Until early 2020 Seegene was a medium sized South Korean purveyor of medical diagnostics with around $110m in annual sales. It ended the year with a net profit of $440m
Seegene’s employees worked around the clock, snatching a few hours of sleep in hotels near the office. Dozens more were hired overnight. Within weeks the firm was exporting millions of test kits to dozens of countries around the globe. It ended the year with $1bn in sales and $440m in net profit. Other South Korean biotech firms have had a similarly good pandemic.
The industry’s boosters believe that, in the words of Kwon Oh-sung of the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, a government think-tank, “the pandemic has been a turning point”. Companies have probably “learned more and accumulated more technology over the past year than in the ten years before that”, thinks Mr Lee.
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