Peter Abrahamson doesn’t mind admitting that his company is targeting the newly rich.

The Shanghai-based CEO of listed WA product marketer Helicon, Abrahamson has on-the-ground knowledge of the growing might of China’s middle classes, who have money to spend and are demanding the best.

That includes the best in healthcare in a country with no national health scheme but a hospital infrastructure that is booming.

“A tertiary hospital like the Royal North Shore or the Royal Prince Alfred (in Sydney) might have 200 beds,” Abrahamson says.

“The bigger hospitals in China, the class three hospitals, might have 1200 beds. They are state of the art, brand new, very well resourced, have paperless systems and they treat hundreds and hundreds of patients a day.”

The concept of medical insurance is starting to appear in China, Abrahamson says, but most currently pay out of their own pocket. And they are demanding the best.

“They can afford it and they want the best. The doctors give them a choice: you can have this or that and this is how much it costs. All of the multinationals are there charging Western prices and going very well.”

Helicon is not about to compete with the multinationals, who all have their own manufacturing facilities and sales staff on the ground, or with the enormous generic medicines market.

“If you think of the number of Chinese people who are taking antibiotics or analgesics every day, it’s massive,” he says. “But they work on extremely fine margins and there is no way that a foreign company like ours could even think of competing in that area.”

What Helicon is doing instead is identifying niche areas of need, and finding a registered product to fill it. In what the company calls special situation opportunities, Helicon is looking at areas like intensive care, emergency medicine, oncology and cosmetic surgery and finding gaps that a Western product can fill.

In July, Helicon had its first licensed product approved for sale in China, the skin regeneration kit ReCell, developed by Professor Fiona Wood and Avita Medical (formerly known as Clinical Cell Culture).

Helicon doesn’t make any products itself and calls itself a speciality pharmaceutical marketing company.

It has licensed four products so far: ReCell; a collagen-based implantable sponge impregnated with the antibiotic gentamicin called Collatamp G, licensed from UK-US pharma EUSA Pharma; Volplex, a succinylated gelatin-based blood plasma substitute from Maelor of the UK; and a wound dressing with a potent bacteriostatic agent for surgical site infections from MedWrap.

“We are in the ICU area and are actively looking for more products there; surgical infections are a huge market in China in particular; and then the cosmetic surgery area,” Abrahamson says. “So we have a strategy there for surgeons. We are also actively seeking products in the oncology area – drugs and diagnostics.”

Collatamp has recently been licensed and Helicon is preparing a product dossier for submission to China’s State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA). This is a long and detailed process and is expected to last 18 months.

To assist in the complex process of gaining regulatory approval, Helicon has appointed a regulatory partner called ChinaGate, which works with the likes of Bayer, 3M and Organon.