China Opens Bids in 7th Medical Consumables Bulk Buy

China opened bids on Thursday for its seventh national round of centralized, volume-based procurement (VBP) of medical consumables, moving to drive down prices on a new category of surgical supplies. The bid-opening conference was held in the northern city of Tianjin, where 156 companies submitted bids covering 558 products, according to Xinhua News.

The round focuses on digestive intervention consumables, incorporating 23 varieties used mainly in endoscopic surgical treatment of digestive tract diseases, including gastrointestinal polyp removal and biliary and pancreatic intervention procedures, CCTV News reported. The procurement cycle is about three years.

What Happened

Bidding companies began entering the venue at 7:30 a.m. to submit pricing materials, and submissions closed at 9:30 a.m., after which the on-site bid-reading phase began, Xinhua reported. The bid opening was held at the Tianjin Saixiang Hotel in the city’s Xiqing District, per an official notice from the National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA).

The seventh round applies the guiding principles of “stabilizing clinical use, ensuring quality, opposing involution, and preventing bid-rigging,” according to the NHSA notice issued a day before the event. The agency said procurement rules were optimized to balance diverse clinical demand with high-quality industry development.

The process unfolds in two rounds. The first produces intended-winner enterprises under “Rule 1,” while the second generates winners under Rules 2 and 3 for companies that did not win directly in the first round. Enterprises with bundled “suite” products submit bids during the second round and receive a separate bid sub-list and a comparable reference price.

Context: A Program Built Over Six Rounds

China’s medical insurance authority has already completed six national rounds of consumables VBP, drawing categories such as coronary stents, artificial joints, orthopedic spine products, sports medicine devices, intraocular lenses, artificial cochleas, peripheral vascular stents, drug-coated balloons, and urological intervention supplies into the program, Xinhua noted. Together these span cardiology, orthopedics, ophthalmology, vascular surgery, ENT, urology, and gastroenterology.

The program’s scale is striking. In its first round, the average price of coronary stents fell from roughly 13,000 yuan to about 700 yuan — a reduction of about 93 percent — according to background compiled from 21st Century Business Herald. Subsequent rounds saw artificial hip and knee joints fall by an average of about 82 percent, and cumulative savings from VBP have been reported in the hundreds of billions of yuan.

VBP is a government-led mechanism in which the state aggregates the purchasing volume of public hospitals nationwide and negotiates or bids for large-volume purchases at substantially reduced prices. It is a central plank of China’s broader healthcare reform, aimed at curbing inflated prices and distribution irregularities while easing the financial burden on patients and the medical insurance fund.

Analysis: The “Anti-Involution” Shift

The seventh round marks the first time digestive intervention consumables have been brought into the national VBP framework, extending coverage into gastroenterology. It also reinforces the program’s trajectory toward what officials call “normalization and institutionalization” of VBP for drugs and consumables.

Recent rounds have carried an explicit “anti-involution” design — a reference to avoiding destructive, race-to-the-bottom competition, per Yicai. Rather than simply selecting the lowest price, the rules use an anchor-price approach: when the lowest bid is too low, 65 percent of the average shortlisted price serves as the price-difference control benchmark. In the sixth round, 8 of 20 competitive groups triggered this rule, preventing individual firms from bidding extreme lows that would drag down an entire group.

The design pairs grouped competition with price-difference control and an innovation tilt, awarding comparison coefficients based on clinical value for products with special functional innovation.

For manufacturers, the shift is reshaping industry logic. As one industry analyst put it, under the normalization of VBP, “the core logic of enterprises has shifted from competing on channels to competing on cost, R&D, and supply.” Domestic manufacturers have been gaining market share as domestic substitution accelerates, and industry concentration is expected to rise.

For listed companies, VBP compresses gross margins but lowers selling-expense ratios, shifting valuation logic from marketing-driven “high-growth, high-margin” models toward manufacturing- and platform-driven models built on scale advantages, cost control, and continuous innovation.

What’s Next

With bids now opened, the joint procurement office will finalize intended-winner enterprises across the two bidding rounds before results are implemented nationwide. The round’s roughly three-year cycle means the prices set this week will shape the digestive intervention market for years to come.

Industry observers will be watching how aggressively prices fall in this new therapeutic category, and whether the anti-involution rules temper the steepest cuts. The outcome will also signal how far the VBP model can extend into specialized clinical areas — and how China’s domestic medical device makers position themselves for a market increasingly defined by cost, quality, and innovation rather than channel access.