Editor’s Note
**Editor’s Note:** This article features insights from Li Jianbo of Demei Medical on the growth of China’s sports medicine industry, highlighting domestic substitution trends and future opportunities in support of national health initiatives.
Beijing and Hong Kong, July 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Recently, Li Jianbo, founder and general manager of Demei Medical, a subsidiary of Aibo Medical, appeared on the People’s Daily Online program “Dialogue with Entrepreneurs” to share in-depth insights on the current development of China’s sports medicine industry, the progress of domestic substitution, and future opportunities in the sector. He stated that the sports medicine industry is a crucial component supporting national health initiatives. Whether local enterprises can break through raw material bottlenecks, improve the industrial service chain, and continuously activate innovation momentum are core factors determining whether the industry can achieve high-quality, differentiated development. Currently, the industry faces both opportunities and challenges.
According to reports, Li Jianbo officially entered the sports medicine entrepreneurship track in 2015. At that time, the domestic market for sports medicine consumables and devices was long dominated by overseas brands, with an extremely low level of localization. Data shows that five leading overseas companies held over 80% of the global market share for core sports medicine consumables, firmly controlling industry pricing power and technological R&D dominance. Domestic local enterprises generally participated in the market through agency and follow-up models, lacking core technology and market voice.
Li Jianbo’s seven years of deep experience in the agency distribution of imported sports medicine devices gave him profound insight into the industry’s pain points. For a long time, foreign brands have been tightening domestic agency rights, leaving local partner enterprises constrained and passive in their development. Under the established industry structure, the larger the business scale and the stronger the localization service capabilities of domestic enterprises, the more they triggered vigilance from foreign brands, who feared the rise of local companies would drive domestic substitution. A termination notice for an agency agreement ultimately became the direct catalyst for Li Jianbo to embark on independent entrepreneurship and deeply cultivate the domestic sports medicine field.
Reflecting on the early days of his venture, Li Jianbo admitted that the initial preparations were rushed, starting almost from scratch. The company faced multiple difficulties in its early stages, including talent shortages, constraints on core raw materials, and a lack of market trust, with very little room for error in the industry. Since there was no mature precedent for original domestic sports medicine consumables in China, industry recognition was low. Any deviation in R&D or product launch could cause irreversible damage to the company’s brand and industry reputation.
Based on real clinical diagnostic and treatment needs, focusing on core clinical indicators such as bone loss control, product pull-out strength, and in vivo biological safety, Li Jianbo led his team to precisely target R&D directions. They concentrated core resources on developing all-suture soft anchor products, striving to create high-safety, high-adaptability, and high-quality domestic high-end sports medicine medical consumables, filling gaps in domestic independent products in related fields.
The path to marketization and clinical validation of original medical devices is fraught with difficulties. In the early stages of the industry, most similar devices could obtain qualification certification and market approval simply through comparative evaluation of clinical literature. However, to truly benchmark against international imported products and verify the core performance of domestic products, Demei Medical proactively raised its R&D and validation standards, conducting high-standard “head-to-head” clinical trials to prove that domestic product performance is on par with imported brands.
The clinical trial cycle was lengthy, the process complex, the ethical review protocol revised multiple times, and cross-regional clinical coordination was heavy, putting the R&D team through numerous tests. This extremely rigorous R&D attitude and meticulous clinical validation ultimately helped the company break through the clinical trust barrier. Currently, Demei Medical has established regular collaborative research mechanisms with several top-tier Class A tertiary hospitals in China, including Peking University Third Hospital and the First Affiliated Hospital of the Army Medical University. Relying on a cross-disciplinary R&D team of nearly 100 people and a 50,000-square-meter standardized production base, the company has achieved standardized operations covering everything from trial design and sample mass production for testing to full-cycle tracking of clinical data, with the entire process benchmarking against international imported product standards. Simultaneously, the company is advancing hundreds of ongoing R&D projects covering multiple core self-developed areas such as new biomaterials, minimally invasive surgical instruments, and endoscopic diagnostic equipment, building a diversified innovation system.
With solid and excellent clinical trial data, Demei Medical has gained high recognition from authoritative experts in top-tier tertiary hospitals, accumulating core clinical customer resources and a good industry reputation. However, imported brands have been deeply entrenched in the domestic market for years, with well-established distribution channels and solidified user habits. These deep market barriers still pose significant resistance to the market expansion of domestic brands, making product promotion and adoption difficult.
In November 2023, the fourth round of national volume-based procurement (VBP) for high-value medical consumables was officially implemented, with sports medicine consumables included for the first time, bringing a critical policy opportunity for the development of domestic sports medicine enterprises.
In Li Jianbo’s view, the VBP policy is a crucial lever for reshaping the industry landscape. Although the price reductions from VBP put short-term pressure on company revenue and profits, they effectively broke down traditional market channel barriers, significantly improving market accessibility for high-quality domestic consumables and allowing more patients to benefit from cost-effective domestic medical products. Leveraging the market logic of “small profits but quick turnover,” the company achieved scaled sales growth, gradually forming a virtuous development cycle of “price reduction driving volume, cost reduction improving efficiency, and increased revenue funding further R&D,” continuously solidifying the company’s core competitiveness.
Currently, the old foreign monopoly structure in China’s sports medicine industry is continuously loosening, and the industry has officially entered a critical inflection point for domestic substitution. Relying on reliable product quality, an increasingly complete local industrial chain, and significant cost and service advantages, the market recognition of domestic sports medicine brands is continuously rising, accelerating the rewriting of the industry’s market structure. Local original innovation has entered a new stage of breakthrough development.
Regarding the future development of the industry, Li Jianbo maintains a clear understanding. According to industry patterns, sports medicine product technology iterates rapidly, characterized by “a model change every three years, a generation change every five years.” Currently, domestic devices still lag behind top international brands in specific areas such as post-operative rehabilitation, full-cycle sports health management, and high-end biomaterial R&D.
Looking back on a decade of entrepreneurial deep cultivation, Li Jianbo summarized: “Everything is possible; it’s just a matter of time.” He stated that industry development is never a solitary path. In the future, Demei Medical will adhere to a collaborative development philosophy, linking upstream and downstream industry resources, pooling industrial innovation forces, and continuing to deeply cultivate original medical device technology R&D. At the same time, it will drive the coordinated development of sub-sectors such as sports rehabilitation and sports nutrition, building a symbiotic and co-prosperous industry ecosystem, continuously promoting the high-quality development of the domestic sports medicine industry, and laying a solid foundation for domestic medical devices to enter the international market.
