Hengrui Brand Guidelines: A 1970 Lianyungang Factory Listed in Shanghai and Hong Kong

A state pharmaceutical factory on the Jiangsu coast.

Hengrui began as a state-owned factory. English Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1970 as the Lianyungang Pharmaceutical Factory, in the port city of Lianyungang in Jiangsu province, where it still has its headquarters. The company’s own website counts its history from the same year, describing itself as “Est. 1970.”

The company in its present legal form came later, and the sources give different dates. Chinese Wikipedia says that in February 1997 Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals was set up as a joint-stock company by five founding shareholders, among them Lianyungang Hengrui Group, formerly the city’s pharmaceutical industry company, and the China National Pharmaceutical Industry Corporation; English Wikipedia instead says the company was established in its current form in 1977.

English Wikipedia credits Sun Piaoyang, a graduate of China Pharmaceutical University with a doctorate from Nanjing University, with taking over the formerly state-led company in 1990 and building it into one of China’s large producers of anti-infection and anti-cancer medicines; it lists him as chairman.

The shares followed in two steps. Hengrui listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2000, under the code 600276, and on 23 May 2025 its H shares began trading in Hong Kong under the code 1276, the business news service Yicai Global reported that day. The stock closed its first Hong Kong session up 25 percent, Yicai said, and the company planned to put the money raised into research and development, new production and research facilities in China and abroad, and the expansion or upgrading of its factories at home.

Today the company calls itself Hengrui Pharma and describes an “innovation-driven, global pharmaceutical company.” Its mission, as the website gives it, is “promoting a healthier life for humankind through advancements in science,” and its listed values are Innovation, Pragmatism, Focus and Diligence.

Generics, then its own molecules.

Hengrui’s older range was broad. English Wikipedia describes a maker of cancer medicines, cardiovascular drugs, painkillers, antibiotics and drug packaging materials, and Chinese Wikipedia lists chemotherapy injections, heart and diabetes drugs, endocrine treatments, antibiotics and large-volume infusions among its products.

More recently Hengrui has put its own molecules first, describing itself as innovation-driven. English Wikipedia names several that it has taken into clinical trials: the anti-PD-1 antibody camrelizumab, the VEGFR2 inhibitor apatinib, the PARP inhibitor fluzoparib — spelled fuzuloparib and sold as Wevdury in the company’s own announcements — and the antiandrogen rezvilutamide. Hengrui says it has brought 27 “Class 1” innovative drugs and six “Class 2” innovative drugs to market in China, runs 15 research and development centres across Asia, Europe, the United States and Australia, and has a research staff of more than 5,600. It names its platforms as antibody-drug conjugates, bispecific and multi-specific antibodies, protein degraders, small nucleic acid drugs and oral peptides.

The company opened research offices abroad in 2020, English Wikipedia says, in Princeton, New Jersey, and in Basel, Switzerland, where Hengrui Europe Therapeutics AG works on protein engineering and an mRNA platform.

Hengrui also says it is ranked on Pharm Exec’s annual list of the top 50 global pharmaceutical companies, for eight years in a row; Chinese Wikipedia notes that the magazine’s 2019 list, which placed Hengrui 47th, was the first on which two Chinese drug makers appeared.

How the category presents itself.

Korean and Chinese drug makers tend to introduce themselves through places as much as products. Their annual reports and websites lead with research campuses: new buildings in Shanghai and Suzhou, and the technology district of Pangyo, south of Seoul. Chia Tai Tianqing, for example, says it moved its global research headquarters to Shanghai in 2023, and Hengrui says it opened research offices in Princeton and Basel in 2020.

The pictures inside those reports follow a familiar pattern. White-coated scientists work at screens and fume hoods; long packaging lines carry tablets and vials; and the older companies keep a place for their beginnings, with founders and first factories shown in archive photographs. Several of the businesses in this group began as municipal or state factories decades before they became listed research companies.

Trade fairs are the other stage. The companies take booths at the BIO International Convention in the United States and at the large pharmaceutical fairs in China, where licensing talks with international partners are now a regular part of the business. Hengrui’s July 2025 licensing agreement with GSK is one recent example. In this guide, such deals are named without sums, and any deal not confirmed as completed is described as pending.

The visual identities themselves are mostly corporate and restrained: usually a wordmark in red, blue or green, with photography doing most of the work. Few of these companies publish brand guidelines or official colour values, so the palettes in this guide are our own unofficial interpretations, chosen to sit alongside the companies’ public materials without copying them.

Licensing its candidates abroad.

Much of Hengrui’s recent international activity has taken the form of licensing. When it listed in Hong Kong in May 2025, Yicai Global reported that none of its innovative drugs had yet won regulatory approval outside China, and that its partners in licensing deals over the previous three years included Merck Sharp & Dohme, the American company Ideaya Biosciences and Germany’s Merck Group.

The largest of these arrived two months later. On 28 July 2025, Yicai Global reported, Hengrui agreed to grant GSK exclusive rights outside China to HRS-9821, a PDE3/4 inhibitor in clinical development for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, together with options on eleven early-stage candidates in areas including oncology, respiratory disease, autoimmune conditions and inflammation. Under the arrangement, Hengrui leads work on those eleven programmes through Phase I trials.

The company now says it has completed 13 overseas deals for innovative drugs since 2023, naming GSK and Bristol Myers Squibb among its partners, and that its medicines reach more than 50 countries, with about 20 regulatory approvals overseas covering injections, oral formulations and inhaled anaesthetics. Recent announcements on its website include work with Braveheart Bio on a heart-muscle candidate presented at the American Heart Association’s 2026 meeting, and the European Medicines Agency’s validation of an application for Wevdury in prostate cancer.

Its stated therapeutic areas are oncology, metabolic and cardiovascular diseases, immunological and respiratory diseases, and neuroscience. Its stated aim is to become “a global biopharmaceutical group through innovation.”

For a design guide, Hengrui shows a former state drug factory presenting itself in the language of a global research company, with two listings and a coastal home city behind it. Compare Sino Biopharmaceutical, whose main operating company also grew from a Lianyungang drug factory, and Fosun Pharma. For this guide we use a navy, a mid blue and a seal red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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