The array of cheeky condoms on Goh Miah Kiat’s desk — mulch-colored, textured and flavored — would make most business executives blush.
They come with grape and strawberry flavors, pleasure-boosting textures, barber pole-like striping, a “Baggy” model and its opposite, the missile-shaped “Powershot.”
They hardly seem the stock and trade of a rural-based family business in Muslim-majority Malaysia, but Goh’s Karex Industries has big plans.
Photo: AFP
Karex already claims to be the world’s biggest condom maker by volume, producing 3 billion annually, more than any other single manufacturer. However, it plans an IPO this year to fund a doubling of output, part of a push to further its growing presence in a market that is expanding due to the world AIDS battle and increasing condom use in Asian economies like China.
“We are enjoying an acceleration in demand for condoms,” Karex executive director Goh, 35, said in an interview at the company’s factory in the drowsy southern Malaysian town of Pontian.
Industry estimates project a global condom market worth US$6 billion in 2015, or about 27 billion condoms, compared with 20 billion last year. Carex — the brand name of Karex condoms — holds about 15 percent of the global condom market, sector analysts say. Other leading brands like Durex, marketed by Britain’s Reckitt Benckiser Group, and Trojan, owned by the US firm Church & Dwight, make up about 25 percent.
“It is a recession-proof industry. With growth rates of about 8 percent annually, it is here to stay,” Goh said.
About half of Karex’s output goes to bulk purchases by governments or international agencies’ safe-sex drives, mainly the UN Population Fund and the US Agency for International Development.
China is a key growth market, as anti-HIV efforts there have accelerated in line with loosening attitudes towards sex.
A Chinese business Web site in 2011 quoted a former top Chiense family planning official as saying that 1.1 billion condoms were provided free to users by the government every year. However, religious and social taboos are also slowly being set aside elsewhere in Asia, Goh said. For example, the largely Catholic Philippines passed a law in January requiring government health centers to supply free condoms and birth control pills, and mandating sex education in schools.
At Karex’s factory — which operates 24 hours a day — workers pull each and every condom down onto an electric-charged tube that can detect micro-flaws. Samples also are plucked from among thousands of condoms drifting by on conveyor belts and filled with water for leak tests.
Goh’s ancestors immigrated from southern China in the 1920s and his great-grandfather opened a grocers amid rubber farms in southern Malaysia.
Expanding into rubber trading, the family later acquired its own plantations and moved into manufacturing in 1988, when Karex was formed. It began making condoms a year later and now exports to more than 100 countries.
It also has helped make Malaysia the world’s largest source of rubber gloves, as the economy moves from an agricultural base towards industries such as medical technology. A Kuala Lumpur stock listing is planned this year, but Goh said the date and size have not been set.
Bill Howe, president of US-based latex company PolyTech Synergies and a condom industry consultant, said Karex’s plans could be overly ambitious.
Howe warned that growth was flat in the more mature US and EU marktets, but added that developing markets like China held great long-term growth potential.
Wei Siang-yu, a Singaporean doctor and commentator on sexual issues, said Asians have long looked down on condoms, inadvertently fueling the spread of disease.
“Many Asians feel intimacy comes only without a condom,” Wei said, adding that prophylactics bear a “sex worker” stigma.
However, Asians are having sex earlier and are more exposed to the safe sex message, he said.
Targeting this demographic, Carex products put pleasure on par with prevention, hence the various colors, flavors and irreverent packaging with wording like “Feel the Thrill” and “Max Super Stud.”
Karex also does custom orders, citing one particularly “adventurous” European client who requested condoms that glow in the dark to resemble a Star Wars lightsaber.
“Compared to a pint of beer, a box of 12 condoms gives you a more pleasurable time,” Goh said.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary