutical companies.

Jiang Ningjun emphasized in the aforementioned event, "Our advantage still lies in R&D and efficiency."

In fact, it is not just Hengrui Pharmaceuticals. The rapid progress in early-stage R&D has become a hallmark of the rise of China's biotech industry, helping local companies begin to surpass international competitors in areas such as cancer and gene therapies.

To steadily advance its international布局 and address the bottlenecks of limited overseas resources and weak independent commercialization capabilities, Hengrui has explored a multi-path approach to international development.

In 2025, Hengrui frequently announced international collaborations.

In March, it licensed the Lp(a) oral small-molecule inhibitor HRS-5346 to Merck & Co. in the United States, with an upfront payment of $200 million, setting a new industry record at the time. In April, Germany's Merck announced another collaboration with Hengrui, obtaining exclusive commercialization rights for the oral GnRH receptor antagonist SHR7280 in mainland China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan). In July, Hengrui licensed the rights related to the PDE3/4 inhibitor HRS-9821 project to GSK, with an upfront payment of $500 million and potential milestone payments of up to $12 billion.

These transactions brought new performance growth to Hengrui. In the first half of 2025, the company's revenue from innovative drug sales and licensing reached 9.561 billion yuan, accounting for approximately 60% of its total revenue, with licensing income contributing 1.991 billion yuan.

At the same time, Hengrui has also innovated in its collaboration models.

In May 2024, Hengrui partnered with Bain Capital to bundle its GLP-1 pipeline into a newly established overseas company, Hercules (now renamed Kailera Therapeutics). While receiving licensing fees, Hengrui also holds a 19.9% equity stake in the new company. In October 2025, Kailera Therapeutics announced the completion of a $600 million Series B financing round.

Jiang Ningjun stated that this model allows Hengrui to gain valuable experience while acquiring overseas assets. It is worth noting that this model sparked a wave of NewCo transactions in China, with nearly 10 such collaborations completed in 2024, totaling over $10 billion in transaction value.

Meanwhile, Hengrui is actively promoting the submission of its candidate drugs to the FDA. However, its liver cancer therapy, the "dual-Ai" combination (camrelizumab + apatinib), was twice rejected by the FDA due to issues related to the production process. According to foreign media reports, Hengrui and its partner Elevar Therapeutics have recently resubmitted the application.

Domestically, the "dual-Ai" combination was approved by the NMPA in 2023 for the first-line treatment of advanced hepatocellular carcinoma. In December of last year, the final analysis results of the Phase III CARES-310 study for the first-line treatment of unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma showed an overall survival (OS) of 23.8 months. Among the approved treatments for unresectable or metastatic hepatocellular carcinoma, the "dual-Ai" regimen has achieved the longest median OS data to date.

Hengrui Pharmaceuticals has the potential to become a new model of a multinational pharmaceutical company rising from China, but another pioneer in going global must be mentioned here—BeiGene.

In 2019, BeiGene gained international fame when its anticancer drug Brukinsa (zanubrutinib) received FDA approval, setting a record for Chinese anticancer drugs entering the global market. However, the international environment today is no longer the same as before. Globalization, the favorable capital environment, and the regulatory landscape have all changed, making the path to going overseas more complex.

Tense geopolitical relations between China and the United States have cast a huge shadow. Although the U.S. Congress passed a weakened version of the Biosecure Act last year, it still attempts to restrict Chinese biopharmaceutical companies deemed security threats.

A Bernstein analyst commented, "Five years ago, people believed Chinese companies were more innovative and would smoothly go global, but reality has been far more difficult than imagined, with far more failures than successes."

Objectively speaking, there are indeed limited cases of Chinese-developed drugs achieving major breakthroughs in the international market.

A milestone event is that zanubrutinib’s global sales exceeded $2 billion in 2024, making it the first Chinese-developed drug to enter the "blockbuster club." Additionally, Legend Biotech’s CAR-T cell therapy Carvykti achieved global sales of $1.887 billion in 2025, a 95.9% year-over-year increase compared to 2024.

However, aside from zanubrutinib and Carvykti, few other products have been able to gain a solid foothold in the global market. Nevertheless, the wave of intensive transactions between Chinese and American pharmaceutical companies last year may indicate a critical shift in the industry in the coming years.

Data from the National Medical Products Administration shows that in 2025, the total value of China’s innovative drug out-licensing deals exceeded $130 billion, with over 150 transactions—both figures representing significant growth compared to 2024. Around the same time, CSPC Pharmaceutical Group signed a major deal with AstraZeneca, with an upfront payment of $1.2 billion and a potential total value of $18.5 billion.

Furthermore, some Chinese pharmaceutical companies have moved beyond simple collaboration models when partnering with Western companies. For example, Innovent Biologics’ collaboration with Takeda Pharmaceutical, which involved a $1.2 billion upfront payment, represents a deep partnership in co-development and commercialization. Compared to simple patent licensing deals, this model better helps Chinese companies "learn from industry best practices."

For pharmaceutical companies of all sizes, entering more profitable overseas markets through transactions and other means is crucial. Hundreds of Chinese biotech companies are developing across the "full spectrum" to establish themselves internationally, but industry insiders point out that truly multinational-capable companies are few.

Returning to Hengrui itself, the aforementioned analyst concluded that, given its current corporate scale and high-profile R&D pipeline, Hengrui remains unique among domestic pharmaceutical companies. "Their ambition is clear: they aim not only to be a giant but also to establish a global presence."

However, the analyst also cautioned that most of Hengrui’s assets are still in the early stages of development and have yet to mature into overseas commercialization capabilities. "The true highlight moment has not yet arrived."