Li Xiting

Li Xiting is one of the founders of Mindray Medical and serves as the company’s chairman. On April 23, 2019, he signed Mindray Medical’s 2018 letter to shareholders as chairman, in which he reviewed the company’s operations in 2018 and set out his judgment on the prospects of the domestic medical device industry. From then until he signed the company’s 2025 letter to shareholders in March 2026, he signed Mindray Medical’s annual letter to shareholders as chairman every year.

In the 2018 letter to shareholders, Li Xiting stated that if the ten years before 2018 had been the “golden decade” of the domestic pharmaceutical industry, then 2018 opened the “golden decade” of the domestic medical device industry. Citing data from the China medical device industry development report, he noted that China’s medical device market was worth more than 400 billion yuan, while the global market was worth roughly more than US$400 billion; in terms of the ratio of per capita spending on pharmaceuticals to medical devices, China’s drug-to-device ratio was about 1 to 0.351, far higher than the 1 to 0.98 of developed countries, so China’s medical device market still had huge room for growth. In the 2019 letter to shareholders, he said that in 2019 the industry, just as he had predicted, showed a trend of steady and rapid growth. In the 2020 letter to shareholders, he recalled that in 2019 the company had been the first in the industry to put forward the judgment of a “golden decade” for China’s medical devices, and acknowledged that the factor of a sudden public health crisis had not been considered when that judgment was made; he stated that after the pandemic a new wave of new medical infrastructure construction had swept the world, which would provide even stronger demand-side support for the “golden decade” of China’s medical devices and make it of even higher quality than previously expected. In the 2021 letter to shareholders, he wrote that three years earlier the company had been the first to predict that China’s medical device industry was entering a “golden decade”, and that the “golden decade” was now approaching its halfway point; the new situation and new changes had not disrupted the main line of the industry’s development but had instead made the “golden decade” of even higher quality. In the 2022 letter to shareholders, he reiterated the “golden decade” judgment put forward in the letter to shareholders in the 2018 annual report, and said that standing in 2023 he could say with more confidence that the golden development period of China’s medical device industry would last far more than ten years, possibly twenty or even thirty years.

In 2018, Mindray was listed for trading on the ChiNext board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Li Xiting said in the letter that successfully entering the A-share market was one of the most important milestones in Mindray’s history, and expressed the hope of using the A-share listing as an opportunity to integrate the company’s global advantages in research, technology, management, sales and other resources and further deepen its global market business layout.

In the 2018 letter to shareholders, Li Xiting disclosed that in 2018 Mindray’s operating revenue reached 13.753 billion yuan, up 23.09% on the previous year; total profit was 4.238 billion yuan, up 44.59%; and net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company was 3.719 billion yuan, up 43.65%. The company’s three major product lines grew in a fairly balanced way: in patient monitoring and life support, products such as patient monitors, anaesthesia machines and defibrillators entered intensive care, anaesthesia, emergency and other departments at more hospitals; in in-vitro diagnostics, sales of chemiluminescence immunoassay products grew as instrument installations rose and the range of reagents expanded, and haematology products entered tertiary hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and elsewhere; in medical imaging, the company’s high-end cart-based colour ultrasound systems, combined with its self-developed shear wave elastography technology, entered many large Grade-A tertiary hospitals in China, and 19 of the top 20 teaching hospitals in the United States were using Mindray colour ultrasound systems. In the same year Mindray’s R&D spending reached 1.420 billion yuan, up 25.50%, equal to 10.33% of operating revenue; by the end of 2018 it had 2,258 R&D staff, nearly 500 more than a year earlier, and their share of all employees rose to 24.45%. Selling expenses were 3.202 billion yuan and administrative expenses 0.715 billion yuan, increases of 17.43% and 10.47% respectively, both slower than revenue growth. In the 2019 letter to shareholders, Li Xiting disclosed that the company’s 2019 operating revenue was 16.556 billion yuan, up 20.38%, and net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent was 4.681 billion yuan, up 25.85%, and said the company would continue to advance firmly towards its goal of becoming one of the world’s top 20.

After the epidemic broke out in early 2020, Mindray teams rushed to designated treatment facilities such as Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital and donated equipment worth a total of about 11 million yuan to Huoshenshan and Leishenshan hospitals; between January 25 and February 6 they installed and commissioned more than 3,000 pieces of medical equipment for Huoshenshan and Leishenshan hospitals. During the Spring Festival, nearly 2,000 staff from manufacturing, logistics, marketing, customer service, technical support and other functions returned to work early, and the company also voluntarily covered costs such as the extra wages of workers at some suppliers of key raw materials and components. By the end of March, the medical equipment the company had donated to designated treatment facilities in Hubei was worth more than 33 million yuan in total, and it had made emergency deliveries of more than 80,000 pieces of medical equipment nationwide. Li Xiting said in the letter that Italy, a European epidemic hotspot, had urgently purchased a first batch of nearly 10,000 pieces of anti-epidemic equipment from Mindray, including ventilators and patient monitors, which the company would deliver in orderly batches. In the 2020 letter to shareholders, he wrote that when the domestic epidemic was at its most severe, the company’s manufacturing, logistics and R&D staff returned to work during the Spring Festival to fight on the production floor, while front-line customer service staff went “against the flow” alongside medical workers from across the country who were assisting Hubei; after the epidemic broke out overseas, Mindray provided anti-epidemic equipment to Russia, Italy and many other countries, and invited top critical care experts from front-line hospitals in Wuhan and from Peking Union Medical College Hospital and Shanghai Zhongshan Hospital to share their experience with doctors around the world through more than 200 online exchange seminars.

In the letter Li Xiting mentioned his ties with Wuhan: his first job was at the Wuhan Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. On December 5, 2019, Mindray signed an agreement with the Administrative Committee of the Donghu High-tech Zone in Wuhan, confirming that the Wuhan Research Institute would be set up in Optics Valley as the company’s ninth R&D centre worldwide, with plans to build a team of about 2,000 people.

Looking ahead, Li Xiting said in the 2018 letter to shareholders that among the company’s three major product lines, patient monitoring and life support products would be the cornerstone, in-vitro diagnostic products would serve as the driving force, medical imaging products would be responsible for expansion, and emerging fields such as minimally invasive surgery would be the direction for exploring new growth; at the same time the company would adhere to the “walking on two legs” strategy of organic growth plus external acquisitions, with priorities for outside investment and acquisitions including advanced technologies, high-end positions in niche markets and the building of overseas platform capabilities. He also proposed that what would lead Mindray’s great development in the coming “golden decade” would certainly be the “dividend of innovation and growth”, and that the company would keep up its R&D investment and strive to move from global technological leadership in the partial field of medical imaging to global technological leadership across all product lines. In the 2019 letter to shareholders, he predicted that after the epidemic doctor-patient relations would fundamentally improve, import substitution in the medical device industry would accelerate and primary healthcare construction would be strengthened; he said import substitution for domestic medical devices fell into three situations: in a few niche areas such as patient monitors and biochemical reagents the domestic share already exceeded 60%; in areas such as haematology, anaesthesia, ventilation and large imaging equipment technological breakthroughs had been made but imported products had not yet been replaced; and in quite a few niche areas such as ultra-high-end colour ultrasound and endoscopes core technologies had not yet been mastered. He said Mindray would systematically compile the construction experience from front-line sites such as Huoshenshan Hospital, Leishenshan Hospital and Beijing Xiaotangshan Hospital, work with governments at all levels and health commissions to advance strategic emergency supply reserve projects and to draft construction standards for fever clinics and infectious disease departments, and focus resources on meeting demand for innovative technologies such as information interconnection, AI diagnostics and total in-vitro diagnostic solutions, while continuing to maintain R&D investment, concentrating on high-end imaging equipment and in-vitro diagnostic products not yet substituted, so as to achieve self-reliance and control in high-end medical equipment as soon as possible. In the 2020 letter to shareholders, he proposed that China’s medical device industry’s “golden decade” must be built on a flourishing industrial ecosystem, and that whether the industry’s competitiveness had improved should be judged by whether the industry chain achieved a collective breakthrough; he pointed out that domestic medical devices had not yet achieved breakthroughs across all categories and that some high-end equipment was still mainly imported; he said Mindray would continue high-intensity R&D investment and cooperate closely with leading domestic companies and research institutions on joint technological breakthroughs. He also judged that world-class medical device companies would emerge in China during the “golden decade”, and said the company had set the goal of “entering the global top 20 within five to ten years and the top 10 over a longer period”; in 2020 Mindray won more than 700 new high-end hospitals in international markets that it had not previously served, and overseas business accounted for less than 50% of the company’s revenue, with the goal of raising this figure to 70%. He cited data showing that China’s per capita number of ICU beds was only one fifth of Germany’s, the share of ICU beds in hospitals was only one ninth of that in the United States, and per capita medical device spending was one seventh of that in the United States, and that the fields Mindray had entered accounted for only about 17% of the US$460 billion global medical device market. He also noted that 2021 was the 30th anniversary of Mindray’s founding, and that the company had grown into a global enterprise with more than 12,000 employees worldwide and products sold in more than 190 countries and regions.

In the 2021 letter to shareholders, Li Xiting summarised the changes in the industry in three points: the epidemic had made governments more keenly aware of insufficient medical resources, and many countries and regions had launched a new wave of medical infrastructure construction, creating an opportunity for Chinese medical device products to enter international markets; domestic medical infrastructure projects were under way, and volume-based procurement combined with medical insurance payment reform was bringing new momentum to the industry; and China’s healthcare service system had entered a stage of high-quality development, with the public rapidly paying more attention to health. He cited data showing that in 2021 per capita consumer spending on healthcare by residents nationwide was 2,115 yuan, up 14.8% year on year, growing 1.2 percentage points faster than overall per capita consumer spending and accounting for 8.8% of per capita consumer spending. He also set out Mindray’s “three constants”: its emphasis on R&D would never change, with the company investing around 10% of revenue in R&D every year for many years, R&D spending reaching as much as 2.7 billion yuan in 2021, nearly 3,500 R&D engineers and more than 7,400 patents, including 5,308 invention patents, and ten R&D centres around the world leading the company into the deep waters of R&D; its courage to innovate would never change, with newly incubated businesses beyond the three main lines, such as minimally invasive surgery, animal medicine, orthopaedics and AEDs, advancing steadily and set to become new growth poles; and its open and enterprising attitude would never change, with the company not only being a supplier of high-quality medical equipment but also helping public hospitals build resource systems in areas such as management systems, discipline capabilities, research standards and talent development, and, through total solutions for emergency departments, operating rooms, ICUs and clinical laboratories as well as the scenario-based device interconnection solutions of the “three Rui ecosystem”, helping medical institutions improve their ability to treat difficult and critical cases, lower costs and support the implementation of tiered diagnosis and treatment. He wrote that in 2021 Mindray won more than 700 brand-new high-end customers overseas and achieved cross-selling breakthroughs with more than 700 existing high-end customers; the company had grown from a follower in the medical device field into a strong challenger, had begun advancing towards becoming an industry leader from 2021, and would keep moving towards the goal of becoming one of the “global top 20 medical device companies”.

In the 2022 letter to shareholders, Li Xiting summed up the company’s direction with the “three Mindrays”. He said that over the past five years Mindray had invested more than 11 billion yuan in R&D in total and its operating revenue had more than doubled; the company had recognised the trend of multidisciplinary integration early, had tried applying AI technology in several product areas before GPT technology matured, with several high-end products among the first to offer intelligent assisted diagnosis, and had built the “three Rui” ecosystem on the basis of fundamental and integrated technological innovation. He said Mindray already had the most complete product line among domestic peers, meeting clinical needs with “one-stop” products and integrated solutions ranging from mid- and low-end to high-end and from individual departments to entire hospitals, had in some niche areas already overtaken rivals on the bend or even on the straight, and proposed that, with no “lighthouse” left ahead, Mindray should become the “lighthouse” and push towards the most cutting-edge technologies, while proactively shouldering the burden of helping make the domestic medical device supply chain self-reliant and controllable; in some raw material areas Mindray had already achieved in-house development and production, and in the future would continue to cooperate with upstream suppliers and leading domestic companies and research institutions. Reviewing Mindray’s 22-year journey of internationalisation, he said the company had followed a path from China to developed countries and then to developing countries, had established 51 overseas subsidiaries and 4 major overseas R&D centres in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and other regions, international business revenue had exceeded 11 billion yuan, and breakthroughs with previously unserved high-end international customers were continuing in 2022. He cited data showing that the global medical device market was currently worth more than US$500 billion, while the market space covered by Mindray’s existing business was only 550 billion yuan; the world’s number-one century-old medical device giant had annual revenue of more than US$30 billion, while Mindray’s full-year revenue in 2022 had only just exceeded 30 billion yuan. He also mentioned that the planned domestic Dangshan and Longhua bases had successively begun construction, and that the company was allocating high-quality resources globally, exploring in a paced and focused way the building of localised operating platforms and production capacity in major international markets, and laying out its warehousing network from a global perspective. He wrote that over the past 31 years Mindray had grown from a follower in the medical device field into a strong challenger, and in recent years had transformed into an industry leader.

In the 2023 letter to shareholders, Li Xiting placed the company’s operations that year under the three core goals of “an innovative Mindray, a leading Mindray and a global Mindray”, saying that Mindray, as a representative of China’s medical device industry, had come to prominence worldwide. He stated that the global healthcare industry was facing an AI+ singularity moment, that leading medical device enterprises represented by Mindray had taken the lead in starting the transformation from digitalisation to digital intelligence, and he interpreted the “digital” and “intelligence” in digital intelligence respectively as the integration of IT technology with hardware equipment and the integration of AI with software systems. He said the digital-intelligence transformation needed to pass through three stages: first, a broad product layout with innovative technologies, which Mindray had been the first to achieve, with its products covering a variety of clinical scenarios such as outpatient and emergency departments, inpatient wards, critical care medicine, surgery, anaesthesiology, ultrasound, clinical laboratories and pre-hospital emergency care, and the technical level of some products having reached world-leading standards; second, the deep integration of data, equipment and IT interconnection, where Mindray, since 2020, had built an open and growable “three-Rui” ecosystem through cooperation with a large number of medical institutions, and had initially completed the construction of an intelligent medical ecosystem of “equipment + IT + AI”, in which “M-Connect” achieved device IoT connectivity and data interconnection, the “Mindray Smart Lab” laboratory solution achieved lean laboratory operation and whole-process management, and “Ruiying Cloud++” focused on imaging interconnection and supported remote guidance and online consultations across departments, hospital campuses and regions; and third, a digital-intelligence ecosystem fully empowering clinical practice, where Mindray, by continuously enriching and upgrading the intelligent applications of medical large models in clinical scenarios, was providing doctors and patients with support ranging from device data monitoring, real-time assessment of patients’ conditions and early warning to the output of diagnosis and treatment recommendations, and hoped to build a large model for the vertical medical field and achieve the model’s self-driven deep learning and evolution. He wrote that the digital-intelligence era of China’s medical devices would begin in 2024, and that Mindray would take on the responsibility of a pioneer and lead the digital-intelligence transformation of China’s medical device industry.

In the 2024 letter to shareholders, Li Xiting set out, from the three angles of trends, actions and goals, the company’s path of using “digital intelligence” to drive globalisation. He recalled that as early as 2015 Mindray had launched a series of individual devices equipped with AI applications and begun exploring the integration of “equipment + IT + AI”, cultivating dedicated full-time staff to track the theoretical development of large models over the long term; in 2023 the company took the lead in raising the banner of leading the industry’s digital-intelligence transformation, and in 2024 it developed “Qiyuan”, a vertical large model for critical care. He stated that amid the wave of artificial intelligence, the long-standing “impossible triangle” in medicine, in which the quality, efficiency and cost of diagnosis and treatment are difficult to balance, had already loosened, telemedicine and continuous care models were penetrating deep into hospitals, and AI general practitioners were beginning to come to the fore. He said that over the past year Mindray had quickly passed through the last stage of the digital-intelligence transformation, a “digital-intelligence ecosystem fully empowering clinical practice”, and stressed that digital intelligence used hardware as its basic carrier, with the company’s monitors, anaesthesia machines, ventilators, defibrillators, haematology analysers, ultrasound and other products all ranking in the top three by global market share; the company had achieved an initial integration of “equipment + IT + AI” through the “three-Rui” ecosystem, while the Qiyuan critical care large model, trained on a high-quality critical care database and an expert knowledge base, possessed deep critical-care reasoning capabilities and would in the future also enter other departments such as emergency, anaesthesiology, imaging and clinical laboratories. He said that the application of artificial intelligence was not about letting AI replace doctors, but about helping to extend the boundaries of doctors’ capabilities. As examples, he said that at UNIBIO, one of France’s largest laboratory chains, Mindray’s haematology analysis line achieved efficient and accurate sample processing, and that in Australia, Mindray used “M-Connect” to link medical institutions across the vast land into a single ecosystem. He said that in 2024 the intelligent medical ecosystem Mindray had built in the direction of digital intelligence continued to penetrate at an accelerating pace among high-end customers worldwide, establishing a number of global-level, regional-level and national-level showcase hospitals; entering 2025, the process of deglobalisation was still evolving in depth, fuelled further by the “Tariff 2.0” turmoil, and Mindray would respond by laying out localised platforms worldwide combined with its digital-intelligence advantages.

In the 2025 letter to shareholders, Li Xiting described the present as a crossroads where a brand-new technological era meets de-globalisation: on the one hand AI was reshaping every link of medical services at an unimaginable speed; on the other, de-globalisation was driving the restructuring of global supply chains towards “regionalisation”, with trade barriers and standards hurdles growing ever stricter. He said that over the past year or more, building on earlier practical experience and technological accumulation, Mindray had achieved a leap in thinking and an upgrade in technology, building the “Qiyuan ecosystem” that comprehensively empowers clinical practice and covers multiple large models; he argued that digital intelligence was the inevitable answer to the medical “impossible triangle”, and that de-globalisation marked the beginning of a new type of globalisation that is decentralised, highly localised and driven by digital intelligence. He divided digital intelligence into five levels: the first is making every product well, improving diagnostic and treatment quality through fundamental technological breakthroughs and innovation; the second is integrated device innovation, improving diagnostic and treatment efficiency and reducing human error; the third is building an ecosystem of interconnected devices to create value from data flows; the fourth is the Qiyuan ecosystem the company is focusing on, using AI large models specialised in the medical field to turn massive clinical data into visualised, practical professional decision support systems for diagnosis and treatment; and the fifth is using “embodied intelligence” to integrate all of the company’s accumulation in digital intelligence, building a closed-loop, self-reinforcing medical ecosystem made up of lights-out laboratories and robots such as intelligent anaesthesia, intelligent ultrasound and intelligent surgical robots. He listed recent product progress at the first and second levels, including the newly launched SEMS platform in in-vitro diagnostics, which raises the testing performance of Mindray’s immunoassays for hormones, bone metabolism and other items to “mass spectrometry-level”; a 20-fold improvement in the anti-interference capability of high-sensitivity cardiac troponin hs-cTnI, reducing the risk of false positives or false negatives from 2 to 3 cases a week to 2 to 3 cases a year; and the ultra-high-end ultrasound system Resona A20, which for the first time achieved micron-level blood perfusion imaging in micro-contrast technology; in integrated innovation, a self-regulating closed-loop anaesthesia system built by integrating devices such as anaesthesia machines and patient monitors was under development. At the fourth level, he said the critical care medicine large model acts as a “medical sentinel” and “diagnosis and treatment assistant”, the laboratory large model helps physicians intelligently review and interpret reports, the perioperative large model empowers the whole process from preoperative planning to intraoperative warnings and postoperative care, the breast and obstetrics and gynaecology large models enable intelligent scanning, automatic reporting and full-process quality control in ultrasound examinations, and the medical engineering large model makes equipment management smarter and more efficient.

On internationalisation, Li Xiting said in the 2025 letter to shareholders that Mindray’s products were sold in more than 190 countries and regions, covering 87 of the world’s top 100 hospitals and the top 30 medical institutions in the United States; it had the most complete product line in the industry, with 9 categories of products ranking first in market share in China and 6 categories ranking among the top three globally. He said Mindray had set up 64 overseas subsidiaries in about 40 countries, more than 90% of its over 3,000 overseas employees were local, it had established 5 R&D centres overseas, and had planned localised production projects in 14 countries, 11 of which had already started production. He cited examples: in Norway, Mindray used wearable devices to improve the efficiency of home-based chronic disease management, significantly reducing the proportion of patients requiring rapid intervention and transfer to a higher level of intensive care; in Saudi Arabia, Mindray provided technical support for the real-time, high-quality transmission of ultrasound images from primary care facilities of Seha Virtual Hospital, the world’s largest virtual hospital, enabling senior experts to provide remote guidance and consultations. On building the ecosystem together, he said that in medical imaging, after launching and carrying out “Project 2025”, Mindray officially launched the five-year action plan “Project 2030” in 2025, aiming to work with global partners to expand its network of ultrasound training centres and schools to more than 150, hold more than 5,500 academic exchanges and benefit 50,000 medical students and doctors; in the United States, Mindray deepened its strategic cooperation with Medtronic, extending their strategic partnership in patient monitoring from hospitals to ambulatory surgery centres, and worked with CMS, a medical simulation institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School, to create the medical simulation course VeriSIM+; in Egypt, Mindray joined Cairo University and other leading institutions to launch the “NEW ERA-Smart ERA multicentre research project”, which after three years of research jointly confirmed that the automated endometrial imaging tool is reliable. He said Mindray aimed to be a deep cultivator of the digital intelligence wave, a steadfast practitioner of localisation and a co-builder of an open ecosystem, and looked forward to working with more industry partners such as medical device giants, biopharmaceutical companies, digital health platforms and artificial intelligence companies.