One of the areas that we at ManufacturingHub.co.za have been watching closely in the South African consumer healthcare market has been the emergence of the "natural medicines" type products - including those developed for the traditional "African" market.
Information is relatively sketchy around the effectiveness and volumes moved in these products and they are treated with some scepticism by the mainstream pharmaceutical community. Often rightly so.
We recently chatted to Mike Allan, the CEO of AltX listed BioScience Brands and the feedback he gave us was that
A) Quality brands are still being sought by the South African consumer who is becoming quite choosy about the products that they buy and the players in this space need to work hard at making sure they don't mix their "serious" brands with their "lifestyle" brands
B) The South African consumer wants to see results and if they don't they will lose faith and start looking at other products
C) The South African consumer is feeling the pinch from the recessionary economic environment and even though they know that health and wellness products should form part of their diet they are being forced to cut back on the number of products that they are buying - i.e. they are a "nice to have" rather than an essential and I think this is where these brands will need to work hard to establish themselves as "serious" brands.
We did a quick Google search - refined to the South African market - brings up over 2000 search results and within these there are a number of very well established businesses which have been operating in this space.
Some of these include the likes of:
I was taking a look at the The South African Journal of Natural Medicine and they reckon they have a print run of 20000 and 100000 readers on average and I thought their readership is also telling us something:
LSM: 8, 9, 10; (65% female)
AGES: between 30-50: 60%; above 50: 30%; below 30: 10%
While the market is small in the bigger picture, the consumer of these products is becoming increasingly mainstream and more sophisticated in their approach to wellness and dietary requirements and we are not talking "miracle cures" here - we are talking products used in:
- Pain and arthritis
- Stress reduction
- Chronic Illness
- Libido enhancement
- Multi-vitamin
- Immune-system boosters
Phyto-Nova I know are doing some interesting things around products like African Ginger, Sutherlandia and Warburgia as alternatives to generic pain-killers.
There seems to be some anecdotal evidence that the South African market is beginning to mature in terms of the quality and understanding of the "natural medicines" space. It would be interesting to get some feedback from participants in this market in terms of where it is headed and how that is being turned into sustainable revenue streams.
Either post your comments here or drop us a line on newsdesk@rival.co.za
