Hanmi at a glance

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R&D driven pioneer For innovation in life sciences

Foundation date : June 15th, 1973
President & CEO: Sung-Ki Lim, Gwan-Sun Lee
Total Sales : 616 billion won (2009)
Employee : 1,894
Subsidiaries : Hanmi Fine Chemical, Hanmi Medicare, Hanmi IT, Beijing Hanmi Pharm,
Hanmi Japan, Hanmi Europe

“Young company with 36 years of history, dramatically grows”

Established in 1973, Hanmi Pharmaceutical has now become the 2nd largest pharmaceutical company with sales up to $558 million in 2008.

Hanmi Pharmaceutical was successful in developing competitive products through ‘First Generic → IMD (Incrementally Modified Drug) → New drug’ Korean type R&D strategy. By investing the cash cow from this success into new product development, Hanmi was able to become a competitive pharmaceutical company in the global market.

While other Korean pharmaceutical companies focused only on in-licensing products from foreign companies, Hanmi concentrated on developing domestic products through in-house API synthesis. This allowed Hanmi to be successful in developing the competitive modifying technology.

Development of competitive products through Korean type R&D strategy Out of 200 Hanmi products, only 3.2% (7products) are in-licensed products. By developing the market with low price-high quality products, Hanmi has lowered the customers’ economic burden and become a part in stopping the outflow of foreign currency.

Hanmi invests 80% of the amount in developing New products, 15% in developing IMDs, and 5% in developing Generic products.

This strategy was very successful and Hanmi started to ‘shake’ the market with everybody referring to Hanmi as ‘the developer of the Korean style modified drug.”

In 1988, Hanmi was successful in exporting Ceftriaxone manufacturing technology to Roche for 9 million sFr and then licensed out the technology to Novartis for $20 million.

While most companies were forced to go through a restructuring during IMF, Hanmi aggressively recruited more people and invested more in R&D using the resource earned from exporting our technology and dramatically grew with the separation of dispensary from medical practice in 2000 as the starting point.

The profitable modifying technology results in new drug technology

The technology accumulated through research on modified drugs put energy into new drug research which started in 2000. Hanmi has succeeded in developing ORASCOVERY Technology, which enables the change of currently available injection therapies for cancer treatment to oral dosage treatment. Hanmi has also succeeded in developing LAPSCOVERY technology which is a technology that enhances the half-life time for bio-products.

Marketing and sales ability shown through IT technology based activity

High quality sales and marketing based on IT technology is the driving force of Hanmi’s growth along with Hanmi’s capability of developing competitive products. From 1990, sales representatives have been going to the field in the morning and directly back home after work. Hanmi has longed for a system which minimizes document work and puts sales representatives closer to the customers.

Hanmi was able to increase the quality gap with other companies by working to achieve ‘Sales revolution’ by closing all sales stores, allowing the representatives to work at home, and specifying the teams into groups with the power to make decisions.

Being the first to successfully apply the automatic sales system (SFA) using PDAs in the pharmaceutical market made this kind of change possible.

We were able to achieve ‘speed’ sales by making it possible for sales representatives, who act as a mobile office, to get orders and proceed with payments in the field.

We were also able to achieve higher quality in sales through the sales representatives’ participation in a 3 day-training program where a successful experience (case study) is shared, and by receiving education on products and their job through our own on-line training program called CES.

Hanmi’s way of selling and marketing products in a position as close to the customers as possible using our IT technology, is analyzed and benchmarked by many other companies.

[Products with sales over $10 million] (mil. USD)
Product Indication Product Indication
Amodipine Hypertension Medilac Intestinal disorder
Clari Infection Slimmer anti-obesity
Guardix Anti-adhesion Triaxone Antibiotic
Carnitil Cerebrovascular Itra Antifungal
Mucolase Inflammation Glimepid Antidiabetic
Simvast hyperlipemia Amoxclan Antibiotic

Hanmi to achieve overseas sales of $100 million

Hanmi, which achieved overseas sales of $77.5 million, is expecting overseas sales of $100 million in 2009. The new vision for Hanmi is to succeed in globalization with overseas sales of $1 billion in 2015 and $3 billion in 2020.

Hanmi is continuously working on becoming a global pharmaceutical company based on our experience in becoming one of the largest companies in Korea in 36 years, with the Korean type R&D strategy and high quality marketing and selling.