Current status and trends of Japan’s bioindustry

Abstract

In Japan, the sales of modern biotechnology products and services in 2006 were worth 1,847 billion Japanese Yen (US$ 16.7 billion). The market has shown steady growth since 1989 (Figure 1). Conventional biotechnology products such as beer and sake are not covered in Figure 1. If we cover products of both conventional and modern biotechnology, the market size in 2005 was Yen 7,692 billion (approximately equivalent to US$ 70 billion). Major modern biotechnology products sold in Japan in 2006 are shown in Table 1.