As the new Managing Director of Bayer Taiwan, Ingo Brandenburg brings to the role over a decade of regional leadership experience and a deeply personal commitment to Bayer’s global mission: Health for all, Hunger for none. Having previously led Bayer operations in Vietnam, the Philippines, and regional APAC roles out of Singapore, Brandenburg now sees Taiwan as a strategic bridge between advanced healthcare innovation and sustainable food systems.

“This is an aging society, but you also see real gaps in areas like women’s health and food resilience,” he says. “That makes Taiwan an incredibly meaningful place to work.”

Brandenburg’s career at Bayer began in Singapore, where he led the company’s Asia-Pacific strategy and commercial excellence transformation. He later served as General Manager of Bayer Pharma in the Philippines before assuming the role of Managing Director in Vietnam.

Across each posting, Brandenburg cultivated a leadership style rooted in decentralization, agility, and community engagement. “We always asked, ‘What can we do at the grassroots level?’” he says, highlighting public-private partnerships in Vietnam that improved access to contraception, boosted crop yields by over 13%, and dramatically reduced agricultural emissions by 25% while achieving 50% water savings.  “We didn’t talk about results as much. What mattered were the partnerships, the education, and the system we established, along with the tangible outcomes.”

Now in Taiwan, Brandenburg sees enormous potential to deepen Bayer’s mission by integrating its business sectors in a uniquely collaborative model. One recent initiative in southern Taiwan brought together prostate cancer awareness, self-care education, and nutritional guidance for aging farmers all at once. “No other company can do that, because we have this cross-sector capability,” he says.

Bayer’s global pipeline in pharmaceuticals continues to grow across high-impact areas such as cardiovascular, oncology, renal, retinal care, and women’s healthcare, and Taiwan is playing an increasing-ly important role in that development. With more than 20 clinical trials currently underway, and a strategic partnership with Taipei Medical University focused on building a predictive data platform, Bayer is helping Taiwan become a regional hub for precision healthcare.

“It’s really about data,” says Brandenburg. Collecting all relevant health information to generate a comprehensive patient profile helps determine not only which treatment is most appropriate but also when in the patient’s care journey it should be administered for the best outcome. “We can closely predict outcomes when we have enough patient characteristics, the right questions, and a strong data pool to analyze.”

Sustainability is another key pillar of Bayer Taiwan’s local strategy. Bayer has a global commitment to support 100 million smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with products and partnerships, 100 million people in medically underserved communities with self-care, and 100 million women in LMICs in need of modern contraception each year by 2030. Bayer Taiwan became the first foreign pharmaceutical company to collaborate with Taipei Rapid Transit Corporation to launch the Bayer-exclusive EasyCard, promoting sustainable transportation. The company is promoting regenerative agriculture, precision spraying, and science-based crop protection to help smallholder farmers increase yields with fewer inputs. “The idea is to produce more with less,” he says. “Less input and less money can still have a higher yield. That’s what the farmers are interested in because that keeps their cash flow going.”

For Brandenburg, the energy of his Taiwan team and the speed at which it executes ideas has been a defining feature of his time so far. “Sometimes I’m talking to someone, and two weeks later we meet for a tea, and they say, ‘Oh, we’ve already tried this,’” he says. “That speed of how people think about it, digest it, and then put an idea into the environment is phenomenal.”

Reflecting on his 14 years in Southeast Asia, he views his move to Taiwan not as a continuation, but as a new chapter, one where health equity, innovation, and sustainability are deeply intertwined. “There are so many opportunities where we can collaborate with like-minded partners here,” he says. “There are so many things we can achieve for the good of society. We often say ‘communities,’ but at the end of the day, the impact is much greater.”