PPE Leaders — At the center of the hurricane

PPE Leaders — At the center of the hurricane

Voices of Leaders: We are aware that you make hundreds of products, from face masks to personal protective equipment gloves, suits and everything. Now of course with this pandemic everyone is talking about medical innovation and equipment. These are the most important topics currently. How has COVID-19 affected the company’s plans for 2020? How do you see this as an opportunity for the company to grow exponentially?

Michael Chang(Chairman & CEO of CSD): Because of COVID-19, the manufacturing for PPE in Taiwan has been noticed worldwide. So I am sure a lot of other opportunities may open up in the future and this probably won’t end for a while. Even when the virus actually has been stopped and there is a vaccine for it. The usage for these kinds of products will greatly change worldwide.

Jonathan Chang(COO of CSD): To add to that, back in the day, in Taiwan, no-one wore face masks, until SARS came along and completely changed the habit of the uses and the product and what it represents. I think that might happen worldwide and give us a lot of opportunities in how we look at the market.

VoL: How has the demand increased from your international distributors or agents when it comes to these face masks? After June 30th how do you think you could potentially start exporting millions of masks to the world?

JC: It depends on the severity in different countries. Generally, we still like to help out but at the same time there are still contracts we have to fulfil. And in terms of the demand you mentioned, the demand has gone to a number I can’t grasp anymore. From the beginning of March we went from getting two or three months to thirty or forty a month. And we’ve been getting enquiries from companies that we try to reach but can never get a hold of, from countries that sometimes I have never heard of. The demand is so high that there is really no number to it.

VoL: Are there any new products you are planning to launch given this pandemic, anything you see as an opportunity?

JC: For starters, for at least three years we have been developing the my colour, my style face mask which is not as extreme of an innovation as you were just talking about but I think these are the most practical innovations and messages to get across, because these actually are medical grade. A lot of these new innovations out there, to me, might be cool, but at the end of the day if you look at the long-term, you look at the cost, and what kind of certificates it has, it still doesn’t match up to what we are doing with my colour, my style. So this is what we want to push worldwide. And we were on the way to doing, like you mentioned, we were in Berlin fashion week, we were stepping onto the international stage but apart from that, I have been in talk with European companies that perceive face masks in a different way that we do. As you know, in Europe, being green is a very big thing.

VoL: Talking about your products, the traditional surgical mask, the designer mask you also have — what does that represent for the company’s production and revenue?

JC: For the company itself, it is a completely different approach to how we normally do things. Like I mentioned earlier, we usually send to hospitals or very local distribution channels, we never had a marketing department. Before, what we did was manufacture a product, package it and out it goes, we didn’t think of sales. But as we wanted to focus more on a consumer market around 2017 we decided there is much more to a product than just being good, in a consumer market there needs to be a lot more added value. And the consumer market is the way we have to go because of the whole bidding system that happens all around the world. So as we looked for the consumer market to just survive and have the chance to grow the marketing department came to be and we started looking at products in a different way. This is how we developed these coloured face masks to fit with the market need.

VoL: People in the US were paying $10-20 for these masks online at one point because people don’t have any, and I know here because of the government programme it costs a few cents. So it must be an exciting time for you, to know that you’re going to get creative. How do you see this as an opportunity for the company to grow more than you ever thought you could grow? And how do you want the international community to recognise CSD after more than 70 years of production and innovation in this field?

MC: After this, what has become apparent is that the products we used to make were mainly for hospitals. But in the future, the whole consumer healthcare industry is going to grow rapidly, it is not just going to be face masks, it is going to be gowns and a lot of other stuff and people are going to be aware of that. In terms of that part, I know it’s hard to say, but it seems like there’s a brand new world, and not an existing industry, but a new channel and a new line of products that is going to be coming out.

VoL: Looking at your fellow colleagues in this industry, do you think you are all on the same page, that this could be a golden ticket for this industry to take off exponentially for the years to come?

MC: After this Taiwan will definitely have a lot of big opportunities. Not only were we able to contain and react to the virus very well, but in terms of let’s say face masks alone, we were able to go from 1.8 million to 18 million in just a matter of four weeks. So that goes to show the innovation and new manufacturing technologies that Taiwan is able to come up with in such a short space of time. As the next few years come along when the whole market is changing, we’re sure Taiwan will be able to adapt quickly and come up with new products that are going to be wanted by the consumers. Even for our company specifically, we were able to start new printing techniques on our face masks, that no-one has done in the world. We actually used a printer from HP and this kind of printing technology was only used by Coca Cola, Budweiser, all these giant companies to do their packaging, but we actually use it for face masks.

VoL: Considering this opportunity, looking to the future, how would you see CSD in the next 3-5 years?

JC: In the next 3-5 years, what we have been doing is slowly trying to be a company that is not known for manufacturing, we are trying to be a company that is known for its own brand on top of just manufacturing. In that sense, we are looking for not just how we can manage and manufacture our products but perhaps how we can design new products and have other people manufacture it for us. In the next 3-5 years I have been looking to these partnerships with other companies, it’s one way of looking at it, and also establishing our brand on the international level and pushing these MIT products throughout the world and showcasing what we can do not just in manufacturing but also with our product innovation and marketing skills, marketing package.

MC: I definitely see more of a future of how this is going to be a consumer not just a hospital product. I also believe in not just manufacturing and going for the lowest price, because you are not going to survive like that, so we have decided to change that to go through the consumer healthcare, that has to be the future, for the medical industry that has to be the future. Even in this industry I have seen appliances, hardwares that are only used in hospitals but now they have a miniature size so that they can be used at home, and so for anything in the medical industry this has to be the future.

 

Reference: Voices of Leaders