Christoph Hamann, General Manager of Merck Healthcare Korea, highlights strong momentum for the affiliate, driven by its fertility and oncology portfolios, as well as an improved access framework for innovative treatments in the country. He discusses Korea’s demographic challenges, its clinical-trial strengths, and the need for faster reimbursement, as well as why Merck is prioritising closer collaboration with the Korean government, family-friendly workplaces, and stronger integration with the global group in its quest to treat 740,000 Korean patients by 2027.
You have now been leading Merck’s business in Korea for three years. How would you assess the market today, and what are you seeing in terms of opportunities and momentum for Merck?
The momentum here is quite good, largely because our portfolio happens to meet the evolving needs of the Korean patient rather precisely. Korea remains a super-aged society with the lowest birth rate in the world, even though that rate has been climbing for the past couple of years, and we have achieved a number of access successes by working closely with both the government and our headquarters. The team feels genuinely proud of what we have accomplished in making our portfolio more accessible and in helping to serve unmet needs across the country.
Why has Asia mattered so much to Merck historically, and how does Korea fit into the “one Merck” approach?
From very early in its history, Merck was investing not only in Asia but across the globe, which is unusual for a mid-sized pharmaceutical company. Large pharmaceutical companies typically maintain a presence in every region as a matter of course, but mid-sized companies tend to concentrate their strength in one region rather than several; Merck was an early exception, expanding well beyond its home base in Germany and Europe, and that has left us with a long legacy across Asia. Today, when you look at Korea’s key economic drivers – semiconductors and displays, life science, biologic and pharmaceutical manufacturing, all underpinned by a genuinely strong healthcare infrastructure and clinical practice – our business aligns with them remarkably well. We have grown alongside Korea for the past four decades now.
What does the rebrand from Merck Biopharma to Merck Healthcare mean for the affiliate?
That change was made globally some time ago, and we simply had not followed suit locally until we agreed, as a team, that we should. Beyond aligning with the global branding, I think the new name better reflects our purpose: it was never really about providing biopharmaceuticals in some narrow technical sense, but about supporting and delivering healthcare more broadly. Our purpose at Merck Healthcare is to create, improve, and prolong life together with patients, and the rebrand captures that.
Where do you see the most important contributions your portfolio makes to Korea’s healthcare system?
This is something I am genuinely proud of, and I hope the team feels the same. It is also one of the things that sets Merck apart: many pharmaceutical companies can claim to improve or prolong life, but very few can claim to create it, and that is a rare position to hold, particularly for a company of our size. It also happens to address one of Korea’s most pressing needs. Despite the recent uptick, Korea still has the lowest birth rate in the world, and last year one in five babies born here was born with support from infertility treatment. As Korea works to manage its demographic crisis and lift the birth rate, IVF treatment is playing an increasingly central role, and we are proud to contribute to that through our products.
Which part of the portfolio is performing best at present?
Today, that would be fertility. Over the past couple of years, the government has formally declared the demographic situation a crisis and has taken significant steps in response, and for good reason: depending on which projection you use, the Korean population could decline by more than half by the end of this century, from around 52 million today to fewer than 20 million by 2100, which carries enormous consequences. The causes of the low birth rate are largely cultural and societal – a highly competitive culture, demanding workplace expectations, the concentration of everything in Seoul, the cost of living – and while many of these pressures exist elsewhere too, they are simply more acute here. In response, the government has pursued a range of initiatives, from greater subsidies for IVF treatment to housing benefits, all aimed at encouraging people to start families.
At the same time, we succeeded in securing Korean reimbursement for one of our own products, a combination hormone treatment two years ago, so as the government sharpened its focus on this crisis, we were able to work alongside our headquarters and the government to expand access. The result has been strong growth in our fertility business, but what matters more to me is the impact we are having: patients are able to build the families they want, the government makes progress on a defining national challenge, and yes, the business benefits too. It is difficult to think of a more genuine win on every front, and it is something I hope the whole team takes real pride in.
How do you foster a family-friendly workplace culture at Merck Healthcare Korea?
This is something Merck values deeply as a corporation, and rightly so – it would be rather hypocritical of us to encourage others to start families through our fertility business while failing to support our own employees in doing the same. It comes down to walking the talk. We have a number of supportive corporate policies, including our Family-Forward Workplace Initiative, under which employees who wish to have a child are supported financially, with time off, and through flexible working arrangements.
Every local culture is different, of course. Historically, the Korean workplace has placed considerable emphasis on employees being physically present every day, alongside a lingering concern that having a child might distract from work. I recall a senior government official telling me, a couple of years ago, that she would rather tell her boss she herself was sick than admit her child was unwell, simply to avoid revealing that family responsibilities might be seen as a burden on her work. That instinct to conceal, rather than the absence of formal support, is really the heart of the challenge here. Korea’s own parental leave policy is, in fact, very generous, offering both mothers and fathers a full year of paid leave, yet many employees still feel they cannot make full use of such benefits without damaging their careers. The real task, then, is building an environment in which that same working mother feels able to tell her employer she needs to care for her family without fear of professional consequence.
We try hard to model that ourselves. 60 percent of our leadership team are women, which I hope signals clearly that people can build a family at Merck while continuing to advance their career. Since we introduced these benefits a couple of years ago, we saw a 47 percent increase in births between 2024 and 2025, and this year already 10 percent of our women employees are pregnant. It is one thing to offer flexible arrangements and benefits on paper; it is quite another to know whether employees genuinely feel safe using them. I am not sure there is a better way to demonstrate that than through indicators such as these, but I take them as a sign that people trust the organisation enough to build a family without fear that doing so will hold back their career.
How does Merck position itself as a partner to the government on this issue?
As a leader in the field, we have real expertise to bring to bear in raising awareness of infertility, and we recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Korea Federation of Subfertility Family, a patient group, to help do exactly that. What is happening in Korea, as in many countries, is that cultural and societal pressures lead people to delay having children for a long time, by which point conception can become biologically far more difficult, sometimes impossible. Our aim is not to tell anyone they should have children, but to ensure people understand, while they are still young, how ageing affects fertility, so that they can plan and choose with that knowledge in hand rather than discovering the difficulty only once they try.
Alongside this, together with several companies from the European Chamber of Commerce in Korea, we founded the Family Friendly Future Forum, where Merck serves as founding member and co-chair. Through it, member companies share best practice and ideas aimed at shaping a more family-friendly workplace culture across Korea, while demonstrating that commercial success and family-friendliness are entirely compatible. In this day and age, I would go further and say that being family-friendly is essential to being a successful company, not least as a tool for recruitment, retention, and motivation. Earlier this year we hosted an HR forum where member companies exchanged best practice, and we hope that thinking will spread more widely into the Korean business ecosystem.
Beyond fertility, working closely with government to understand its needs and policies is simply essential to securing access for any part of our portfolio here, given how distinctive and, frankly, challenging the environment can be. Engaging government stakeholders, patient groups, and healthcare professionals alike remains central both to helping patients and to our own success.
Having previously worked in Malaysia and Brunei, how would you compare Korea’s healthcare system, particularly on patient access?
The strengths are considerable: outstanding healthcare infrastructure, highly trained healthcare professionals, and a genuine appetite for adopting new treatments quickly in pursuit of better outcomes. Korea also operates a single-payer system, which is a genuinely noble ambition – providing healthcare to every citizen – but an extremely difficult one to sustain. The central challenge is building a system that remains both high in quality and current in its treatments, while still being financially viable for everyone.
Other markets, such as Malaysia or Singapore, blend government-provided healthcare with a substantial private sector, each somewhat supporting the other, even if that arrangement is not without its own trade-offs. I am American myself, and until relatively recently a great many people in my own country struggled to access healthcare at all, which I regard as a genuine failing. At the same time, I recognise just how difficult it is to provide healthcare for an entire population; it is a wonderful ambition, but a genuinely hard one to realise.
How important is the shift towards risk-sharing agreements for rare disease therapies in Korea?
It matters a great deal to companies like ours. There has recently been some restructuring within Merck, and Korea now sits within what we call our core markets – broadly, a grouping of countries aligned by healthcare infrastructure, reimbursement environment, and scale of opportunity. One real benefit of this shift is that, as the Korean affiliate, we now have a louder voice within headquarters when communicating Korea’s specific needs around approval and reimbursement, which matter because Korea’s regulatory and pricing landscape is genuinely distinctive and needs to be understood and planned for well in advance. That earlier voice in development prioritisation and launch planning means we can assess, early, whether and how to bring a product to Korea, ideally having everything in place by the time it reaches regulatory submission, which should help speed up the process considerably.
At the same time, I think there is real value in both sides meeting somewhat in the middle. As I mentioned, Korea’s regulatory, pricing, and reimbursement policies differ markedly from those elsewhere, and the net effect is that securing reimbursement here typically takes close to four years from regulatory approval, with roughly half of that time absorbed by the reimbursement process alone. Of medicines recently approved across core markets such as the US, Europe, and Japan, only 22 percent are reimbursed in Korea, compared with almost 80 percent in the US, 60 percent in Germany, and 50 percent in Japan. Korea has world-class infrastructure and is an innovative country by any measure, yet on patient access to the newest medicines it is clearly falling behind, and that is precisely where meeting halfway would help most.
Companies must do their part to understand Korea’s environment, which is one reason I welcome the move to core markets, but given the country’s demographic pressures – an ageing society, a low birth rate, and a rapidly shrinking population – faster access to innovative medicine would help Koreans live longer, healthier, and more productive lives, which will only grow more important as the population declines. I applaud the government for exploring reforms to both the regulatory and reimbursement processes. I have only been here three years myself, but colleagues tell me it has been a long time since any meaningful change occurred, so the government’s willingness to explore new approaches is genuinely encouraging. The faster it can act, the sooner the access gap that clearly exists today can begin to close.
How is Merck utilising Korea’s clinical trial infrastructure and its world-class principal investigators?
Korea is a priority market for clinical trials, thanks to its exceptional infrastructure and the sheer speed of patient recruitment; it is not unusual for Korea to lead the world on that measure, something the Koreans themselves sum up neatly with the phrase “pali pali,” meaning quickly, quickly. That speed reflects genuinely well-trained doctors with real enthusiasm for the science, the data, and new innovation, who embrace new treatments remarkably fast. It is something of a shame, then, that once a trial concludes and Korean doctors have direct experience with a medicine proven safe and effective, with the infrastructure and expertise already in place, it can still take roughly four years before that same medicine is actually reimbursed. There is a clear misalignment there. Korea remains a genuinely important market for clinical trials nonetheless; it was ranked third globally a couple of years ago, and while it has slipped somewhat since, likely behind Beijing in first place, it remains a market of real significance.
Your new chief executive has named mergers and acquisitions as a strategic priority. Is there an opportunity to raise Korea’s visibility within the global organisation, and are you pursuing that?
Absolutely, and it has climbed steadily up my own priority list over the past three years. Priorities naturally evolve in a role like this: when I arrived, increasing access for our existing portfolio was the immediate focus, at a time when only one of our three oncology products carried reimbursement and parts of our fertility portfolio had none at all. We now have reimbursement across all three oncology products, and having seen more clearly what Korea is capable of, raising its visibility within the wider organisation has become one of my top priorities, which is another reason I welcome the move to core markets and the greater voice it affords us with headquarters.
Our electronics and life science businesses are already well established here. A couple of years ago we acquired a company in Korea within electronics, and we have invested heavily in facilities and partnerships across both electronics and life science; later this year we will open a new Bioprocessing Production Center in Daejeon, a EUR 300 million investment due to open in October. Korea is already one of our largest global markets for semiconductors and displays, and life science has grown strongly too, though healthcare has not yet reached the same scale. That is precisely where we are working with both headquarters and government: a more innovation-friendly access environment, one that rewards value and speed appropriately, would make it far easier for Korea to attract the same calibre of investment in healthcare that it has already secured in semiconductors and life science. Healthcare and pharmaceuticals are simply more heavily regulated, and current policy is not yet as conducive to that scale of investment. There are encouraging signs, including commitments made through initiatives such as JLABS, but nothing close to the scale seen in comparable markets, and there is clearly untapped potential here. It really is a question of meeting in the middle: Korea can continue to evolve its environment, and our own headquarters needs a fuller appreciation of what is possible here. Bridging that gap is, in many ways, the core of my job, because I want nothing more than to see Merck grow further in Korea.
As a final message, what would you like to convey to Korean stakeholders and the wider global community?
I think the message for the Korean government has, in many ways, already been conveyed through this conversation, but more broadly: we remain deeply committed to Korea. We see enormous potential here and want to continue working with both government and headquarters to help address the unmet needs arising from the country’s demographic challenges. I believe we are well positioned to do so, and I would like to see Merck and Korea grow even closer together in the years ahead.
For me personally, success looks like a handful of specific things. First, that our full portfolio achieves reimbursement, so that every patient who needs our products can access them; we have new treatments coming for rare tumours, including desmoid tumours, tenosynovial giant cell tumours, and neurofibromatosis type 1 with plexiform neurofibromas, alongside other pipeline products, and ensuring each achieves access here remains a clear personal goal. It is not common for a company of our size to have so many products reimbursed, and I see that as an important marker that we are doing things the right way.
Second, I would like to see the Korean birth rate continue to rise, and I hope we can keep contributing to that, whether through our IVF treatments, our awareness initiatives, or our efforts to help shape a more family-friendly workplace culture more broadly; some of that impact we can measure directly through our treatments, and I know we are already making a difference.
Finally, we have set a goal that by 2027, more than 740,000 Korean patients will be benefiting from our treatments. If we achieve that, I believe it will speak clearly to our purpose here: to create, improve, and prolong life in Korea.
