Mexico’s medical device industry overview
By Adina Moloman
Sources: Qmed, Plastics News, SRE
Cleveland-based Freedonia Group Inc. report the world demand for medical device packaging will increase 5.9 percent annually to $25.7 billion in 2017, the demand will still be concentrated in Western European countries, the United States and Japan.
Beside this group there are other emerging countries with an increase role in the medical device industry. Mexico is one of them, because it attracts foreign direct investment to establish manufacturing in Mexico operations to serve the huge internal market and export to countries where Mexico has a free trade agreement in place. The countries investing in this sector include the United States of America, which represents more than 80% of total foreign direct investment followed by Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.
Since Mexico’s medical device market continues to grow, Mexico’s internal demand for medical products is forecasted to have a compounded annual growth rate of 5.2% by 2020 and is becoming the second largest medical equipment market in Latin America, behind Brazil. Partly this is explained by a higher national demand for healthcare services. Analysts from the medical device sector are predicting an increase in the manufacture of medical devices in Mexico by 74% over the next years, reaching an industry that is worth $14.9 billion in 2020.
The statistics so far are showing that in Mexico, this sector has more than 2,000 economic units, of which approximately 400 companies are exporters; most of them are dedicated to manufacturing and assembly, but in the last three years many transnational corporations are including research and development product operations in their Mexico manufacturing plants.
The state of Baja California has the largest concentration of medical device companies in Latin America, with over 65 plants providing more than 35,000 jobs. The Baja California cluster has reached such an important growth partly to the interaction with San Diego, California medical sector, reaching a sophisticated bi-national medical device interaction
