CompanyGraph
Aier Eye Hospital Group Co. Ltd.
300015 · SZSE · China
Performs eye surgery — LASIK, cataract removal, and retinal procedures — across a network of government-licensed facilities in China.
Aier Eye Hospital Group runs a chain of eye surgery hospitals across China, performing procedures like LASIK, cataract removal, and retinal surgery inside facilities that each hold a separate operating licence from China's National Health Commission — without that licence, no procedure can legally be billed or reimbursed. Because each licence is site-specific and cannot be bought, only granted, the only way to build national surgical capacity is to accumulate them one location at a time, which takes years and is impossible to shortcut with capital alone. Even once a facility is licensed and equipped with femtosecond lasers and phacoemulsification machines, it cannot treat patients at full volume until certified ophthalmic surgeons arrive to staff it — and those surgeons require three to five years of fellowship training beyond a standard medical degree, so how fast the network grows is ultimately set by how many ophthalmologists China's education system produces each year. That ceiling on surgeon supply is the same for every competitor, which means a new entrant would have to obtain separate licences for each city and then wait in the same queue for the same scarce surgeons — making the existing portfolio very hard to replicate from scratch.
How does this company make money?
The company is paid per procedure — either by China's national health insurance system or directly by private patients. How much it earns per case depends on the complexity of the surgery: a basic refractive procedure like LASIK pays less than a complex retinal operation. Revenue accumulates only when a credentialled surgeon completes a discrete surgical act inside one of the licensed facilities.
What makes this company hard to replace?
Patients going through multi-stage retinal procedures need to stay at the same facility because their surgeon already knows their case history — starting over elsewhere is medically disruptive. Referring optometrists build relationships with specific locations and direct patients there consistently. Insurance pre-authorisation is also tied to specific hospital network contracts, so switching facilities mid-treatment can mean losing coverage.
What limits this company?
China's medical schools produce a fixed number of qualified ophthalmologists each year, and the specialist training for femtosecond LASIK, phacoemulsification, and vitrectomy cannot be shortened or replaced by machines. So no matter how many new licensed facilities the company opens, each one can only run at full capacity as fast as the national surgeon pipeline delivers trained operators to staff it.
What does this company depend on?
The company cannot operate without healthcare facility operating licences from China's National Health Commission, ophthalmic surgeons with certified surgical credentials, femtosecond laser systems from manufacturers like Alcon and Johnson & Johnson, phacoemulsification machines for cataract procedures, and active medical device import approvals for that foreign-manufactured equipment.
Who depends on this company?
Chinese patients with myopia in underserved cities would lose access to refractive correction surgery if the network stopped. Diabetic patients needing retinal treatment would face much longer journeys to reach an alternative facility. Elderly patients waiting for cataract surgery would experience significant delays because regional surgical capacity would shrink.
How does this company scale?
Hospital management systems, patient scheduling protocols, and standardised surgical procedures can be copied to a new location relatively cheaply once a licence is in hand. What does not scale quickly is surgeon supply — each new facility needs ophthalmic surgeons who have completed 3–5 years of fellowship training, and China's education system produces only so many of them each year. That bottleneck does not ease as the company grows larger.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
China's aging population is pushing demand for cataract surgery up faster than the surgeon training system can respond. Changes to national health insurance reimbursement rates directly affect how much the company earns per procedure. Import restrictions on medical devices from foreign manufacturers could cut off access to the advanced surgical equipment the network depends on.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
If China's National Health Commission changed its licensing rules in a way that stopped surgeons from working across multiple licensed sites, the referral network that connects the facilities would fall apart. Separately, if import approvals for foreign-made femtosecond laser and phacoemulsification equipment from manufacturers like Alcon and Johnson & Johnson were suspended, the standardised procedures that run identically across every location could no longer be performed the same way — and the logic of the whole network would unravel.