AstraZeneca has announced it will spend $100 million on research and development in China over the next three years.
"China is an extremely large pharmaceutical market that is growing very rapidly," David Brennan, chief executive of Europe's third-biggest pharmaceutical, said today.
While the global pharmaceutical market was growing 7 per cent annually, China's market was expanding at a rate of more than 20 per cent, said Mr Brennan.
Drug sales in China could almost double to $25 billion a year from $13 billion in 2005, as Chinese increasingly accept Western medicines, say analysts.
The company said its investment was the largest by any multinational drug company to date in China, but that was still only a tiny fraction of the $3.4 billion AstraZeneca spent last year on research and development.
China is AstraZeneca's fastest growing major market, with annual growth of about 30 percent, but sales in the country last year were only about $300 million compared to the company's nearly $24 billion in global sales.