Like most Americans, Asians are becoming more health conscious these days, setting the stage for a boom in the home healthcare and healthy lifestyle products business. The leading lifestyle products company in Asia is a Singaporean company called OSIM International Ltd., which has been growing consistently by more than 20 percent a year.

“OSIM International has taken a holistic approach to a healthy lifestyle,” says Peter Lee, chief financial officer. Each OSIM retail store offers healthcare products for each of the four areas of wellbeing: relaxation, hygiene, nutrition and fitness.

Already the company markets its products from over 320 colorful retail outlets, located mainly in Asian countries, including Hong Kong and China, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia. It has recently expanded into Southern California, Vancouver BC and Latin America.

“Hong Kong is our largest market right now,” says Lee, “with about 40 percent of out total sales.” As might be expected, urban areas that create stress in people are the company’s target markets.

Lee says the most exciting growth opportunity is in China. In the near term, OSIM is focusing on 15 major cities there. By yearend, the company hopes to have 85 outlets. Piracy of its products has been a problem in China, but OSIM is trying to combat this with better technology and trade-in policies for major items such as the massage chairs.

OSIM retail stores feature an exclusive range of products ranging from vitamins and food supplements for a healthier body to high-tech vacuum cleaners and air filters for a cleaner home environment. Each store has several zones where people can experience different concepts of health and wellbeing, and come out feeling relaxed and refreshed.

OSIM’s remarkable growth has been largely due to brisk demand for a high-tech massage chair called iMedic. Borrowing a page from Chinese acupuncture principles, the chair is said to locate and stimulate a person’s 27 major acupressure points and even gives customized rubdowns tailored to the person’s physical dimensions.

Ron Sim, chairman and chief executive officer, says the iMedic chair does not claim to offer cures for medical ailments but it does help maintain a sense of wellbeing.

“In modern times, relaxation is not a luxury, it’s a necessity,” he says. “And good health has no price.”
Sim, an avid jogger who holds a PhD in Business Administration from Wisconsin International University, founded the company in 1980. In the late 1980s, he saw that the home healthcare products sector was dominated by a disparate group of equipment manufacturers with little or no emphasis on marketing and a lack of brand consciousness among consumers. In 1989, he decided to bring together different home healthcare products from different equipment manufacturers and market them using specialty branding.

Another hot seller that is fueling OSIM’s expansion in Asia is an electric roller foot massager. The devise delivers a stimulating foot massage that is based on the principles of reflexology, an ancient art first practiced by Chinese, Indian and Egyptian peoples. Reflexology, still widely practiced in Asia, holds that treatment of certain parts of the foot has corresponding benefits to various other parts of the body. True or not, the device delivers a massage not easily forgotten.

With a strong commitment to innovation, the company is constantly coming out with new healthy lifestyle products that are designed to soothe the mind and body of the modern urban dweller.

Showing a profit even in economic downturns, OSIM has become something of a role model.

For further information, see www.osim.com.sg.