Last Year, South Korea's Medical Device Trade Surplus Reached 3.8593 Trillion Won... "Surplus for 3 Consecutive Years"

Photo of a medical device to aid understanding of the article

Last year, the surplus in South Korea's medical device trade balance slightly decreased, but it maintained a surplus for the third consecutive year.

The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety announced on the 24th that the medical device trade surplus last year was $2.99 billion (3.8593 trillion KRW). This marks the third consecutive year of surplus following the first surplus of $2.21 billion in 2020 and $3.28 billion in 2021.

The production value of medical devices reached 15.7374 trillion KRW, showing a 22.2% increase compared to the previous year, marking an all-time high. Although exports ($7.88 billion) and imports ($4.89 billion) decreased by 8.7% and 8.6% respectively compared to the previous year, the rise in exchange rates led to a 3.0% and 3.1% increase in KRW terms.

The domestic medical device market size naturally expanded as well. Last year, it reached 11.8782 trillion KRW, a 30% increase from the previous year. The domestic medical device market has experienced ultra-fast growth of 159% over the past 10 years.

The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety analyzed that the reason for the increase in domestic medical device production and market size last year was due to the spread of the Omicron variant, which led to increased production of domestic COVID-19 test kits. For example, the production value of COVID-19 self-test kits increased more than fourfold from 274.4 billion KRW in 2021 to 1.4415 trillion KRW in 2022, and exports also more than doubled.

Supported by the growth of the domestic medical device market size, job creation continues. Last year, the number of employees in medical device manufacturing and import companies reached 145,826, a 7.2% increase compared to the previous year.

Additionally, last year, two companies surpassed 2 trillion KRW in production value for the first time. Ten years ago, in 2012, there were only two manufacturers with production values exceeding 200 billion KRW.

The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety plans to actively promote export support policies to revitalize the market amid increasing approvals and exports of domestically produced digital medical devices.

A ministry official stated, "We opened the ‘Comprehensive Support Center for Software Medical Device Approvals’ today, and will provide comprehensive technical support throughout the entire product development cycle?from clinical trials and approval stages to overseas market entry?for companies developing software medical devices and others."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.