Latin America gets planned as Brazil plus an afterthought. Brazil is genuinely the anchor — the largest register in the region by a wide margin, and the one with a mature public procurement trail you can actually read. But the smaller markets behave differently enough that the Brazil playbook transfers badly, and one of them is a manufacturing hub rather than a demand market at all.
Request a demo →Across much of Latin America, hospital purchasing runs through published tender processes. That is unusually good news for anyone evaluating the region, because a tender history is a far better demand signal than any market-size estimate: it tells you what was actually bought, often by whom, at what value, and in the specification language buyers really use.
Brazil's procurement trail is the deepest in the region and among the most useful anywhere. If you are weighing Latin America and have not looked at who has been winning public contracts in your category, you are guessing at a question that has a published answer.
Costa Rica's register is far larger than its population would suggest — comparable in size to markets many times larger. That is because it is a significant medical device manufacturing and export hub, not because it is a large domestic market.
It is a useful illustration of why record counts should never be read as market size. The number tells you something real and important about Costa Rica; it just is not the thing most people assume it is. Nearly two-thirds of its registered manufacturers also hold a US or EU registration, which is the signature of an export-oriented base rather than a domestic one.
"Registered only here" is the share of a market's manufacturers who appear in none of the other 29 markets we cover — the closest single measure of how much of your competition is local. "Also holds US or EU" is the share who were approved in a major market too.
| Market | Product records | Manufacturers | Registered only here | Also holds US or EU |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brazil | 100,893 | 9,956 | 39.8% | 48.0% |
| Costa Rica | 50,024 | 4,664 | 17.2% | 62.8% |
| Colombia | 33,389 | 8,039 | 35.4% | 48.2% |
| Mexico | 14,324 | 388 | 3.9% | 85.3% |
Figures from the Meridian Trace corpus, August 2026. Record counts are not market size — markets catalogue at different levels of detail, and a bigger number often means a more granular filing convention rather than a bigger opportunity. Company identity is resolved across scripts and spelling variants, which is a derived judgement rather than a registry fact.
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