Taiwan-based polarizer maker BenQ Materials, who has diversified its business into the contact lens market, expects to see the new business break even in 2017, for the first time ever, due mainly to successful market development at home and abroad, according to the firm's chairman ZC Chen.
The company unveiled on July 11, 2017 a new version of its Miacare-branded silicone hydrogel color daily contact lens with a high oxygen permeability rate of 150dk/t, compared to 110-120dk/t for general contact lenses.
The company has secured steady supply of upstream material, silicone hydrogel, from its plant in Yunlin County, southern Taiwan, which also manufactures pressure sensitive adhesives needed in polarizer production. And the firm can also handle on its own chemical formula and molecular design associated with the production of silicone hydrogel, thus securing consistent quality of the main material, according to Chen.
Seizing 40% of domestic market for silicon hydrogel contact lenses
All these advantages, Chen said, have helped BenQ capture a 40% share of the domestic market for silicone hydrogel color daily contact lenses. The company now has 1,200 sales outlets around the island, with domestic sales accounting for 70%-80% of its revenues for such contact lenses.
At the moment, silicone hydrogel contact lenses command only 10% of total annual sales of around 330 million pieces of contact lens in Taiwan, with general hydrogel contact lenses commanding the bulk of the market.
Besides domestic sales, BenQ has successfully tapped into the markets in Malaysia, Singapore and China. It now records 800 sales stores in Malaysia and 100 in Singapore. In China, the company adopts an e-commerce strategy, having established a flagship store in Tmall, a leading B2C trading platform under the Alibaba Group, to sell its Miacare-branded silicone hydrogel contact lenses, according to Chen.
As to sales of polarizers, Chen said that despite continued price drop in the third quarter of 2017, BenQ Materials is guardedly optimistic about sales performance in the quarter as it has started shipments to new South Korean customers engaged in the production of TV and IT products. He expects the firm's polarizer shipments to the new customers to pick up drastically in the fourth quarter.
BenQ Materials chairman ZC Chen
Photo: Shihmin Fu, Digitimes, July 2017
Article translated by Willis Ke
