In today’s highly competitive business world, Qisheng Technology has made remarkable achievements in the field of smart beds with its unique development path and firm business philosophy.
This article will delve into the development story of Qisheng Technology over the past 20 years behind its annual revenue of 3 billion.
The development of Qisheng Technology has not been smooth sailing.
In the early years, they tried to build cars privately but failed.
Walking into the Jiaxing headquarters building, there is a vintage red car in the lobby, which bears witness to that dream.
The car can still be started today and participated in the 1998 Beijing Auto Show, where it received more than 4,000 orders in four days.
However, the production license was never approved, and coupled with the impact of the Asian financial crisis, the team was eventually disbanded.
But this failure also left them with valuable lessons and an obsession with underlying certainty.
Later, they started from the core motor of the lifting system, made the core components number one in the world, and then sold the company.
In 2005, they set out again and established Jiaxing Shuford Electric Bed Co., Ltd. (later renamed Qisheng Technology Co., Ltd.), focusing on smart electric beds.
What really enabled Qisheng Technology to move from “making beds” to “making sleep health” was a phone call from Germany.
At the end of 2012, a 42-year-old German colleague died in his sleep, which gave them an idea: Can the bed sense changes in vital signs in advance and send reminders during sleep?
To this end, they cooperated with the Zhejiang Tsinghua Yangtze River Delta Research Institute to develop non-contact sensors from scratch.
After years of hard work, we finally developed the world’s only non-contact vital signs monitoring sensor that could sense “a falling feather”, upgrading the bed from “comfort improvement” to “vital signs protection.”
Qisheng Technology has set three almost harsh bottom lines for itself.
The first bottom line is that hallucinations will not be tolerated. They spent four and a half years making rigorous manual annotations of all medical knowledge related to sleep health.
The second bottom line is to prove it is harmless first, and then talk about effectiveness.
The core technology of the depression detection algorithm was developed many years ago, and it was only launched in March this year because it would take at least six or seven years to prove its harmlessness.
The third bottom line is to insist on not discounting. They believe that health and life cannot be discounted, and discounting products goes against the values promoted.
In terms of strategic planning, Qisheng Technology has planned four clear growth curves.
The first curve is traditional foreign trade OEM/ODM. The penetration rate of smart bedding in American households is less than 17%, Europe is less than 2%, and China is almost zero. The ceiling is still far away.
The second curve is brand development. In China, the “Shuford” brand is the core, which is more conducive to product iteration and supporting R&D investment.
The third curve is software subscription services, and paid items cover a variety of medical-grade consumer services.
The fourth curve is the health ecology. With the establishment of the third curve and the accumulation of multi-modal health data, it will naturally fall into place.
The core users of domestic smart beds are the mainstays of families in their thirties with an average monthly salary of 15,000 to 18,000, and medical workers are the highest paying group.
Huang Xiaowei judged that the true full-scale outbreak of big health would have to wait ten years, so Qisheng Technology prepared its production capacity ten years in advance to wait for the outbreak.
As a company with nearly 96% of its revenue from overseas and highly dependent on exports to the United States, Qisheng Technology has summarized three iron rules for going overseas.
The first is to respect mature markets and choose acquisitions rather than build own brands; the second is to be truly localized, hiring local leaders in overseas markets and delegating decision-making power to the front line; the third is to have a larger pattern, take into account the interests of local industries, and not engage in predatory overseas expansion.
On the issue of power and inheritance, Huang Xiaowei said that he will definitely retire in 10 years and transform the company from “the founder’s company” to “the founder of the company.”
Qisheng Technology insists on being an enterprise rather than a business. This road is slow, heavy, and lonely, but they are betting on the turning point when great health will arrive in ten years.
In an industry that is accustomed to “waking up early, grabbing the limelight, and leaving as soon as you make a profit,” Qisheng Technology is willing to consistently place its values on a twenty-year time scale. This kind of persistence is commendable.
