The Impact of Venture Capital on the Innovation and Growth of Chinese Pharmaceutical Firms: An Empirical Study of A-Share Listed Companies

The pharmaceutical industry plays an important role in Chinese economic development. How to propel the innovation and growth of the pharmaceutical industry with capital market tools becomes an important question. With the increasing layout of venture capital (VC) in the pharmaceutical industry, the impact of VC participation on the innovation and growth of pharmaceutical enterprises should be carefully studied. For investment purposes, CVCs, which are established by industrial corporations, mainly focus on new technologies and modes in the relevant industrial chain of their parent companies, and try to establish strategic synergy through their equity investment. IVCs have no specific industry restrictions, and their purpose is to search for and identify innovative enterprises with high growth potentials, and to harvest financial gains by investing in them.In order to explore these issues, this paper collects and analyzes data from a sample of Chinese A-share listed pharmaceutical companies from 2015 to 2022, tests the impact of VCs on the innovation inputs, innovation outputs, and growth performance of this sample of companies, and examines the differences between the impacts of IVCs and CVCs on the relevant performance. It is found that VC investment has a significant positive impact on pharmaceutical firms' innovation input, innovation output, and firm growth. In particular, IVCs have a significant positive effect on innovation input, growth performance, and an insignificant effect on innovation output of pharmaceutical firms. CVCs, on the other hand, have a significant positive effect on innovation input, innovation output, and growth performance of pharmaceutical firms. In addition, the interaction between IVC and CVC can further enhance the innovation input level and growth performance level of pharmaceutical enterprises. This paper uncovers the differences in the impact of IVCs and CVCs on the innovation input, innovation output, and growth performance of pharmaceutical enterprises, expands the research on venture capital, enriches the driving mechanism of pharmaceutical enterprises' high-quality growth and innovation capability in the Chinese context. This paper also provides some insights into how pharmaceutical enterprises select VCs and how VCs can empower pharmaceutical enterprises in practice.