Foreign investors fled Chinese biotech after the pandemic. They still haven’t come back

Out­side biotech mon­ey isn’t pour­ing in­to Chi­na like it used to.

In 2020 and 2021, ven­ture in­vestors put near­ly $8 bil­lion in­to Chi­nese bio­phar­mas. But in the years that fol­lowed, those amounts have plunged as in­vestors have sharply pulled back from Chi­na, ac­cord­ing to da­ta from Deal­For­ma. Pri­vate in­vest­ments last year to­taled a mere $600 mil­lion. And the de­cline has been echoed in the pub­lic mar­ket as well: A No­vem­ber re­port from McK­in­sey sug­gests that among 35 list­ed Chi­na biotechs, $80 bil­lion in mar­ket cap had been erased since the peak.

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