Malaysia looks to build up its reputation as a fertility hub and hopes China will look to its high success rates with in vitro fertilisation, says South China Morning Post.
And it is part of Malaysia’s attempt to capture an impending baby boom in China after scraped its one-child policy in October 2015.
Estimates are that around 90 million couples in China looking to conceive a second child.
For the Malaysians, it is the need to double its medical tourism industry revenue that is of importance.
The Malaysian medical tourism industry’s revenue broke through the RM1 billion (US$255.4) mark for the first time in 2016. By 2020, the national target is to double that.
It may seem ambitious, says the Hong Kong-based paper, but the Malaysian Healthcare Travel Council (MHTC) is confident of achieving that figure. The market in its sights? China.
Malaysia claims it’s in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment success rate is actually among the highest in the world at about 66 per cent compared with the world average of 50 per cent.
Because of that, the health care travel council feel that Malaysia is in a very good position to position itself as the fertility hub for the region.
Healthcare tourists from China are already Malaysia’s second-fastest growing market in 2016, according to MHTC. That year, arrivals from China grew 20 per cent year-on-year (y-o-y), behind Vietnam at 83 per cent y-o-y.
MHTC declined to provide a breakdown of medical tourist proportion and average spend per head by country of origin. Its data excludes numbers from dental and wellness treatments.
It said fertility and cardiology treatments are among the top five treatments sought after by healthcare travellers to Malaysia, alongside orthopaedics, oncology and aesthetics.