"Our mandate is to become No. 1 in everything we enter into, so our long-term goal is to become a leading pharmaceutical company in the world."
That's what Christopher Hansung Ko, CEO of Samsung's (NASDAQOTH: SSNLF) Bioepis unit, had to say about his company's unexpected dive into biotech.
Of course, to become that dominant, Samsung would have to beat a lot of other pharma companies -- and face off against Google (GOOGL 1.27%) (GOOG 1.25%), whose investments in Calico to combat aging also have transformative possibilities.
The Korean conglomerate is looking to compete in biosimilars, or the generic versions of biologic drugs, and it's paired up with a number of health care heavyweights (including Biogen) to make that happen. It's a pretty target-rich environment, and a market that may be worth as much as $24 billion by 2019. Samsung isn't idly grabbing headlines either -- it's investing $2 billion to get this foray started, with the expectation of selling $1.8 billion a year in biopharmaceutical products by 2020.
In the following video, from Market Checkup, the Motley Fool's health care-focused investing show, Motley Fool health care analysts Michael Douglass and David Williamson dig into the details and look at the investing takeaways in this surprising and exciting story.
