With a population of more than 200 million, it’s the largest market for medical devices in Latin America, with around 6,500 hospitals and 18,000 diagnostic laboratories. While there are nearly 4,000 domestic factories that manufacture medical devices, an estimate from BoneZone claims that 80% of all medical products used in Brazilian hospitals are imported.

While in recent years  we’ve seen downturns in Brazil’s market in terms of medical device imports, more recent numbers compiled by our ShareScope service suggest that Brazil is bouncing back nicely in that area.

But medical device imports are far from the only area in which Brazil’s healthcare industry is making a comeback. Here are some other market estimates for health sectors within Brazil that are posting impressive growth.

Overall Healthcare Spending

A projection from ReportBuyers indicates that healthcare spending in Brazil will increase significantly over the next couple of years, posting a current adjusted growth rate (CAGR) of 5.8% between now and 2020.

Medical Equipment in Hospitals

When we looked at the numbers from our HospiScope service — our extensive database for Latin American hospitals — we noticed that Brazilian hospitals increased their equipment counts in a variety of categories during 2017. These include:

•    Nuclear medicine systems (up by 14%)
•    Electrocardiogram machines (up by 34%)
•    Endoscopy machines (up by 27%)
•    X-ray machines (up by 12%)
•    MRI machines (up by 9%)
•    Fluoroscopes (up by 7%)
•    Bone densitometers (up by 6%)

This specific growth we’re seeing seems to dovetail well with market projections from other sources, such as the one by GlobalData, which indicated that Brazil’s medical device market will grow with a CAGR of 7.5% to reach a value of US$14.2 billion by 2020.

Biomaterials

Brazil’s biomaterials market (used for cardiovascular, orthopedic, wound care and urological treatments and drug delivery) will grow with a CAGR of 18.3% between 2017 and 2022 to reach a value of US$5.1 billion in 2022, compared to its 2016 value of US$1.8 billion.

Pharmaceuticals

The Brazilian pharma market is set to grow with a CAGR of 3.5% between now and 2021, eventually reaching a value of nearly US$30 billion that year — a solid jump from its 2016 value of US$25.3 billion.

Digital Health

This sector involves healthcare IT, new software for case management and predictive analysis and other types of mHealth or mobile health solutions, as well as electronic medical records. Global Market Insights predicts that the Brazilian digital health market will grow by nearly 28% between 2015 and 2024.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF BRAZIL’S BOOM

Companies looking to maximize their opportunities in Brazil can explore a number of options with Global Health Intelligence (GHI) that can help achieve that:

HospiScope: Medical device companies can use this GHI product to see which Brazilian hospitals are increasing equipment counts to quickly identify new prospects or to sync HospiScope with their customer relationship platform to perform propension analysis and optimize safe force effectiveness.

ShareScope: Companies looking to enter or expand within Brazil can use this product to know which brands have the highest market shares with different types of products and also discover market sizes to gauge growth potential for their sales efforts.

In-Scope: This service digs out competitive intelligence, which can give companies in the pharma, biomaterials or medical devices sector and advantage over their rivals. In-Scope can also provide custom research to answer specific strategic questions your firm may have about the Brazilian healthcare market — along with guidance from GHI analysts to turn market insights into effective strategy steps.