"Viagra" products collectively face a midlife crisis: Eli Lilly transfers product rights, and Baiyunshan experiences two consecutive years of decline

Ask AI · How will patent expirations and centralized procurement policies reshape the market landscape for ED drugs?

China Business Daily reporter: Chen Xing    China Business Daily editor: Huang Sheng

In the hidden corners of men’s health in China, a behind-the-scenes market battle that has lasted more than two decades is now entering a new turning point.

Once, a single blue pill defined an era. As the world’s first oral ED (erectile dysfunction) treatment drug, Pfizer’s Viagra launched in 1998, entered China in 2000, and from then on, the term “Viagra” became a synonym for this category. Soon after, Eli Lilly’s Cialis entered with a differentiated positioning of “36-hour long-lasting” efficacy, forming a three-way standoff among foreign companies alongside Viagra and Bayer’s Levitra. It wasn’t until 2014 that Zai Yunshan’s Jin Ge came on the scene as the first domestic first generic, using pricing advantages to open up a gap in the market and rewrite it into a new pattern of “domestic brands leading while original drugs retreat.”

However, when the timeline reaches 2026, the stories behind these three names are being rewritten again. Viagra is facing ongoing shrinkage after the patent cliff, Cialis is being gradually carved out by its parent company, and Jin Ge—once soaring—has also run into its own “midlife crisis.”

“Viagra” has been on the market in China for 20 years: an inflection point where old drugs split their fate

Viagra, Cialis, and Jin Ge all belong to the same class of drugs—PDE5 inhibitors. Their pharmacological mechanisms are the same, but their origins, ingredients, and standing in the industry are entirely different.

Viagra is the source of the term “Viagra.” Its active ingredient is sildenafil citrate, developed by Pfizer. It was the world’s first oral ED drug and an unmistakable symbol of this category. Over more than a decade after launch, it essentially monopolized the global market.

Cialis is a comeback story of the “second-place” contender. Its active ingredient is tadalafil, developed by Eli Lilly, and it entered China in 2005. The biggest difference from Viagra is duration of efficacy—Cialis lasts up to 36 hours, and it is also the only PDE5 inhibitor simultaneously approved for treating both ED and benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH).

Jin Ge is the latecomer and the disruptor. Its formulation is exactly the same as Viagra—both are sildenafil—yet it is a domestic generic drug. When it launched in 2014, the strategy set by Zai Yunshan for it was simple and direct: cut the price by 30% for the same dosage, reduce the per-dose amount by half, and reduce the patient’s per-dose out-of-pocket cost by 60% compared with the original drug. This move carved out the market pattern that shaped the following decade.

Counting from Viagra’s launch in China in 2000, over the past more than twenty years, this male-urology drug market has played out a commercial transformation from “foreign-company monopoly” to “domestic substitution,” and then to “a chaotic contest among many players.” Foreign companies shifted from monopolizing the market to being “carved out,” while domestic generics moved from soaring growth to turning downward again, and this old drug once more reached the crossroads of fate.

Among them, as the pioneer, Viagra fell from a “miracle drug” at over 100 yuan per pill into a participant in price wars, yet still holds a place in the out-of-hospital market thanks to its brand accumulation.

As a differentiated competitor, Cialis shifted from being Eli Lilly’s core asset to a carved-out non-core business. But after it moved into the out-of-hospital market under Menarini, in 2024 it still retained sales of about 935 million yuan.

As a pioneer of domestic substitution, Jin Ge started from zero and rose to the industry’s No. 1—yet became trapped in a dilemma of “both volume and price falling” amid the intensifying competition among generics. Meanwhile, a new batch of domestic innovative drugs is trying to break out of the price-war quagmire through differentiation based on clinical value.

Cialis “exits the stage”: from a star product to a carved-out asset

The story of Cialis is a classic textbook example of the lifecycle of an original drug.

In 2007, Cialis’s global sales first surpassed $1.2 billion, nearly matching Viagra’s sales from the same year. In 2017, its global sales peaked at $2.323 billion. But after that, the growth curve took an abrupt turn downward due to patent expirations and the impact of generics.

In China’s market, Cialis faced another blow. In April 2020, Cialis’s ED-use patent expired in China. In the same year, tadalafil tablets were included in the second batch of the National Drug Centralized Procurement catalog, and Eli Lilly failed to win the bid. That year, Cialis’s hospital-segment sales fell by nearly 60%. The consequences of losing the centralized procurement bid were immediate—data for 2024 show that in terms of public hospital sales of tadalafil, Tianjin Jinyaotong alone accounted for more than 30%, while the original Cialis accounted for less than 20%.

In 2021, Eli Lilly sold its China mainland market rights for Cialis to the Italian biopharmaceutical company Menarini. At that time, when Eli Lilly was interviewed by the media, it said that this move was intended to concentrate resources to accelerate Eli Lilly’s development in five major therapeutic areas: diabetes, oncology, autoimmune diseases, pain, and neurodegenerative diseases. Once a blockbuster product, it became the parent company’s “non-core asset.”

Today, this carve-out is still ongoing. In March 2026, Yuliyuan Pharmaceuticals announced that it would acquire all of Cialis’s equity interests in China Hong Kong, China Macau, and South Korea, including trademark rights, product registration approval rights, and manufacturing technology licenses. After completion of the acquisition, the number of markets in Asia in which Yuliyuan Pharmaceuticals holds Cialis rights would expand from the original 8 to 11.

However, after shifting to the out-of-hospital market, Cialis actually found new room for survival. Data from Minet shows that in 2024, Cialis’s sales in hospitals dropped to just 53.2 million yuan, but its sales in pharmacies and online stores reached 426 million yuan and 509 million yuan respectively, totaling 935 million yuan.

On March 24, the reporter sent questions about Cialis’s rights plans for other regional markets to Eli Lilly’s email address, but as of the time of publication, no reply had been received.

Jin Ge’s “midlife crisis”: from soaring momentum to turning downward

If Cialis’s exit was the fate of original drugs, then Jin Ge’s decline reflects the collective predicament of the generic-drug market.

Jin Ge is Zai Yunshan’s core product. In its first year after launch, sales exceeded 700 million yuan. By 2016, its market share surged to 49%, surpassing Viagra to become the industry’s No. 1. In 2017, its market share rose further to 55%, firmly holding the top spot. In 2019, Jin Ge officially surpassed Viagra in both sales revenue and sales volume, becoming China’s leading ED drug. In 2023, Jin Ge’s sales revenue reached a historical peak of 1.29 billion yuan, with sales volume exceeding 100 million pills, and its gross margin has long remained above 90%. It is not only Zai Yunshan’s most profitable product, but also a landmark case of a domestic generic’s comeback.

But the turning point came in 2024. Zai Yunshan’s annual report shows that in that year, Jin Ge’s sales revenue fell year over year by nearly 20%, sales volume dropped by more than 10%, and inventory surged by nearly 50%. In 2025, the decline continued—full-year sales were about 79.87 million pills, nearly 8 million fewer than the previous year, and revenue decreased year over year by 26.18%. This is the second consecutive year of decline for Jin Ge after 2024, when both sales volume and revenue fell for the first time.

As of March 2025, nearly 50 companies in China have already obtained approval for sildenafil citrate generics, with a total of 137 generic applications accepted; the number of tadalafil generic companies has exceeded 70, and more than 100 approval documents have been issued (including multiple specifications).

The direct consequence of players entering one after another is a price war. In 2020, Qilu Pharmaceutical’s sildenafil citrate tablets were quoted at 2.08 yuan per pill, a drop of 92%. It became the only exclusive-bid winning product in that year’s centralized procurement, and Jin Ge and Viagra were eliminated together. By the first half of 2023, in public hospitals, Qianwei’s market share was nearly double that of Viagra, while Jin Ge’s sales revenue in public hospitals had almost gone to zero.

Even in the out-of-hospital market, the price war did not stop. On e-commerce platforms, after the maximum discount, the per-unit price of Viagra 50 mg tablets has fallen to 29.8 yuan, a drop of more than 70% compared with the price of over 100 yuan at the beginning of its launch. Jin Ge’s same-spec products have long left the era of triple-digit pricing.

Jin Ge’s “midlife crisis,” at its core, is the inevitable end point of the generic-drug dividend. When the time window for first generics closes, when the price war is fought down to the floor price, and when the pressure on the stock market approaches its limit, the story of growth can no longer be told. Still, judging from Zai Yunshan’s main products, Jin Ge remains its highest-revenue product.

How to break through?

If the “over-involution” on the supply side is the clear line of sight in this shift, then changes on the demand side are a deeper undercurrent.

Facing the impasse, players are looking for new directions to break through. Formulation innovation is one route. By searching the National Medical Products Administration database, it can be seen that from ordinary tablets to orally disintegrating tablets and dry-mixed suspensions, the forms are becoming increasingly diverse. New formulations such as orally disintegrating tablets, oral suspensions, and oral films attempt to win users away from traditional tablets with an experience of “no need for water,” “dissolves on the tongue,” and “discreet administration.”

Domestic innovative drugs of Category 1 have also begun to appear in dense waves this year. On July 8, 2025 and July 22, 2025, within half a month, two new domestic ED drugs were approved back-to-back: Angweida by Wangshan Wangshui (simesin seda-? tablets—simesin? actually “盐酸司美那非片” ) and TaIota? by Yangtze River Pharmaceutical (talanot?—“盐酸妥诺达非片”), trying to challenge the existing pattern of PDE5 inhibitors with a better side-effect profile and higher selectivity.

From the “blue little pill” era opened by Viagra, this game is now entering a new stage. Original drugs are being carved out, generics are locked in internal competition, new formulations are attempting breakthroughs, and the demand side is changing. When the “Viagra” products all face their midlife crisis as a group, the real question may not be “who will win,” but rather what kind of new story this market can still grow.

China Business Daily