Company profile

Fresenius Medical Care is the world’s leading provider of products and services for people with chronic kidney failure. Around 3.2 million patients with this disease worldwide regularly undergo dialysis treatment. Dialysis is a vital blood cleansing procedure that substitutes the function of the kidney in case of kidney failure.

We care for more than 320,000 patients in our global network of more than 3,700 dialysis clinics. At the same time, we operate 41 production sites on all continents, to provide dialysis products such as dialysis machines, dialyzers and related disposables.

Our strategy is geared toward sustainable growth. We aim to continuously improve the quality of life of patients with kidney disease by offering innovative products and treatment concepts of the highest quality.

Fresenius Medical Care’s corporate headquarters are in Bad Homburg v.d.H., Germany. The headquarters of North America are in Waltham, Massachusetts and the headquarters of Asia-Pacific are located in Hong Kong.

Fresenius Medical Care around the world

Fresenius Medical Care in numbers

•   We offer dialysis services and products in around 150 countries.
•   Every 0.7 seconds we provide a dialysis treatment somewhere on the globe.
•   We employ around 114,000 employees in around 50 countries.
•    One in two dialysis machines worldwide is made by Fresenius Medical Care.
•   In 2017, Fresenius Medical Care generated revenues of around 17.8 billion Euro.
•   Fresenius Medical Care has been developing and producing dialysis products for more than four decades.

Innovations made by Fresenius Medical Care

The market conditions in some of the countries where we sell our products vary considerably. Fresenius Medical Care successfully takes this disparity into account with its differentiated product range. Our R&D teams benefit from this: As our product development is decentralized, we can address regional requirements quickly. However, chronic kidney failure is increasingly becoming a global problem, leading to growing demand for improved, high-quality yet cost-efficient treatment methods. For our innovation teams around the world, this results in synergies that we intend to leverage by having a global R&D function.

We have identified six core areas as the future focal points of our R&D activities

1. Market leadership

The treatment of chronic kidney disease is a medical success story that Fresenius Medical Care has contributed to significantly over the past decades; we are now the world’s leading provider of dialysis products and services. To maintain this position in the future, our R&D teams face the major task of continuously researching new technical possibilities and further enhancing therapies.

2. Vertical integration

As we are a vertically integrated company, our employees in the R&D department also benefit from direct access to the opinions and experience of patients and experts at our own dialysis centers. This helps them to enhance our products in such a way as to optimize and further automate processes in the clinics, and to simplify operations. This again enables us to further improve patient safety.

3. Global portfolio management

Our modular system in the area of product development enables us to standardize the basic functions and individual components of our therapy systems internationally. In future, we aim to further expand this uniform platform architecture with the aim of reducing development times, achieving economies of scale in purchasing and bundling our development resources.

4. New technologies and applications

In 2014, we again pressed ahead with enhancing our products and introduced several major innovations in our markets. Our aim is to quickly turn new findings into market-ready products, enabling us to offer patients gentler, safer and more individual treatment.

5. Home therapies

More people than ever suffer from chronic kidney failure. The resultant higher cost burden for health care systems and limited availability of trained personnel for dialysis centers boosts demand for home therapy systems. Home dialysis and its associated technologies and products are therefore another key focal point of our R&D activities.

6. Emerging markets

Our growth strategy includes gearing our business operations towards attractive future markets. In addition, we want to provide more and more people with access to life-saving dialysis treatment. We aim to press ahead with our R&D activities in the Chinese market especially in our “China Design Center” in Shanghai.

Our R&D infrastructure

In 2015, 649 highly qualified employees worked for Fresenius Medical Care in R&D worldwide (2014: 599). They come from various backgrounds: Physicians work side by side with software specialists, business economists and engineers in interdisciplinary teams. Most activities are carried out at our facilities in Schweinfurt and Bad Homburg (Germany). Other R&D sites are in St. Wendel (Germany), Bucharest (Romania) and Krems (Austria). In the U.S., the Company maintains centers of excellence for the development of devices in Concord and Lake Forest, California, and for dialyzers and other disposable products in Ogden, Utah. Development activities in Shanghai and Changshu (China) are focused on the growing demand for cost-effective dialysis systems for Asia and emerging markets. The global R&D organization coordinates collaboration and technology exchange among the various sites.