TAIPEI, Dec. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Taiwan has been lauded by international communities for its standout performance in containing the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19). In the meantime, Medtecs Group, a company headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan has taken off to become the world’s leading supplier of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the biggest PPE stockpiling solutions provider in 2020.
William Yang, CEO of Medtecs International Corp.
“With the COVID-19 pandemic showing no signs of slowing down in the U.S., Medtecs is riding on the paradigm shift in PPE demand by setting up a local PPE supply chain and turning Medtecs into a household name,” said Group CEO, William Yang.
As nations around the world struggled to cope with the COVID-19 crisis earlier this year, Medtecs, which is dual listed in Singapore and Taiwan, had to turn away orders by new customers because it was flooded with requests from its existing OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturing) customers to triple its PPE output.
Medtecs of course planned to honor its existing agreements with these long-term partners. On the other hand, the 31-year-old company also hoped to capitalize on surging demands to gain more market share for its own Medtecs and CoverU branded products. Soaring raw material prices further complicated the situation. In the end, however, Medtecs managed to scale up quickly to meet the demand surge and was able to increase output by almost 30 percent for existing customers while stepping up production of its own branded products for buyers both old and new.
The trick? Round-the-clock shifts, increased automation and outsourcing the manufacturing of non-critical parts of the products. Medtecs also converted idle plants into additional manufacturing bases so that additional production lines were added quickly. At the same time, Medtecs harnessed the power of e-commerce to source for quality raw materials, reliable vendors and even new customers, which, coupled with its “Source and Sell Globally” strategy, has worked well in the current global economy where supply chains are often unstable.
The Group is now churning out 80 million medical masks and 18 million gowns monthly, from production facilities in Cambodia, Mainland China and the Philippines. Singapore, Taiwan and the Philippines are among its biggest markets. Now, it is looking to enter the U.S. market.
“At one point, we were actually giving up tens of millions of dollars in profits to honor our commitment to existing customers,” said Yang, who has been with the Group since 2005. In 2018, he succeeded his father Clement Yang – Medtecs’s founder and current Chairman – as CEO.
Medtecs-branded products, which made up a mere 3 percent of the Group’s total output in 2019, accounted for a whopping 65 percent of overall production in the first nine months of 2020. The company’s three-decade-old OEM business has been overtaken by its full-fledged OPM (Original Product Manufacturing) business.
Yang said Medtecs’s “Source and Sell Globally” strategy was a big help when it comes to raw material sourcing. Four years ago, the Group began to grow its network of suppliers. As a result, “during a pandemic like the current one, we don’t have to spend extra time and resources on validating new suppliers, because we already have a full list of trustworthy suppliers to meet the surging demand. When the order volume is big, we scaled up quickly and still managed to deliver on time,” said Yang.
The Group’s growth has been nothing short of explosive. Medtecs’s net profit jumped to $85 million in the first nine months of 2020, up from $426,000 during the same period in 2019. Revenue increased to nearly $290 million, from around $50 million previously.
Isolation gowns and coveralls – Medtecs’s core products – made up 73 percent of revenue by product type for the nine-month period ended September 31, 2020, up from 64 percent last year. Disposable surgical masks accounted for 18 percent of the total revenue, up from 0.2 percent last year.
Asia is still Medtecs’s largest market, accounting for 44 percent of the Group’s revenue by geography. About 35 percent of the Group revenue came from Europe, followed by 15 percent from North America, a key market which is seeing rising positive cases and higher rate of hospitalization.
Two months ago, Medtecs incorporated a wholly-owned subsidiary, Medtecs USA, in Delaware. According to Yang, Medtecs is working with a US partner in North Carolina to produce and distribute its CoverU collection of personal protective clothing and gears across the country by the end of 2020. This marks the beginning of the Group’s transformation into a one-stop PPE procurement platform and a global PPE stockpiling solutions provider.
Moving forward, Medtecs will continue to respond to President Trump’s and President-Elect Joe Biden’s call to bring production of key PPE items back to U.S. soil. As the first phase of its U.S. expansion plan, Medtecs will be setting up production lines and producing USA-made disposable facemasks which have proven to be effective and instrumental in slowing down the spread of COVID-19.
About Medtecs
Medtecs International Corporation Limited (“Medtecs”, together with its subsidiaries, the “Group”) is the world’s leading supplier of personal protective equipment (PPE) and a trusted multi-national PPE stockpiling solutions provider to governments and group purchasing organizations around the world.
The Group commenced operations in the Philippines in 1989 and has since established a strong presence in the United States, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Medtecs was incorporated in Bermuda in 1997 and currently is headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan.
Medtecs has offices and facilities strategically located in Taiwan, Cambodia, the Philippines, Singapore and Mainland China. In 2020, the Group incorporated Medtecs USA Corporation, it’s first subsidiary in the United States, for expansion into the local PPE and medical consumables market.
Medtecs is dual-listed in Singapore and Taiwan.
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