Americans suffering from arthritis can now find relief from an unexpected new player in the pharmaceuticals market.

South Korea’s Samsung conglomerate, best known for its smartphones and televisions, will make available on Monday in the U.S. its lower-price copy of Johnson & Johnson ’s blockbuster rheumatoid-arthritis drug Remicade, the second such alternative on the market. The Samsung-developed drug will be marketed to health-care providers by Merck & Co.’s U.S. sales team and will be sold for about a 35% discount off Remicade’s current list price.

The move follows an April approval by the Food and Drug Administration. It is the Samsung business empire’s debut treatment in the world’s biggest drug market and reflects its desires to diversify beyond electronics.

Samsung Bioepis Co., the group’s new biotechnology company, is targeting the creation of near replicas of so-called branded biologic drugs, like Remicade, which are made out of living cells and address complex diseases including cancer or arthritis. These “biosimilars” are sold more cheaply than brand-name treatments that often cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.

The lucrative biologic drug market will gradually open up as patent protections of those treatments expire, creating opportunities for biosimilars made by Samsung and others. Biologics had $202 billion in world-wide sales last year, and the drugs are expected to have $214 billion in sales this year, according to EvaluatePharma, a source of pharmaceutical market data and analysis. It estimates sales will reach $276 billion in 2020.