Big Swallow

Founders protg has brought bioscience design to a nutricyclicals maker in Taiwan.

- Joyce Huang

After Vincent Lin, an early super salesman for Taiwan’s TCI, was made its CEO in 2010, he decided to take the maker of private-label dietary supplements up a considerable notch. He would invest in what he called “integrated bioscience design” (IBD) to come up with proprietary ingredients to differentiate itself across a product line addressing everything from sleep promotion and weight loss to countering depression and skin aging.

TCI would unlock and extract new substances—such as from agricultural wastes like longan shell and banana peel—through its laboratory work. That IBD is being carried out by Ph.D.s among a team of 200 researchers employing biology, agronomics, industrial engineering and consumer behavior studies to attract premium-brand clients. Since 2013, the effort has expanded into genomics in one of the nine labs, with the promise of tailoring personalized needs to nutricyclicals.

That last effort is a $6.5 million multiyear push on top of what is now an annual $6 million R&D budget. Lin’s gamble is that this will keep the 500 corporate customers in 48 countries wanting to put their labels on TCI wares without much haggle room over price. That’s the basis for a repeat 2018 appearance for his outfit on Forbes Asia’s Best Under A Billion companies list—and the genomics could lead to TCI’s own retail lines as well.

The company’s trove of novel formulas underlies its 41% gross margin, says Donald Lee, an analyst with JihSun Securities in Taipei. “Its strength lies in its fast-paced development of key ingredients, its capability of manufacturing a comprehensive array of dosage forms and its perfect timing of product launch, just to name a few,” he says.