Hanmi Brand Guidelines: A Seoul Pharmacist’s 1973 Drug Maker and Its Licensing Deals

A Dongdaemun pharmacist goes into manufacturing.

Hanmi began with a pharmacist. Korean Wikipedia says Lim Sung-ki, a pharmacy graduate of Chung-Ang University, ran a pharmacy under his own name in Seoul’s Dongdaemun district from 1966 before founding the drug maker in 1973. English Wikipedia says the company was first named after him and quickly renamed Hanmi Pharmaceutical; its Korean name, 韓美藥品, is written with the hanja characters for Korea and America. Korean Wikipedia gives the first registered name as Hanmi Pharmaceutical Industrial Co., and says the company took its present form, Hanmi Pharm Co., Ltd., in 2003.

The early business was in antibiotics and contract work. English Wikipedia says Hanmi started by selling a powdered antibiotic combination and moved into cephalosporin antibiotics in 1985 and injectable ceftriaxone in 1987. Korean Wikipedia records soft-capsule filling and contract manufacturing from 1979, a children’s fever suppository in 1982, the chemicals affiliate Hanmi Fine Chemical and a factory at Paltan, in Hwaseong, in 1984, and a research centre in 1986. Hanmi listed its shares on the Korean stock exchange in 1988, and in 1993 moved into a headquarters building at Bangi-dong in Seoul’s Songpa district, opposite Olympic Park, Korean Wikipedia says.

Licensing its methods to larger drug makers became a habit early. Korean Wikipedia says that in 1989 Hanmi licensed a process for making ceftriaxone to Roche of Switzerland, and in 1997 transferred a microemulsion formulation technology to Novartis. English Wikipedia says Hanmi began selling in China in 1996 and moved into Europe from 1998; the Chinese subsidiary is Beijing Hanmi.

Improved drugs, combinations and a long-acting platform.

Hanmi’s strategy, English Wikipedia says, combined incremental improvements to existing drugs, new combination drugs and new medicines of its own. Korean Wikipedia credits it with the approval of Amodipine, an improved version of an existing blood-pressure drug, in 2004, and the launch of Amosartan, a combination drug, in 2009; it also lists generic versions of two well-known erectile-dysfunction drugs, sold as Palpal from 2012 and Gugu from 2015.

By around 2010, English Wikipedia says, Hanmi’s research centred on two areas: longer-lasting peptide and protein medicines built on a technology it calls Lapscovery, and small-molecule kinase inhibitors for cancer and autoimmune diseases. That research produced a run of licensing deals. English Wikipedia records a cancer candidate licensed to China’s Luye Pharma in 2014 and to Spectrum Pharmaceuticals in 2015; an autoimmune candidate licensed to Eli Lilly in March 2015; and, in November 2015, licences to Sanofi for a group of diabetes candidates, to Janssen for a metabolic-disease programme and to Zai Lab in China. In December 2016 the Sanofi deal was reduced in scope and some rights returned to Hanmi. Not every deal held: in September 2016 Boehringer Ingelheim ended its licence for the lung-cancer drug olmutinib, the day after Hanmi announced a cancer deal with Roche’s Genentech, English Wikipedia says.

One Lapscovery medicine reached the US market. Eflapegrastim, sold in Korea as Rolontis, was licensed to Spectrum in 2012, according to Korean Wikipedia, and approved in Korea in 2021. On 9 September 2022, OncLive reported, the US Food and Drug Administration approved it as Rolvedon, and Spectrum’s chief executive marked the approval as a milestone in its collaboration with Hanmi.

Korean Wikipedia says Hanmi makes tablets, capsules and eye drops at its Paltan plant in Hwaseong, which it describes as producing around 70 per cent of the company’s products, and runs a cephalosporin antibiotics plant and a biologics plant for Lapscovery products at Pyeongtaek; it says these sites hold European GMP certification, with the Paltan plant certified in 2009 and the Pyeongtaek antibiotics plant in 2013.

Design and documentation.

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.

A holding company, and a contest over it.

Hanmi Pharmaceutical is not the top of its own group. In July 2010 the company split to create a holding company, Korean Wikipedia says; the holding company was renamed Hanmi Science in 2012, and Hanmi Pharm is now its subsidiary.

That structure became the centre of a public dispute within the founding family in 2024. In January 2024 Hanmi Science and the chemicals group OCI announced a plan to combine, under which OCI Holdings would take a stake of about 27 per cent in Hanmi Science, The Korea Times reported. Members of the founding family opposed the plan and put forward their own candidates for the Hanmi Science board. At the annual shareholders’ meeting on 28 March 2024, The Korea Times reported, all five of the opposing nominees were elected and all six management nominees were rejected; OCI then withdrew from the merger. Korean Wikipedia says the board was evenly split after an extraordinary meeting in November 2024, and that in March 2025 the family stepped back from day-to-day management and the holding company appointed a professional chief executive.

For a design guide, Hanmi shows a drug maker whose public profile rests less on consumer brands than on licensing announcements, approvals and its group structure. Compare Yuhan, a Seoul drug maker with a century of history, and Chong Kun Dang. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a night ink and a lab teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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