Infinitus Straddles Two Worlds.
Founded / 1992
Headquarters / Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province, China
Top Executive / Lam Yu, Infinitus Global CEO
Hero Product / Infinitus Health Tonic
Corporate Employees / More than 3,000
At its core, traditional Chinese medicine focuses on preventing disease. There’s always been a push and pull between the tenets of this Eastern methodology and the treatment-centric focus of Western medicine, but companies like Infinitus straddle both worlds in their quest to develop quality products that meet people’s diversified needs for health, beauty, youth, vitality and quality of life.
When they launched in 1992, Infinitus took a health and wellness track, advocating for excellence in Chinese wellness traditions and seizing opportunities to promote the Chinese medicine health industry. They used the Chinese health culture as the theoretical basis for research and development of high-quality Chinese herbal health products, while utilizing modern technology and Western methods to conduct research and development, demonstration, extraction and processing to make Infinitus products more effective and more appealing to the health and wellness needs of multiple consumer personalities.
Today, Infinitus is positioned as a high-quality Chinese herbal health product company within the health food, skin care, personal care and household categories, offering seven major brands and more than 200 products in total. They have two production bases in Xinhui and Yingkou comprised of hundreds of acres, as well as more than 30 corporate offices in Hong Kong, Shanghai and other metropolitan centers and a newly completed headquarters in Guangzhou, China.
Infinitus operates within a hybrid business model that includes direct sales, plus 30 branches, 30 service centers and about 7,000 specialty stores and studios in mainland China as well as online platforms like WeChat, websites and apps to carry out service consultation, marketing promotion and product sales. E-commerce cloud merchants and distributors can utilize all these options to introduce products and consult with consumers before and after sales. All told, Infinitus employs more than 3,000 people.
In 2020, Infinitus earned a “China Best Employer Award” and then found themselves in the company of well-known, global businesses like McDonald’s, Marriott International and SAIC GM when they earned Top Employer China 2021 certification. This comes as a result of excellent human resource benchmarks, management, strategies and practices including personal and professional employee growth plans, creating a better workplace environment and enabling company-wide long-term and sustainable development.
Launching a Hero Product
But this storied history all began nearly 30 years ago with the launch of what would become their hero product—Infinitus Health Tonic.
Capitalizing on more than 20 years of research conducted by Professor Xianxiu Xian of what is now China’s Southern Medical University, Infinitus brought to market Infinitus Health Tonic in 1994. Utilizing Dr. Xian’s development of “composite polysaccharide,” a combination of pure, natural ingredients extracted from plants and fungi-active polysaccharides, the Health Tonic’s blend was found more effective in enhancing immune system function than ingesting a single polysaccharide.
Theirs was the first composite polysaccharide, Chinese herbal health product and it was quickly recognized and favored by consumers. In the years since, Infinitus Health Tonic has racked up numerous awards and was ranked as the number one Chinese herbal immunomodulatory health food in 2019 by Euromonitor Information Consulting (Shanghai), a world-renowned research and consulting organization.
Proudly Rooted, Meticulous and Compliant
China’s health food industry has undergone a decades-long evolution bringing about healthier and steadier product development, segmentation in consumer demand that has increased cross-industry competition, as well as online and offline integration development. These and other trends provide both opportunities and challenges.
Yet, Infinitus is proud and thankful to be rooted in the excellence of the thousands-year-old Chinese wellness traditions, as they continue implementing a forward-looking business development strategy.
“By reviewing, we found that the health concepts embodied in the Chinese wellness traditions, such as treatment of disease, holistic view, physical and mental coherence, etc., coincide with the current needs of health preservation, and our original choice is still in line with the trend of the times,” Lam Yu, Infinitus Global CEO, told the 2021 China Special Food Conference.
Today, companies need to be more intensive and meticulous, Yu explained, and they must strengthen consumer insights and services in order to grasp the needs of different groups and fields.
Infinitus, like other upstanding health and wellness direct selling companies doing business in China, is actively promoting industry compliance as a way of evolving to meet the needs of their marketplace and as a follow-up to the country’s 100 Day Review of the nutritional supplement industry.
Previously short-sighted, bad and illegal behaviors by some companies affected not only famous health food brands but also product markets, reputations and the operating efficiency of the entire industry.
Since 2017, Infinitus has set June 16th each year as the “6·16 Infinitus Norm Management Day,” hoping to set an example for the public in corporate norm and shape an industry image of integrity and self-discipline; to help practitioners establish a correct view of employment, strengthen their awareness of standards, strengthen standardized behaviors and continue to gain customers’ recognition; standardize themselves so that consumers can truly understand product efficacy and information, enjoy honest and high-quality services and worry-free after- sale guarantee.
This edict should come as no surprise to those familiar with the corporate culture at Infinitus which is based upon the core phrase “Si Li Ji Ren,” when translated into English means “considering everyone’s interest before taking action.”
Infinitus emphasizes taking a helicopter view, thinking from others’ perspectives and caring about other people’s feelings. They’ve built a philosophy that produces steady brand growth thanks to effective communication channels between customers and the company, as well as the ability to take rapid action in response to ongoing market changes, collect feedback from the sales force to better meet their needs, cultivate high trust and efficiency that enhances participation and create a sense of belonging that promotes win-win situations.
Primary, Productive Forces for Success
Science and technology are the primary, productive forces behind the success of Infinitus. They consider scientific strength a weapon for winning in the marketplace, and technology permeates all aspects of Infinitus’ research and development, production, sales and service.
Cooperative research partners at University of Cambridge, for instance, used advanced molecular biology technologies to study the effects of active ingredients in Chinese herbal medicines. Their discoveries provided a new research direction, analytical methods and targets for in-depth study of anti-aging product development, as well as valuable insights for future anti-aging product efficacy.
Infinitus invested about 300 million yuan ($47 million U.S. dollars) in 2018 to build the first smart Chinese herbal oral liquid production line, receiving 17 patents along the way. The high degree of automation and information technology that powers it allows Infinitus to realize full-process automation from unpackaging, preparation, filling, sterilization, light inspection, packaging and storage.
It speeds production and increases per capita production capacity, while ensuring the quality stability of batch production, reducing manual intervention, the intermediate links of product production as well as direct contact between product and environment, resulting in higher standards of hygiene. In the five years from 2020 to 2024, Infinitus will invest a total of 3 billion yuan ($471 million U.S. dollars) in scientific research.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift of consumers purchasing online. Paired with 2020’s growth in China’s social e-commerce sector surpassing 70 million and the expectation of China’s health service industry to climb to 16 trillion yuan (approximately $2.5 trillion U.S. dollars) by 2030, the integration of online and offline business has become an irreversible trend.
So, in 2019, Infinitus rolled out a new business model that included e-commerce and then prioritized digital transformation as 2020 began. Through the use of technology, they sought to break down all barriers to creative thinking and adopt innovative approaches to reinvent direct selling. They launched digitally through Enterprise WeChat to fully maximize operational efficiency so that a distributor only needs a cell phone to acquire a lead, convert into a buying customer, conduct follow up sales conversion, and provide business support.
The e-commerce business model is working for Infinitus, who touts more than one million distributors who have chosen the Easy Earn model of social e-commerce in the past two years. The company plans to invest 3.4 billion yuan (approximately $526 million U.S.) in digital transformation and brand building. By grasping the current social e-commerce dividend, finding the right marketing model and inspiring business potential, Infinitus is accelerating its pace toward achieving its mission and creating a whole new series of growth points.
From the January 2022 issue of Direct Selling News magazine.
