Practice · both directions

Movement has become a clinical deliverable.

Two things happened at once. China made rehabilitation and physical activity instruments of national health policy — and Europe started sanctioning pharmaceutical companies for promoting a treatment without giving diet and exercise their due prominence. On both sides of the corridor, structured physical activity moved from a marketing theme to something a regulator expects to see. That changes who buys it, and from which budget.

Discuss the segment Who buys, and why Finitima, by JUMO Partners

5,500+Chinese hospitals with a weight-management clinic by February 2026, at tier-2 and above

2.2Rehabilitation physicians per 100,000 people — against a national target of 8

3,000+Certified exercise prescribers trained in China, roughly 1,600 of them from the medical sector

¥7tnTarget size of China's sports sector by 2030 (State Council, September 2025)

Sources: national weight-management programme reporting; China Daily / KPMG; State Council directives, 4 September 2025. Figures cover distinct scopes and are not additive.

The asymmetry

The same capability solves opposite problems in the two markets.

Europe

The absence is sanctioned

Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medicines is prohibited across the Union. What regulators have been acting on is narrower and more interesting: promoting a treatment without giving sufficient prominence to diet and physical activity. Enforcement is live in several jurisdictions. A credible lifestyle counterpart has stopped being a communications option and become a compliance component.

China

The presence is mandated, and it comes first

The national weight-management protocol instructs clinicians to intervene on diet, exercise and psychological factors before prescribing. The state has built the clinic infrastructure to do it and does not have the trained capacity to staff it. A manufacturer that presents itself without an activity component is contradicting the regulator's own sequence.

JUMO Partners advises on this market; Finitima, our sport-and-health agency, builds and runs the programmes themselves. What survives on both sides is a narrow, defensible space: non-promotional disease education, medically validated, auditable and documented. It is narrow enough that no sport agency can enter it, and no healthcare communications network has built a physical-activity practice to fill it.

Who buys

Two very different buyers, and neither of them is marketing.

Movement-technology companies

European companies in movement analysis, physiotherapy, rehabilitation equipment and sports performance, selling into hospitals, rehabilitation centres, universities, clubs and federations. The decision they face is not whether China is large. It is whether to register as a medical device — which opens the clinical segment and closes the calendar — or to stay outside registration and reach only performance and education buyers.

Market and access assessment across rehabilitation, sports rehabilitation and performance
Registered versus non-registered business models, and which segments each one reaches
NMPA classification and registration pathway assessment
Voice-of-customer and KOL interviews with physicians, physiotherapists and performance staff
Distributor and channel partner identification and qualification
Hospital, rehabilitation centre, university and sports institution development
Entity setup, recruitment and local commercial representation

Metabolic and obesity manufacturers

Here the opening conversation is with the medical director, regulatory affairs or compliance — never with marketing. These are the functions that block projects on this subject, which makes them the functions that pay to unblock them, and the budget sits on a consulting line. The molecule is becoming a commodity: the compound patent on the leading product expired in China in March 2026, more than twenty domestic manufacturers are in the queue, and prices have already fallen sharply. Differentiation is moving to the service around the product.

Regulatory scoping: what may be said about activity and nutrition, in each market, with the texts behind it
Disease-education programmes with a medically validated activity component
Localisation of global sport and activity assets into a compliant Chinese programme
A documented human validation gate on every medical and regulatory output

Finitima, by JUMO Partners

Why this is not an agency brief

The position is empty, and we know exactly why.

We mapped four families of operator — European sport agencies, healthcare communications and patient-services networks, digital health and weight-management platforms, and the Chinese health ecosystem. Sport agencies hold rights and athletes but have no pharmaceutical client and no regulatory capability. Healthcare networks hold the budgets but carry no physical-activity practice on any capability page; they subcontract it. Digital health sells adherence, measurement and nutrition — to employers and payers, not to laboratories. In China, no sports application has signed with a manufacturer.

What is closed, and why that matters

Chinese advertising law prohibits celebrity endorsement of medicines and bars influencers from recommending them in live streams. The athlete-as-ambassador model does not exist here.
The industry code prohibits paying for entertainment and leisure activities for healthcare professionals, and excludes leisure-themed venues — which removes recreational sport sponsorship.
The code extends to agencies working for a member company. Anyone doing this work is held to it as if they were the manufacturer.
False research and false donations were added to the national pharmaceutical anti-corruption plan in June 2026, closing the associative and philanthropic workarounds.

Knowing precisely which doors are shut is most of the value. It is what stops a programme being designed into a wall.

Non-drug intervention, operated as a business.

Cadence is a venture built to run the non-pharmacological half of metabolic treatment for manufacturers in Europe and China — regulatory scoping, disease education with a validated activity component, and rights localisation. It trades under the endorsement of JUMO Partners and draws on the same network.

Finitima, by JUMO Partners

What you can engage us for here

A sector practice is not a separate service.

It is the evidence that we have run these services before in rehabilitation and sports performance — the regulatory particularities, the buyers, the failure patterns and the published work. The engagement itself is one of these.

Scoped engagement