No coincidence here: Just after the announcement of China’s $123 billion health-care reform initiative in 2008, Canon launched its business in medical devices here. Business is apparently pretty good, with a 100% YoY gain (caveat being this is early days).

Being Canon, the company is mostly focused on high-end medical devices with high-end prices, i.e. x-ray digital radiographic imaging systems and various ophthalmic devices.

It’s also moved quickly to set up clinical demonstration bases in several Chinese hospitals and will expand the scale in the future.

However, it probably won’t expand into the countryside market, where the government is quite keen to improve health-care delivery. Why? Not surprisingly it’s because they don’t think they can make any money selling to peasants.