It comes down to numbers: Latin America has more than 20,000 hospitals, compared to 5,754 for the United States, for example. By itself, Brazil is #4 in the world in terms of amount of hospitals, with 7,878, behind Japan (8,565), India (8,652) and China (23,170).

In fact, Brazil and Mexico are both in the top 10 of countries with the most hospitals: the amount of hospitals in Mexico is 3,658, more than Germany or France and more than 5 times the amount of hospitals in Canada (725).

Beyond Brazil and Mexico, other key hospital markets in Latin America are Colombia (with 2,554 hospitals), Argentina (2,306 hospitals) and Chile (383 hospitals). While Chile’s amount of hospitals may seem relatively small, keep in mind that it has more hospitals than Switzerland (298), the Netherlands (259) and Belgium (191), among other markets.

Growth Prospects

Of course, the greater opportunity for global medical equipment or device brands is not just in the sheer number of hospitals: it’s about the rapidly growing demand that Latin American hospitals have for this equipment.

In tracking this growth with the HospiScope database, we’ve seen hospitals in Latin America significantly grow their equipment counts in 2017. For example:

• Mexican hospitals increased nuclear medicine systems by more than 50%, MRI machines by 24% and gamma cameras by 17%
• Brazilian hospitals increased their EKG machine counts by 34%, their MRI machines by 9% and their CAT scanners by 7%
• Argentine hospitals increased their counts MRI machines, EKG machines, endoscopy towers, ventilators and EEG machines by more than 50%
• Chilean hospitals increased their stereotactic mammography machine counts by 34% in 2017, while also increasing their counts of MRI machines (20%), ultrasound machines (14%), CAT scanners (10%) and EKG machines (3%)
• Colombian hospitals increased their counts of ultrasound machines by 44% in 2017, while also elevating their counts of X-ray machines (42%), EKG machines (40%), MRI machines (37%) and EEG machines (25%)

And that’s just the bigger markets. HospiScope also tracked strong 2017 growth in equipment counts for hospitals in Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Guatemala and other smaller markets.

The figures from HospiScope jibe well with a different set of numbers for 2017: the amounts of different equipment types imported into Latin American countries. We’ve already noted significant growth in Brazil, Chile, Peru and Argentina, among other markets.

Solidify Your Share

Given the current health trends (the rise in NCDs) and demographic shifts (the projected explosion in seniors) in Latin America, it seems likely that the region’s 20,000+ hospitals will become bigger battlegrounds as established players jockey for position while also fending off companies from Asia that are starting to explore the LatAm market. And since market intelligence can often give you the edge over competitors, you may want to explore using ShareScope for a data-driven third-party evaluation of your market share in different countries, as well as In-Scope to obtain intelligence on competitors or more detailed market studies.

The Asian Hospital Market

You may have noticed the huge numbers for Asian hospital markets — like China — that we cited at the beginning of the piece. So have any number of medical equipment manufacturers, but Asian countries present their own challenges for market entry. That’s why here at Global Health Intelligence we have been working to offer market intelligence for the Asian healthcare market, which you can find here. Beyond those preliminaries, our experienced team can also help you with ad-hoc custom research for the Asian hospital market.

Contact us directly to explore more.

These days, it may not be enough.

Global Health Intelligence built a database covering nearly 90% of the hospitals in Latin America, and in Colombia, we cover 74%. For each hospital in Colombia (and every other country) that we profile, we include more than 130 data points—especially what kind of medical devices and equipment that hospitals have. With this knowledge, a sales and marketing teams for medical devices/equipment firms in Latin America can see where hospitals are overstocked and, more importantly where they have the biggest needs.

Knowing that—as well as who to contact for purchases, which we also include in the database in many instances—your team can then identify strong prospects and sell.

Below you can download one of our fact sheets for Colombia that breaks down data on beds, rooms, different types of medical devices and equipment, IT infrastructure, procedures performed and more.

That will give you a basic idea of the data, but if you schedule a 30-minute demo with GHI, you can see for yourself how quickly this high-tech tool can uncover a slew of sales opportunities in Colombia and in many other Latin American medical device markets.

• Build personal contacts
• Pitch prospects one by one
• Be active in trade shows to increase brand awareness
• Keep at it

That’s pretty much been it. Different approaches, particularly those involving data to drive targeting, just weren’t possible. The available data for Latin America on capital equipment, medical devices, consumables, PACs, RIS and other categories was either unavailable, incomplete or extremely out of date. So the typical push made perfect sense.

Now it makes a lot less sense.

Global Health Intelligence (GHI) built a team to do all the important digging as far as purchases and imports of different types of medical supplies and equipment in LatAm for nearly 90% of the hospitals in the region, not to mention quantifying the market share of different companies in different categories. This means you can take a much more strategic, informed approach to spiking sales. While it’s great to see medical devices sales going up 8% YOY in Mexico and sales surging with infusion pumps and capnography equipment, that general data isn’t as helpful when you don’t know who has the greatest need—and how to reach them. With this in mind, here’s how to increase your sales of medical equipment in LatAm using a data-driven approach.

#1: Drill Down to Find Opportunities

Your sales team obviously knows who they want to target based on previous experience—they bought product A before so they’ll probably need more soon. But what if casual touching base with your clients doesn’t reveal a need in another area—simply because your client doesn’t handle that area and doesn’t know? Yet if you could call up a hospital’s equipment purchases in the past year with a few quick clicks, you could see opportunities that you never even thought of…because they never came up in client conversations before.

#2: Plan Strategically with Greater Precision

When it comes time to map out strategy for next year and how much to commit to different parts of the budget, many sales and marketing teams know what they’ll do…and at the same time, they don’t know. They don’t often have hard data on what’s happening in different areas that can help them figure out how much to allocate in marketing/sales or which areas they should target more in the coming year because there’s a need. Instead, they rely on feel—their impression of what’s happening based on what they’re seeing and what their clients say. This could be valid when you have an experienced team in place—but why not add objective data to be sure that your team’s feel for the market is solid?

#3: Strengthen Your CRM

There no question that a good CRM software like Salesforce can streamline your customer relationships and strengthen marketing campaigns. But why limit yourself to ONLY your data? By integrating your CRM with GHI’s hospitals database, you synchronize your contacts and their buying habits with identified sales needs based on real-world equipment counts so you can further increase the efficiency of your targeting and cross-selling via CRM, not to mention making your marketing efforts more targeted by basing them on real-world needs from rock-solid data.

#4: Power Your Propensity Analysis

This approach tries to predict customer behavior by using variables and isolating out who among your customer base is most likely to buy. While there are a number of great tools out there for running a propensity analysis, the strength of your results are only as good as your data. As with CRM, why base your analysis on just your internal data? If you can incorporate real-world sales results from real-world behaviors for dozens of categories, you’ll be able to identify many more prospects with proven needs you can meet.

NEXT STEPS

Contact GHI for a 30-minute demo to see how our tool can help you get started with these 4 approaches and jump-start your numbers ASAP. Just tell us where you want to improve and the challenges you have. We’ll show you how easy it is to get your answers and then apply them to your sales strategies. While tried-and-true is fine for an approach, there’s always value in trying a new approach based on a true picture of the market—and that’s what we can give you.