Competitive Landscape in China Toothpaste Market

Chunsheng Xu

Guangzhou Dental Doctor Oral Care Institute, China

Competition in China toothpaste market is long-standing

In the initial stage after establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the China’s toothpaste industry included mostly manual workshop-type small-scale production enterprises, which were mainly concentrated in three big cities—Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangzhou.In the 1980s, after the reform and opening up, domestic brands sprang up and gradually formed competition situation. In addition to three large-scale enterprises,Shanghai Toothpaste Factory, Tianjin Toothpaste Factory and Guangzhou Toothpaste Factory, there were a batch of enterprises, including Chongqing Toothpaste Factory,Liuzhou Toothpaste Factory, Hefei Daily Chemical General Factory, Hangzhou Toothpaste Factory, Guangzhou Jieyin Toothpaste Factory, Wuzhou Toothpaste Factory,and Nanchang Toothpaste Factory, grew rapidly and became the leading enterprises in China toothpaste industry.In the 1990s, several foreign-invested enterprises, including Colgate, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Hawley & Hazel Chemical, LG, and Lion, entered China powerfully, and their toothpaste products formed a monopolistic situation in the high-end market; whereas the domestic brands continuously kept a competitive status in the market.

1.本科生對(duì)本專業(yè)的滿意情況對(duì)其是否選擇考研行為有一定影響。在選擇考研的學(xué)生中，對(duì)本專業(yè)的滿意率是51.15%；對(duì)于考研所報(bào)考的專業(yè)，56.6%的學(xué)生選擇了“當(dāng)前熱門專業(yè)”；32.2%的學(xué)生“不喜歡本科學(xué)?；?qū)I(yè)，希望通過考研來選擇自己滿意的學(xué)?；?qū)I(yè)”。在不選擇考研的學(xué)生中，對(duì)本專業(yè)的滿意率達(dá)到了90%，遠(yuǎn)高于選擇考研的學(xué)生。

Analysis on Main Points of Steam Turbine Regenerative Extraction Steam System Design HUANG Tao(68)

After entry of the 21stcentury, the toothpaste market has exhibited fierce competition, and the foreign-invested enterprises have gradually took the initiative in the market through new product development, low price extension,advertising bombardment, and terminal monopoly.[1]The traditional domestic brands painfully reshuffled in the process of restructuring, and their production outputs increased steadily. Maintained at original level, or decreased greatly, or they reorganized with other enterprises or finally broken up. Meanwhile, emerging domestic brands like Yunnan Baiyao, Nice, Dental Doctor, and Saky, have obtained some advantages in competition with foreign-invested brands and become the main force of domestic brands by means of accurate orientation, flexible mechanism, qualif ied products, and struggling spirit.

Present situations of development of the China toothpaste market competition

According to the relevant statistics, the terminal retail sales amount in the China toothpaste market was about RMB 45.0 billion and the factory sales amount was about RMB 22.0 billion in 2014. At present, toothpaste enterprises in China formed two major camps: foreign-invested enterprises, represented by Colgate, Procter & Gamble,Hawley & Hazel, Unilever, LG, Lion, and GlaxoSmith-Kline, occupy 55%; domestic enterprises, represented by Dencare, Yunnan Baiyao, Nice, Qiancai, Weimeizi, BlueS-ky, Masson, Liangmianzhen, and Maxam, occupy 45%.

The traditional channels in China toothpaste market are “supermarket + exclusive shop + circulation channel”; with the entry of pharmaceutical enterprises into the toothpaste field and the rising of e-commerce, the marketing channels for toothpaste show a fully emerging situation, that is, a channel mode of “supermarket + exclusive shop + drug store + circulation channel + e-commerce channel”. Figure 5 shows the toothpaste sales shares of various channels in 2014, and the large-scale supermarket channel is still absolutely dominant.

Characteristics of toothpaste market competition in China

Brand competition

There are 9 foreign-invested toothpaste enterprises in China: Procter & Gamble (China) Co., Ltd., Colgate-Palmolive (China) Co., Ltd., Hawley & Hazel Chemical(China) Co., Ltd., Unilever (China) Co., Ltd., Beijing LG Daily Chemical Co., Ltd., GlaxoSmithKline (China) Investment Co., Ltd., Amway (China) Daily Necessities Co.,Ltd., Sunstar (Guangzhou) Chemical Co., Ltd., and Lion Daily Necessities Chemicals (Qingdao) Co., Ltd. The foreign-invested toothpaste brands primarily are: Crest,Colgate, Darlie, Zhonghua, Bamboo Salt, Amway, Lion,and Sensodyne, etc.

There are about 85 domestic toothpaste enterprises in China, including 10 ones with more than 100 million production and marketing volume, namely, Chongqing Dencare Oral Care Co., Ltd., Guangxi Aoqili Co., Ltd.,Guangzhou Qiancai Cosmetics Co., Ltd., Liuzhou Liangmianzhen Co., Ltd., Masson Group Co., Ltd., Nice Group Co., Ltd., Shanghai Maxam Daily Chemical Co., Ltd.,Tianjin BlueSky Group Co., Ltd., Yunnan Baiyao Group Co., Ltd., and Guangzhou Weimeizi Personal Care Products Co., Ltd. There are about 24 medium-scale enterprises, and others are small-scale enterprises. The domestic toothpaste brands primarily are Lesening, Yunnan Baiyao,Nice, Dental Doctor, Saky, BlueSky, Heimei, Liangmianzhen, Maxam, Tianqi, and Caoshanhu, etc.

三百里外的梨友聽說秀容月明復(fù)起，大吃一驚，立即令手下打著自己旗號(hào)，火速向桂州進(jìn)發(fā)，他卻親率一萬輕騎，去襲擊巢城。

Now, Chinese people attach more and more importance to interpersonal communication. Red lips, white teeth, and fresh breath is essential for people’s appearance.In addition, quick rhythm and high stress in modern life make Chinese people’s oral health conditions increasingly complicated and diverse, so traditional functional toothpaste products represented by fluoride-containing toothpaste and herbal toothpaste have been subdivided gradually, and high-end functional toothpaste products,e.g., multi-functional toothpaste, gingiva protection toothpaste, and anti-allergy toothpaste, have been launched constantly. Figure 3 gives the distribution of market shares of toothpaste categories in 2014, and the products with whitening, freshing, and gingiva protection functions have market share of 55.2% in total, becoming the top 3 function demands of consumers.

Figure 1. Top 10 toothpaste brands in China toothpaste market by production output

In recent 5 years, domestic brand toothpaste enterprises have been well aware that the consumption concept has been upgraded and that low-level price competition has been unfavorable for the development of the industry, so only if fully utilizing the advantage of affinity formed by the brands, taking strategies of scientific and technological innovation and quality-based winning, developing highend functional toothpaste. These actions can make the domestic brand toothpaste products win larger market share.According to the incomplete statistics of China Oral Care Industry Association, the market share of domestic brand toothpaste products in the high-end market of products with 100g and selling price over RMB 15 was slightly higher than that of foreign-invested brand toothpastes.

Figure 2. Top 10 brands in China toothpaste market by sales amount

In 2014, the top 10 toothpaste brands in the China toothpaste market by sales amount are shown in Figure 2, including 5 foreign-invested brands and 5 domestic brands. At present, the foreign-invested brands have higher annual sales amount share, which is approximately 55%.

11月14日，云南省政府新聞辦召開特色小鎮(zhèn)新聞發(fā)布會(huì)，公布了今年15個(gè)獲得省財(cái)政獎(jiǎng)補(bǔ)支持和6個(gè)被淘汰的特色小鎮(zhèn)名單。

Product competition

The top 10 toothpaste brands in the China toothpaste market by production output in 2014 are shown in Figure 1, including 4 foreign-invested brands, and 6 domestic brands. The overall quantity of domestic brands is far larger than that of foreign-invested brands, so the current annual production output share of domestic brands is higher than that of foreign-invested brands, and reached 52%.

According to a sample investigation in Changzhou,Jiangsu Province in 2014,[3]out of 364 varieties of toothpaste in different sizes from 19 brands collected by price collectors, 149 were priced from 10 to 20 yuan, representing 41% of the total; there are 86 toothpaste products with price more than RMB 20 per piece, accounting for 23.6%; in contrast, there are only 30 toothpaste products with price less than RMB 5, accounting for 8.2% of the total. Price monitoring officers said, “From vertical comparison of the price of toothpaste product with the same species and size between now and past, we can see that the toothpaste prices do not rise markedly. Manufactures have launched more and more middle-end and high-end products with increasingly higher prices. People often bought a piece of toothpaste within RMB 3–4 in the past, but the number of consumers choosing toothpaste priced more than RMB 10 has now increased day by day.”

Figure 3. Distribution of market shares of toothpaste categories in China in 2014

Price competition

With the constant increasing income of Chinese residents, and more and more agricultural population moving to cities for living, the sales volume of famous brand toothpaste products with high efficacy shows an accelerated growth trend. Research results show that high-and ultra-high-end toothpaste products have been constantly attracting consumers, and have become the principal driving force of rapid development of the toothpaste market,whereas the sales volume of medium- and low-end toothpaste products has decreased year by year. The specific change in annual sales volume of toothpaste products of different price grades in the past 3 years is shown in Figure 4. At present, the high- and ultra-high-end toothpaste products represents market share up to 52%, taking a dominant place in the market.

Figure 4. Change in annual sales volume of toothpaste products in different price level in the past 3 years

除草劑是迅速打開大田市場(chǎng)的關(guān)鍵。安道麥自2016出了廣受歡迎的小麥田除草劑“技除?”，在長(zhǎng)江流域冬小麥區(qū)域迅速拓展市場(chǎng)。針對(duì)水稻市場(chǎng)，公司陸續(xù)推出了優(yōu)秀產(chǎn)品“拿克思?”“立帆?”“啶心?”?，F(xiàn)在，又一款差異化的除草劑產(chǎn)品“Agil?”也箭在弦上，據(jù)悉，該化合物是安道麥全球銷量最大的除草劑單品之一，將由安道麥引入中國(guó)。

Channel competition

The toothpaste market share of foreign-invested enterprises exhibits a descending trend as a whole. The statistical data in 2012 showed that the share of Procter &Gamble in the China toothpaste market decreased from 20.6% to 17.8% and that of Unilever in the China toothpaste market decreased from 12% to 9.9%.[2]The toothpaste market share of domestic enterprises exhibits an ascending trend as a whole, but it was only 30% in 2008.[1]

Figure 5. Toothpaste sales share of various channels in China toothpaste market in 2014

Development trend of China toothpaste market competition

Development trend of industrial scale

3) 溫度。當(dāng)浸提溫度<40℃時(shí)，隨著溫度升高火龍果果皮甜菜苷類色素提取量呈逐漸上升趨勢(shì)；當(dāng)溫度增至40℃時(shí)提取量最高，為3.85 mg/100g；之后呈快速下降趨勢(shì)，其原因可能是甜菜苷類色素對(duì)溫度較敏感，過高的溫度加速了甜菜苷類色素的分解[14]。因此，浸提溫度以40℃最優(yōu)。

Change trend of industrial policies

Nowadays, the consumers are paying more attention to the quality safety of the products. As toothpaste is directly related to human oral cavity. Therefore, quality safety is the most important factor that influences the sustainable and stable development of the industry. At present, China Food and Drug Administration and the industrial association will organize all toothpaste enterprises to formulate and improve laws and regulations and relevant technical standards, providing powerful assurance for product quality safety so that the consumers completely feel ease to use the products.

In the next 5 years, the per capita annual consumption of toothpaste in China will rise further; if the export increase is taken into account, it is expected that the total output of toothpaste will reach 670,000 tons by 2020, with an average annual growth rate of 3.5%. Due to technical progress, the increase in total sales amount in the toothpaste market should be faster than that in output, and it is expected that the total sales amount will have an annual growth rate up to 7% and with reach RMB 30.8 billion in 2020 and the Chinese toothpaste market will exceed the USA toothpaste market, and become the largest toothpaste market in the world.

With the gradual improvement of laws and regulations, environmental protection and occupational health protection has also become indispensable production conditions, thus most toothpaste enterprises will implement HACCP certification and clean production audit under the organizing and guidance of the governments, to strictly control and effectively handle the hazardous materials,dust, noise, and wastewater, etc.

Development trend of products

As Chinese market is huge, and there are numerous consumers, the demands for oral care products are diversified, so toothpaste market needs to be further segmented.Methods as oral-condition-based care, age-based care,time-based care, and sex-based care have been accepted by the consumers, and there will be new segmental methods generating as natural, safe, and environment friendly, to create new market space, in the future. In recent years, new product concepts, including specific women toothpaste, swallowable children toothpaste, low-foam toothpaste, nanometer antibacterial toothpaste, and fluorine-free mothproof toothpaste have started to be focused on, and there are a few new products launched to test the waters.[4]

In respect of function, the current toothpaste functions are mainly divided into 2 major categories: one is to prevent and adjuvantly treat some oral diseases, e.g., tooth decay, odonthemodia, gingivitis, periodontitis, oral ulcer,and tooth defect; the other is to help adjust and improve oral conditions, e.g., bad breath removal, dental calculus removal, tooth stain and plaque removal, and tooth whitening. In the future, with the change of consumers’ focus on oral problems and the deep understanding of oral conditions by medical institutions, there will be some new function demands to be excavated.[4]

In respect of categories, with the further development of e-commerce and micro-commerce, the usage experience of product will become more and more important.The first category is toothpaste products with super-strong function (hemostasis, stain removal, and bad breath removal, etc.), which will become the emerging force in the market in addition to composite functional toothpaste products; the second category is brand-new products,which are made by combining toothpaste and products like oral care liquid, toothbrush, whitestrips, tooth powder,drugs and health care products together, comprehensively solve oral problems; the third category is OTC drug toothpaste products appearing after further combination of oral care products, including toothpaste, with oral clinics and oral beauty institutions in the future.[4]

Development trend of market strategies

In China toothpaste industry, there are both superlarge-scale foreign-invested toothpaste enterprises topping the global rankings, and powerful large-scale domestic toothpaste enterprises and numerous medium- and smallscale domestic toothpaste enterprises. Various enterprises have different market strategies, as at different development stages.

In general, foreign-invested enterprises will continue to keep supremacy in the market in the future by means of powerful research and development strength, comprehensive market experience, long-standing brand heritage,good partnership with terminal outlets, and strong advertising campaign and mergers and acquisitions (M&A)means. It can be seen from the shelves in supermarkets that the toothpaste areas are basically monopolized by foreign-invested brands. Whether in respect of single product quantity, placement position, single piece price, or promotional strength, foreign-invested brands fully surpass domestic brands. Each of such foreign-invested brands as Darlie, Crest, Colgate, and Zhonghua uniquely occupies a shelf, and each brand has more than 20 single products and numerous concepts, and has its representative products in each price interval.

In the future, the domestic enterprises will drive the regional extension of channels while raising the professional level of products, so as to gradually progress from single segment category and regional channel to all category and the whole market. However, different domestic enterprises will have different methods and strategies. For example, Yunnan Baiyao, and Saky will build professional oral care images, realize brand differentiation, and using a single toothpaste product towards segment field (e.g.,tobacco stain removal, and probiotics) and by largely extending non-toothpaste category (toothbrush, mouthwash,and dental floss, etc.), respectively. Dental Doctor will raise impact force to steadily enlarge market scale through product research and development and brand extension(sub-brands including Jiapeiliao, and Anchiyou, and family brands including Extra, and Wrigley’s Spearmint).Liangmianzhen has started targeted additional stock issue, taking the first step towards recovery. Liangmianzhen has good bases in view of brand, funds, production, and research and development. It will be hopeful for Liangmianzhen to realize double sales growth, if it can focus on toothpaste business, carry out marketing reform, change its mechanism, and implement incentive plans in later stages.[5]

[1] Anonym. Decrease in Market Share of Procter & Gamble and Unilever in the China Region. www.chinairn.com/news/20121009/939876.html (Accessed Oct 9).

[2] Anonym. Breakout of Domestic Brands Bucking the Trend with Breakdown as Effort Point. news.c2cc.cn/rihua/data/201208/559530.htm (Accessed Aus 13).

[3] Anonym. The Prices Of Functional Toothpaste Products Are Indeed High, Ranging from More Than RMB 20 to More than RMB 80. news.gmw.cn/newspaper/2014-02/23/content_2920133.htm (Accessed Feb 23).

[4] C.S Xu. Present Situations and Trend Analysis of High-End Functional Toothpaste. Detergent & Cosmetics. 2015,38, 7-9.

[5] Anonym. Market Competition of Toothpaste. news.360xh.com/201405/25/11420.html (Accessed May 25).