Clinical diagnostics benefits from COVID bounce - recruiter says

Clinical diagnostic technology in the UK has experienced a substantial ‘COVID bounce’, according to the head a leading recruitment company focussed primarily on servicing the sector.

Ivor Campbell, chief executive of Snedden Campbell, said a concerted focus on testing and diagnostics during the Coronavirus pandemic in the past year has attracted major investment to the sector which has led to a recruitment drive among diagnostic companies.

Prior to March last year, the UK represented around 50% of the Stirlingshire-based company’s business, but since the end of the first lockdown last May it has increased to close to 100%.

Many established diagnostic companies have repurposed production to focus on COVID-19 testing but the main driver of growth is increased confidence within established and earlier stage businesses partly based on private and public investment, according to Campbell.

The increase in confidence in diagnostic businesses has encouraged the birth of more start-ups and there is evidence that the non-diagnostic medical technology industry has also benefited from investment.

Campbell, who has recruited senior technical talent and board executives for medical technology companies from the smallest to the biggest, including Abbott, Siemens and Werfen, said: “Until March 2020, our business was split 50-50 between the UK and an arc across western Europe from Barcelona to Copenhagen. 

“Since COVID, everything has been focussed on the UK. Historically we would have our work cut out to fill our time with UK projects, now all our revenue is being generated out of the UK.”

The UK med tech sector is the third largest in Europe, comprising 3,700 companies, most of which are small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), generating a turnover of £21 billion. 

Employing 115,000 researchers, scientists, engineers, designers, and clinicians, including 9,000 north of the border, the sector produces a vast range of medical devices and diagnostic technologies.

While in vitro diagnostics represents only 7% of the sector, it is one of the fastest growing segments of the industry by revenue. The biggest are digital health, which accounts for 28% of revenue, drug delivery (23%) and single use technology, such as syringes, lancets, and infusion lines (19%).

According to Campbell, who launched his company in 2001 after working for some of the UK’s biggest recruitment companies, the UK medtech industry is now on a rapid path to growth, with new opportunities opening in the US and Asia Pacific markets.

He said: “Germany and France have the advantage of large companies like Roche, Siemens and BioMerieux who develop their own laboratory diagnostic systems at scales capable of competing with US-based giants.

“In recent years, the UK diagnostic sector’s advantage has been the ability to fund new entrants into the point-of-care and rapid test markets, and now the best of these are growing steadily in an encouraging COVID-accelerated investment environment.  

“The NHS is the largest customer for medical technologies in the UK, serving more than 60 million patients but it’s a finite and conservative customer. UK medtech has always looked to export and Brexit is encouraging companies to double down on their efforts to look further afield.

“An upside for many medtech businesses, because they tend to be primarily a high-margin and low-volume traders, is that the practical differences between selling in Sydney or Paris aren’t that high. 

“For most UK medtech companies, their big market has always been the US, the EU not so much. The US remains a land of plenty for a lot of UK diagnostics companies and many see their futures increasingly in Asia Pacific. Most have somebody based in China and India and, in normal times, Australia is becoming a regular haunt for sales directors. 

“The argument about the EU is that it has 500 million consumers. That may be the case but the market for sophisticated medical technology is among the richer countries in western Europe, mostly the arc of countries from Spain to Finland. 

“Do we have clients who are doing huge amounts of business in Bulgaria? No not really. France, Benelux, the Nordics, and Iberia. They are important places to understand and work in. The rest of it, right now, not so much.”