I've been in this industry for over a decade, and seeing the news of Vicky Technology's IPO today, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't envious.
A raw materials company reaching a market value of 9.1 billion yuan on its first day of trading. But if you think about it carefully, this actually serves as a wake-up call for the entire cosmetics OEM industry: the upstream raw material end is changing, and downstream OEMs that don't adapt will eventually be eliminated.
First, let's talk about what Vicky actually did. Simply put, they applied pharmaceutical thinking to cosmetic raw materials. The founder is a PhD in peptide medicinal chemistry from Peking University, who had been working on innovative drugs before switching to cosmetic peptides in 2011, and has been at it for fifteen years. With 69 patents, 22 new raw material filings, and a 6.6% share of China's peptide raw material market, ranking first.
The key is that they don't just sell raw materials; they have integrated the entire chain from molecular design to process development to formulation to finished products. This capability, frankly, many finished product OEMs cannot achieve.
But today I don't want to talk about how great Vicky is, but rather what this means for brands choosing OEMs.
In the past, when brands approached OEMs, the first question was "What's your minimum order quantity?" and "Can you do this price point?" Now it's different. More and more brands are asking upfront: "Do you have a peptide series?" "Are your registration certificates complete?" "Can you handle everything from raw materials to finished products?"
The fact that Proya and Giant Biogene directly invested in Vicky is actually sending a signal: leading brands are no longer satisfied with just finding OEMs at the finished product end; they want to move upstream and lock in the supply capacity of core raw materials.
The pressure on small and medium-sized OEMs is enormous. If you don't have resources at the raw material end, don't have your own registration certificates, and rely solely on buying others' raw materials for filling, then your irreplaceability in the eyes of brands is very low.
So what kind of OEMs can seize this opportunity? My judgment is: factories that have raw material R&D capabilities or a stable raw material supply system, hold registration certificates, and can deliver the full chain from formulation to finished products.
Take ourselves as an example. We've been doing OEM for over a decade, and have run through the entire chain from raw material screening to formulation development to registration filing to production filling. 72 technical achievements, over 100 registration certificates, four major production bases. When brands want to develop a peptide product line, they don't need to find raw materials themselves or handle filings on their own; they can start directly with a mature solution.
After Vicky's IPO, attention on the peptide track will only increase. For brands, the key is to find a reliable OEM to help shorten the path from concept to launch. The earlier this is done, the better.
(Data sources: Shanghai Securities News, Vicky Technology prospectus, Frost & Sullivan report)
Company profile: Guangdong Weitai Biotechnology Co., Ltd., a national high-tech enterprise, OEM/ODM for cosmetics and medical devices, four major production bases, 72 patents, over 110 Class II medical device registrations and filings, 800+ partner brands, certified by ISO13485, ISO22716, and US GMPC.
