Every medical-technology multinational operating in Asia-Pacific publishes, once a year, a considered account of the forces acting on its business. It is called the risk factors section, it is written by people who are legally accountable for its accuracy, and it is the closest thing the industry has to a signed confession.

Almost no innovator reads it.

That gap is the whole reason this programme exists. An innovator approaching a large medtech company is usually selling a problem the buyer has not yet agreed exists. That is a slow conversation, and most of them end quietly. But a problem the buyer has already written down, signed off and filed with a regulator is a different conversation entirely. It does not guarantee a deal. It does mean the first meeting begins at the second question.

What we did

We read the most recent annual filing of fifty-two APACMed corporate member companies and ten large global peers who are not members but compete for the same tenders. We looked for the same fifteen problems in each, against a written test — a stated rule for what counts as a match and what does not.

Then we did the part that matters more: we recorded what we could not verify. A company whose filing we could not retrieve in full is marked not tested, not marked negative. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and a framework that quietly converts one into the other is not measuring anything.