China has become a destination for corporate bargain hunters looking to acquire pipeline assets for a steal. But its days as a discount market may be numbered.
Licensing deals rose in 2025 with 92 compared to the previous year’s 64, according to Evaluate data.
“The more interesting thing is probably the continued rise in the average upfront payment associated with those deals,” said Mark Lansdell, director of Custom Intelligence at Evaluate. That figure lept from $102 million to $141 million between 2024 and 2025.
“It’s not such a bargain anymore to acquire a Chinese asset,” he said. “I don’t think it means that they are becoming unattractive. But it does show that the value of Chinese assets is being recognized.”
If the trend continues, licensing deals with Chinese companies could start to resemble pricing more typical of Western firms, Lansdell said.
“Eventually, you can imagine a world in which there is no difference if [a drug] was developed in China or in a Western company,” he said.
Chinese dealmaking on the rise
Chinese drugmakers have increasingly established themselves as partners for global pharmaceutical companies and a valuable source of new investigational drugs to replenish pipelines strained by an industry-wide patent cliff. Licensing deals reached a record estimated $137.7 billion in 2025, marking a continuation of earlier trends.
At the same time, Chinese biotechs are gaining new access to overseas investment, broadening their growth opportunities.
The top deal in 2025 in terms of value was GSK’s $500 million upfront agreement for Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals’ investigational chronic obstructive pulmonary disease drug and 11 additional candidates in oncology, immunology, inflammation and respiratory illnesses. The total deal value, including milestone payments, could reach $12 billion.
The GSK deal reflects a pattern in the market: that the largest agreements are still dominated by big companies.
“There are some smaller companies coming in to either create a pipeline or just complement what they're developing themselves. But when you pick out the bigger deals in 2025, it was all Big Pharma,” Lansdell said. “And 2026 is starting off the same way.”
The most notable deals involving Chinese firms this year were struck by Gilead Sciences, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, AbbVie, GSK, Sanofi and UCB.
One of those 2026 agreements, between AstraZeneca and CSPC Pharmaceuticals, also highlights challenges in calculating average deal value, which becomes difficult to interpret when the pacts often include multiple assets, Lansdell said.
The AstraZeneca deal includes a $1.2 billion upfront payment, and is tied to eight weight loss and type 2 diabetes programs. It also grants the pharma giant access to CSPC’s AI molecular design capabilities and its unique dosing technology. Milestone payments could reach $3.5 billion across these programs.
While the terms of the deal are public, the value of many deals isn’t disclosed, further complicating calculations. Only 40 of the 92 deals in 2025 revealed upfront deal value, according to Evaluate.
The allure of Chinese assets
Dealmaking will likely continue even as prices rise because affordability isn’t the only factor that makes China’s drug assets so appealing, Lansdell said. China’s growing innovation engine has been difficult for global drugmakers to ignore.
“Such a high proportion of the pipeline is now China-derived, so going to China is almost an inevitability in some areas, like oncology,” he said.
Companies looking to fill their pipelines often have a plethora of potential drugs to choose from in areas such as oncology, obesity and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, or among modalities including multispecific antibody drugs, CAR-T, and other cell therapies.
Many Western companies are still jumping on the latest bandwagon into increasingly crowded markets, Lansdell said. But if markets become too saturated, it might eventually leave a growing number of unpartnered Chinese companies facing two primary options.
The first would be to push their investigational drugs through the pipeline themselves. China-based trials have a critical advantage over their Western counterparts — they can often run faster and at a lower cost. However, many Chinese companies lack experience in late-stage drug development, Lansdell said. The second route would be to shelve partnerless drugs regardless of their potential.
In the meantime, experts are watching to see if current licensing trends will continue at the same pace in 2026. Lansdell predicts that Chinese biotechs will surge in familiar areas such as cell and gene therapies, antibody drug conjugates and multispecific antibodies. They will also likely push toward the cutting edge, expanding into new areas of research.
