When health-keeping consumption became increasingly popular across China, southeast China's Fu'an City well leveraged the trend and managed to grow the small indigenous massager industry into a big industrial cluster.
In the 1980s, the massager industry in Fu'an, Fujian Province, represented merely OEM manufacturing relying heavily on foreign technologies, but nowadays, market-oriented sci-tech innovation has led the sector out of backwardness.
Continuous sci-tech input and a deep integration of the industry with related universities and research institutions helped break sector technology bottlenecks and fit in with the trending intelligent and refined development of the big health sector.
Instead of being followers, massager producers of Fu'an are largely industry pace-setters currently.
Walking into exhibition halls of local massager chair producer ROVOS Fitness, one can see smart massagers of various types with advanced technology. Its 3D and 4D product series, enabled by smart movements, can optimize product functions in real time through cloud-based remote upgrade technology.
As Wu Jinghua, chairman of ROVOS Fitness, said, the key to customer experience improvement lies in detail refinement. The company has been delving into product innovation to solve consumers' pain points.
Built on its multiple homegrown technologies, massagers with functions such as biomimetic grasping and rubbing, acupressure, and intelligent and adjustable massage are all within the company's reach for better user experience.
At present, independent R&D and broad application of the above-mentioned core technologies are a common sight for local massager producers, who have bidden farewell to OEM manufacturing and built solid foundations for competition in sub-sectors of wellness.
As the big health market where diversified and personalized needs prevail demands more and more products that cater to refined nursing of different body parts or scenario-based nursing, Fu'an massager producers agilely adapt to the change with differentiated development.
Via matching products with different cohorts of consumers and wellness scenarios, a multi-tiered massager products system has been in shape there.
In the exhibition spaces of local massager producer Ives Electronics, 200-plus massage products including lumbar massage cushions, neck massage devices, and kneepads are regularly presented to satisfy different needs of people.
Focusing on sub-sectors with dedicated efforts, Ives Electronics has won over 100 patents and lifted its annual output value from about 30 million yuan to around 200 million yuan, mirroring the thriving of Fu'an's market-oriented, technology-innovation-driven massager industry.
(Edited by Duan Jing with Xinhua Silk Road, duanjing@xinhua.org)
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