Covid-19 has given South Korea’s biotech firms a shot in the arm

UNTIL EARLYKOSDAQKOSPI 2020 Seegene was a medium-sized South Korean purveyor of medical diagnostics with around $110m in annual sales. On January 27th that year Chun Jong-yoon, Seegene’s boss, and his counterparts at other biotechnology firms were summoned to an emergency meeting by the government. Officials asked if they could produce tests for a novel coronavirus which had been spreading rapidly in Wuhan, China. Seegene’s test kit was given the go-ahead by regulators. When cases began spiking soon afterwards in Daegu, in South Korea’s south-east, the company went into emergency mode. “We stopped all other activities and just threw everything we had at covid-19,” says Mr Chun.Seegene’s employees worked around the clock, snatching a few hours of sleep in hotels near the office. Dozens more were hired overnight. Within weeks the firm was exporting millions of test kits to dozens of countries around the globe. It ended the year with $1bn in sales and $440m in net profit. Other South Korean biotech firms have had a similarly good pandemic. Five of the ten most valuable companies in the index of medium-sized firms now come from the biotech sector, up from two at the end of 2019. So do two out of the ten biggest companies in the benchmark index.