Ruyan, Once the Pioneer of the Global E-Cigarette Industry—Where Is It Now?
It was the world’s first true e-cigarette. From the moment it was born, its unique identity was destined to bring change to the entire tobacco market. It was also once the world’s largest e-cigarette manufacturer, achieving sales of over 100 million in it
It is the world's first truly e-cigarette. From the moment of its birth, its distinctive identity is destined to bring about a change in the entire tobacco market.
It was also once the world's largest e-cigarette manufacturer, with sales exceeding 100 million in its first year.
Its high price was once a symbol of the status of many upper-class people. Wearing elegant and decent evening gowns, they sat at a banquet and took out an e-cigarette and smoked smoke, like a human elf playing with dream smoke.
It is Ruyan electronic cigarette. In 2005 and 2006, sales were nearly 1 billion yuan in one year; in 2008, it had sold more than 300,000 e-cigarettes and were listed in Hong Kong.
However, since its establishment in 2003, in just over ten years, this originator of e-cigarettes has long been unknown under the impact of a number of new e-cigarette brands. It has dissipated in the field of e-cigarettes like faint smoke.
Charles Darwin said in his classic exposition of the law of the jungle in "The Origin of Species" that the species that survive are not the strongest populations or the most intelligent populations, but those that respond most positively to change. rdquo;
There are no successful enterprises, only enterprises of the times.
The birth of the world's first e-cigarette
"One day when dragons get water, they will surely flow back in the Yangtze River."
The founder of Ruyan e-cigarettes is called Han Li. The purpose of making this product was to quit smoking. He hopes to create a method that allows people to ingest nicotine without having to absorb other harmful substances produced when cigarettes burn. At the beginning, Han Li didn't think of making an e-cigarette, but chose to use a nicotine patch.
When you go to bed at night, stick the nicotine patch to your navel. But within a few days, Han Li often woke up from nightmares at night covered in cold sweat. The root cause of the nightmares was the nicotine patch.
So Han Li decided to research a smoking cessation product himself. In 2003, as a pharmacist, Han Li led the team to design and invent the first nicotine-based e-cigarette product. Later, Han Li named it Ruyan. In 2004, Ruyan Company officially launched e-cigarettes. Han Li was one of the founders of the company. He mass-produced this product for the first time in the world and sold it to the China market.
However, the sales situation was not as ideal as expected. At that time, there was no clear domestic control policy on tobacco. In addition, the price of Ruyan e-cigarettes was too high for ordinary working people. The price of one cigarette was hundreds of yuan and needed to be replaced regularly.
So Han Li and other founders negotiated together and set their sights on the vast overseas market. In 2005, Ruyan e-cigarette products began to be exported overseas because Europe and the United States had stricter tobacco controls and high consumption levels, allowing them to accept smoke. The price. How popular was smoke at that time? There are many communities and forums about e-cigarettes on the Internet. From American star Lindsay Lohan to South Korean high school students, smoking e-cigarettes is a fashion.
In the following years, Sanlong International began to enter the fast lane of development with Ruyan e-cigarettes. At its peak, sales reached 1 billion yuan in 2007 and 2008, and were exported to the United States and Europe. In 2008, Ruyan Company claimed to have sold more than 300,000 electronic cigarettes and was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the name of Sanlong International.
Ruyan's birth was accidental, but success was inevitable.
As a new product, Ruyan has irreplaceable advantages. And the target market was identified, and sales of e-cigarettes immediately increased, with sales reaching 1 billion yuan in 2005.
Market chaos and fraud
"Since the sky has been born as smoke, why does the world have to produce anything else?"
Sometimes, the development of a company is like riding a hot air balloon. Anyone who has been in a hot air balloon should know that all the operator can do is adjust the altitude of the balloon to capture different wind directions, while the specific route and landing point of the balloon can only be resigned to fate. The same is true for the success and decline of enterprises. They have controllable ranges but retain uncertainty.# p#pagination title #e#
In 2006, CCTV suddenly exposed that Ruyan's smoking cessation effect was fake. Wang Hai, a famous anti-counterfeiting fighter, also went into action, accusing Ruyan's products themselves of being harmful and deceiving consumers. A spokesperson for the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration told many media that Ruyan's propaganda was suspected of being inaccurate and violating scientific theories, and requested that it be handed over to him for control.
This series of incidents has brought the safety and regulatory issues of Ruyan e-cigarettes to the forefront, causing Ruyan's sales to be greatly frustrated. As a result, Ruyan almost completely abandoned the domestic market, including other e-cigarettes at that time, also turned their targets to overseas markets.
However, Ruyan does not enjoy a fish in water in overseas markets. Because Ruyan e-cigarette products do not have enough technical barriers, after Ruyan entered overseas markets, many tobacco tycoons began to research and make their own e-cigarette products.
In front of the tobacco company with strong capital, Ruyan is like a small boat thrown into the waves, far behind by these giant tobacco crocodiles. Ruyan patent holding company Saiport realizes that patents must be used to protect its rights, but with its strength, it is a huge burden to apply for all patents around the world. It can even be said that the speed at which Seibot applies is the speed at which Ruyan lives and dies.
It was not until 2012 that Ruyan's invention patent in the United States was finally recognized, and immediately began to sue major international e-cigarette brands, involving more than 10 brands. But this time is too late. For Seibo, who is not rich in funds and strength, Ruyan has already missed the best treatment period, and everything is nothing to make up for.
The return plan failed and was acquired by Imperial Tobacco
"If you want to fail, how can you die?"
When the financial crisis broke out in 2008, many export products were blocked from exporting abroad and began to turn to domestic sales. In 2009, Ruyan's operations in foreign markets deteriorated, so it began to re-target the China market. Ruyan believes that there are 350 million smokers in China, which is more than the total population of some countries. With the strengthening of tobacco control efforts in China and the government's policy support and guidance for some high-tech smoking cessation and tobacco control products, its e-cigarette market is expected to become the world's largest market. Therefore, Ruyan accelerated its layout of the domestic market and carried out a series of major actions.
In 2011, after Ruyan announced its return to the China market, it began to vigorously crack down on counterfeit products in an attempt to eliminate counterfeit products in the e-cigarette market. After that, Ruyan launched a new product line and joined hands with Jingdong to reach a strategic cooperation agreement to provide new e-cigarettes. However, these did not make the sales performance of e-cigarettes recover, and the effect of various measures was not obvious.
In 2013, after years of losses, Ruyan was acquired by Imperial Tobacco, the world's fourth largest tobacco company, for US$75 million, including e-cigarette patents, rights and proceeds that may arise from patent infringement lawsuits filed in the United States and other places. At this time, Ruyan had already changed its name to Sanlong International. Since then, Ruyan has been quarantined by Imperial Tobacco, and Han Li has worked as a consultant for Fontem Ventures, a subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco.
Sometimes the joke of fate is that when you finally wait for the right time to do something, it's already time to call.
In the second year after Ruyan was acquired, e-cigarettes entered China with the existence of European and American trend cultures and subcultures, and began to re-emerge. In 2015, Shenzhen held the first e-cigarette Expo, marking that the new thing of e-cigarettes began to be widely recognized. But the originator of e-cigarettes in the past has disappeared. In 2016, Imperial Tobacco signed up to participate in the 3rd Electronic Cigarette Exhibition Tobacco. Many people were looking forward to whether the smoke that had been hidden would return.But at the e-cigarette show, Imperial Tobacco only showed off its Puritane andJAI electronic cigaretteThe two major e-cigarette brands have not seen Ruyan。
Sanlong Group did not completely withdraw from the development of the e-cigarette industry after selling its Ruyan business. It still sells under the Ruyan brand, but there are not many sales channels and the sales volume is even small. Most people buy it out of nostalgia.
The former e-cigarette giant fell to the ground, but unfortunately, the day of its comeback is nowhere in sight.#p#Pagination Title #e#
The carnival of enthusiasts or the smoke of businessmen?
"Success or failure has turned around, but the green mountains are still there."
E-cigarettes are not new abroad, and there are many big brands that dominate the market. In China, except for Ruyan ten years ago, there are almost no e-cigarette brands that can be named today. Ruyan's defeat was due to both the overall external environment and internal management mistakes.
1. The pain of marketing, low market awareness
The public generally has low acceptance and awareness of e-cigarettes, and it is still in the literacy stage in China. In the search for e-cigarettes, the harm of e-cigarettes is the most concerned issue. For a product to be purchased by consumers, it must first be recognized and popularized. However, Ruyan's early advertising promotion is not as much as its copycat product as Ruyan's real taste, and they all focus on smoking cessation. For those who do not quit smoking, there is a lack of sufficient popularity among smokers and audiences.
2. Wrong positioning and wrong estimation of consumer groups
The original target users of Ruyan e-cigarette were middle-aged smokers like Han Li. They were mainly used to quit smoking. The product publicity was also mainly to quit smoking. However, in fact, more people who buy e-cigarette products in China are players outside the mainstream crowd. rdquo; Their criteria for judging whether an e-cigarette is good or bad is whether the smoke volume is large and whether the shape is cool enough.
However, Ruyan cannot meet the needs of players in terms of shape or smoke volume.
3. Internal and external troubles make it difficult for products to break through
In China, the e-cigarette market is extremely irregular, and e-cigarette products can be easily copied. Coupled with insufficient property rights protection, all kinds of fake and fake e-cigarettes are flooding the market, mixed with good and bad ones. Even if Ruyan has a patent, it is impossible for it to spend a lot of time on counterfeiting, resulting in lack of follow-up.
Abroad, major tobacco giants have begun to make efforts in the e-cigarette business. The brands of this industry in China regions have basically been cleaned and eroded. Behind major e-cigarette brands are one or several traditional tobacco giants. Ruyan, which does not have strong funds, is difficult to break through.
4. The price is expensive, and there is no innovation.
Early Ruyan e-cigarettes were divided into two types: cigar type and pipe type. The price of cigar type ranged from 599 yuan to 1999 yuan, and the price of pipe type ranged from 2800 yuan to 16800 yuan. An e-cigarette costs five to six hundred yuan, which is not cheap in China, where the average price of a pack of cigarettes is 13 yuan, and has no advantage in price competition. In addition, over the years, Ruyan's technological innovation has not kept up, and its products have various problems. Some users say that smoking Ruyan e-cigarettes for too long will cause sore and painful cheeks. Moreover, the battery capacity is small and it will be out of electricity for a while. It is difficult to smoke.
5. Policy orientation, wandering in a gray area
At present, domestic e-cigarettes are not regulated by the government. Anyone can produce them, buy them anywhere, and use various channels. The quality is difficult to guarantee. The existence of China Tobacco has further increased the complexity of the market. Although 99% of the world's e-cigarettes come from China, the domestic market is very small.
With the start of domestic e-cigarettes and the enhanced brand awareness, the private brands of some e-cigarette companies have also begun to rise. However, in the environment where e-cigarettes are in a gray area, most e-cigarette brands have begun to change their thinking. They no longer promote e-cigarettes as a substitute for traditional tobacco, but use fashion and trends as selling points as subculture to promote them. At present, some first-and second-tier cities have set up e-cigarette bars to attract players to enter. Domestic e-cigarettes may rise in these cities in the future. Paradoxically, China is the world's largest exporter of e-cigarettes, with 500 e-cigarette manufacturers in Shenzhen.
On the way from birth to sales and integration into commerce, a new product must not only be tested by the market, but also be restricted by various policies. However, Ruyan mistakenly estimated the consumption situation and target group in the domestic market, and missed the opportunity to revitalize itself forever.
It was also once the world's largest e-cigarette manufacturer, with sales exceeding 100 million in its first year.
Its high price was once a symbol of the status of many upper-class people. Wearing elegant and decent evening gowns, they sat at a banquet and took out an e-cigarette and smoked smoke, like a human elf playing with dream smoke.
It is Ruyan electronic cigarette. In 2005 and 2006, sales were nearly 1 billion yuan in one year; in 2008, it had sold more than 300,000 e-cigarettes and were listed in Hong Kong.
However, since its establishment in 2003, in just over ten years, this originator of e-cigarettes has long been unknown under the impact of a number of new e-cigarette brands. It has dissipated in the field of e-cigarettes like faint smoke.
Charles Darwin said in his classic exposition of the law of the jungle in "The Origin of Species" that the species that survive are not the strongest populations or the most intelligent populations, but those that respond most positively to change. rdquo;
There are no successful enterprises, only enterprises of the times.
The birth of the world's first e-cigarette
"One day when dragons get water, they will surely flow back in the Yangtze River."
The founder of Ruyan e-cigarettes is called Han Li. The purpose of making this product was to quit smoking. He hopes to create a method that allows people to ingest nicotine without having to absorb other harmful substances produced when cigarettes burn. At the beginning, Han Li didn't think of making an e-cigarette, but chose to use a nicotine patch.
When you go to bed at night, stick the nicotine patch to your navel. But within a few days, Han Li often woke up from nightmares at night covered in cold sweat. The root cause of the nightmares was the nicotine patch.
So Han Li decided to research a smoking cessation product himself. In 2003, as a pharmacist, Han Li led the team to design and invent the first nicotine-based e-cigarette product. Later, Han Li named it Ruyan. In 2004, Ruyan Company officially launched e-cigarettes. Han Li was one of the founders of the company. He mass-produced this product for the first time in the world and sold it to the China market.
However, the sales situation was not as ideal as expected. At that time, there was no clear domestic control policy on tobacco. In addition, the price of Ruyan e-cigarettes was too high for ordinary working people. The price of one cigarette was hundreds of yuan and needed to be replaced regularly.So Han Li and other founders negotiated together and set their sights on the vast overseas market. In 2005, Ruyan e-cigarette products began to be exported overseas because Europe and the United States had stricter tobacco controls and high consumption levels, allowing them to accept smoke. The price. How popular was smoke at that time? There are many communities and forums about e-cigarettes on the Internet. From American star Lindsay Lohan to South Korean high school students, smoking e-cigarettes is a fashion.
In the following years, Sanlong International began to enter the fast lane of development with Ruyan e-cigarettes. At its peak, sales reached 1 billion yuan in 2007 and 2008, and were exported to the United States and Europe. In 2008, Ruyan Company claimed to have sold more than 300,000 electronic cigarettes and was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the name of Sanlong International.
Ruyan's birth was accidental, but success was inevitable.
As a new product, Ruyan has irreplaceable advantages. And the target market was identified, and sales of e-cigarettes immediately increased, with sales reaching 1 billion yuan in 2005.
Market chaos and fraud
"Since the sky has been born as smoke, why does the world have to produce anything else?"
Sometimes, the development of a company is like riding a hot air balloon. Anyone who has been in a hot air balloon should know that all the operator can do is adjust the altitude of the balloon to capture different wind directions, while the specific route and landing point of the balloon can only be resigned to fate. The same is true for the success and decline of enterprises. They have controllable ranges but retain uncertainty.# p#pagination title #e#
In 2006, CCTV suddenly exposed that Ruyan's smoking cessation effect was fake. Wang Hai, a famous anti-counterfeiting fighter, also went into action, accusing Ruyan's products themselves of being harmful and deceiving consumers. A spokesperson for the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration told many media that Ruyan's propaganda was suspected of being inaccurate and violating scientific theories, and requested that it be handed over to him for control.
This series of incidents has brought the safety and regulatory issues of Ruyan e-cigarettes to the forefront, causing Ruyan's sales to be greatly frustrated. As a result, Ruyan almost completely abandoned the domestic market, including other e-cigarettes at that time, also turned their targets to overseas markets.
However, Ruyan does not enjoy a fish in water in overseas markets. Because Ruyan e-cigarette products do not have enough technical barriers, after Ruyan entered overseas markets, many tobacco tycoons began to research and make their own e-cigarette products.
In front of the tobacco company with strong capital, Ruyan is like a small boat thrown into the waves, far behind by these giant tobacco crocodiles. Ruyan patent holding company Saiport realizes that patents must be used to protect its rights, but with its strength, it is a huge burden to apply for all patents around the world. It can even be said that the speed at which Seibot applies is the speed at which Ruyan lives and dies.
It was not until 2012 that Ruyan's invention patent in the United States was finally recognized, and immediately began to sue major international e-cigarette brands, involving more than 10 brands. But this time is too late. For Seibo, who is not rich in funds and strength, Ruyan has already missed the best treatment period, and everything is nothing to make up for.The return plan failed and was acquired by Imperial Tobacco
"If you want to fail, how can you die?"
When the financial crisis broke out in 2008, many export products were blocked from exporting abroad and began to turn to domestic sales. In 2009, Ruyan's operations in foreign markets deteriorated, so it began to re-target the China market. Ruyan believes that there are 350 million smokers in China, which is more than the total population of some countries. With the strengthening of tobacco control efforts in China and the government's policy support and guidance for some high-tech smoking cessation and tobacco control products, its e-cigarette market is expected to become the world's largest market. Therefore, Ruyan accelerated its layout of the domestic market and carried out a series of major actions.
In 2011, after Ruyan announced its return to the China market, it began to vigorously crack down on counterfeit products in an attempt to eliminate counterfeit products in the e-cigarette market. After that, Ruyan launched a new product line and joined hands with Jingdong to reach a strategic cooperation agreement to provide new e-cigarettes. However, these did not make the sales performance of e-cigarettes recover, and the effect of various measures was not obvious.
In 2013, after years of losses, Ruyan was acquired by Imperial Tobacco, the world's fourth largest tobacco company, for US$75 million, including e-cigarette patents, rights and proceeds that may arise from patent infringement lawsuits filed in the United States and other places. At this time, Ruyan had already changed its name to Sanlong International. Since then, Ruyan has been quarantined by Imperial Tobacco, and Han Li has worked as a consultant for Fontem Ventures, a subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco.
Sometimes the joke of fate is that when you finally wait for the right time to do something, it's already time to call.
In the second year after Ruyan was acquired, e-cigarettes entered China with the existence of European and American trend cultures and subcultures, and began to re-emerge. In 2015, Shenzhen held the first e-cigarette Expo, marking that the new thing of e-cigarettes began to be widely recognized. But the originator of e-cigarettes in the past has disappeared. In 2016, Imperial Tobacco signed up to participate in the 3rd Electronic Cigarette Exhibition Tobacco. Many people were looking forward to whether the smoke that had been hidden would return.But at the e-cigarette show, Imperial Tobacco only showed off its Puritane andJAI electronic cigaretteThe two major e-cigarette brands have not seen Ruyan。
Sanlong Group did not completely withdraw from the development of the e-cigarette industry after selling its Ruyan business. It still sells under the Ruyan brand, but there are not many sales channels and the sales volume is even small. Most people buy it out of nostalgia.
The former e-cigarette giant fell to the ground, but unfortunately, the day of its comeback is nowhere in sight.#p#Pagination Title #e#
The carnival of enthusiasts or the smoke of businessmen?
"Success or failure has turned around, but the green mountains are still there."
E-cigarettes are not new abroad, and there are many big brands that dominate the market. In China, except for Ruyan ten years ago, there are almost no e-cigarette brands that can be named today. Ruyan's defeat was due to both the overall external environment and internal management mistakes.
1. The pain of marketing, low market awareness
The public generally has low acceptance and awareness of e-cigarettes, and it is still in the literacy stage in China. In the search for e-cigarettes, the harm of e-cigarettes is the most concerned issue. For a product to be purchased by consumers, it must first be recognized and popularized. However, Ruyan's early advertising promotion is not as much as its copycat product as Ruyan's real taste, and they all focus on smoking cessation. For those who do not quit smoking, there is a lack of sufficient popularity among smokers and audiences.
2. Wrong positioning and wrong estimation of consumer groups
The original target users of Ruyan e-cigarette were middle-aged smokers like Han Li. They were mainly used to quit smoking. The product publicity was also mainly to quit smoking. However, in fact, more people who buy e-cigarette products in China are players outside the mainstream crowd. rdquo; Their criteria for judging whether an e-cigarette is good or bad is whether the smoke volume is large and whether the shape is cool enough.
However, Ruyan cannot meet the needs of players in terms of shape or smoke volume.
3. Internal and external troubles make it difficult for products to break through
In China, the e-cigarette market is extremely irregular, and e-cigarette products can be easily copied. Coupled with insufficient property rights protection, all kinds of fake and fake e-cigarettes are flooding the market, mixed with good and bad ones. Even if Ruyan has a patent, it is impossible for it to spend a lot of time on counterfeiting, resulting in lack of follow-up.
Abroad, major tobacco giants have begun to make efforts in the e-cigarette business. The brands of this industry in China regions have basically been cleaned and eroded. Behind major e-cigarette brands are one or several traditional tobacco giants. Ruyan, which does not have strong funds, is difficult to break through.
4. The price is expensive, and there is no innovation.
Early Ruyan e-cigarettes were divided into two types: cigar type and pipe type. The price of cigar type ranged from 599 yuan to 1999 yuan, and the price of pipe type ranged from 2800 yuan to 16800 yuan. An e-cigarette costs five to six hundred yuan, which is not cheap in China, where the average price of a pack of cigarettes is 13 yuan, and has no advantage in price competition. In addition, over the years, Ruyan's technological innovation has not kept up, and its products have various problems. Some users say that smoking Ruyan e-cigarettes for too long will cause sore and painful cheeks. Moreover, the battery capacity is small and it will be out of electricity for a while. It is difficult to smoke.
5. Policy orientation, wandering in a gray area
At present, domestic e-cigarettes are not regulated by the government. Anyone can produce them, buy them anywhere, and use various channels. The quality is difficult to guarantee. The existence of China Tobacco has further increased the complexity of the market. Although 99% of the world's e-cigarettes come from China, the domestic market is very small.
With the start of domestic e-cigarettes and the enhanced brand awareness, the private brands of some e-cigarette companies have also begun to rise. However, in the environment where e-cigarettes are in a gray area, most e-cigarette brands have begun to change their thinking. They no longer promote e-cigarettes as a substitute for traditional tobacco, but use fashion and trends as selling points as subculture to promote them. At present, some first-and second-tier cities have set up e-cigarette bars to attract players to enter. Domestic e-cigarettes may rise in these cities in the future. Paradoxically, China is the world's largest exporter of e-cigarettes, with 500 e-cigarette manufacturers in Shenzhen.
On the way from birth to sales and integration into commerce, a new product must not only be tested by the market, but also be restricted by various policies. However, Ruyan mistakenly estimated the consumption situation and target group in the domestic market, and missed the opportunity to revitalize itself forever.
