Written by Zebra Consumption | Author: Chen Biting

At the end of December 2025, Future Wear, the parent company of health-smart hardware brand SKG, officially launched its Hong Kong IPO.

Almost at the same time, SKG's biggest rival, the Sci-Tech Innovation Board-listed company Beiqing Song (Breo), was placed under investigation by regulators for alleged information disclosure violations, together with its actual controller.

The history of the smart massager industry resurfaces, scene by scene.

Beiqing Song and SKG – both Shenzhen-based brands, pioneers and leaders in the smart massager industry – have been locked in overt and covert rivalry for years. Similar products, comparable celebrity endorsers, and stores often located right next to each other; their IPO plans followed one after another.

Who would have thought that Future Wear, with more stable performance and slightly better profitability, would miss the IPO window due to poor timing? Lucky Beiqing Song got ahead and landed on the A-share market in 2021.

After its IPO, Beiqing Song continued to expand along the path of "heavy marketing, light R&D," only to hit the ceiling of the smart massager market and face fierce competition, leading to falling revenue and several consecutive years of losses.

SKG's parent company, Future Wear, took a seemingly harder road: focusing on R&D and product quality, relying on distribution channels, and maintaining business stability. Though its IPO attempts failed repeatedly, it is now regrouping and trying to prove itself to the market.

It turns out that every gift of fate comes with a price tag hidden in the dark.

City Derby

Morning: starting a busy day with a neck massager. Noon: a fascial gun in hand after working out at the gym. After lunch: don't forget the lumbar massager. Evening: only with an eye massager can one fall asleep peacefully...

Today's young people have incorporated health-smart hardware into their daily lives. They might not imagine that the readily available neck massagers of today were only popularized fairly recently.

In the 1960s, Japan produced the first fully automatic massager. However, due to technological limitations, traditional massagers were bulky, had limited functions, and offered a poor user experience, failing to gain widespread acceptance.

Decades later, with the introduction of new materials and technologies, massage devices became miniaturized and precise. With the support of China's electronics and home appliance industries, they rapidly grew into a new product category.

Ma Xuejun, a northeasterner born in the 1970s with years of experience in sales, founded Beiqing Song in Shenzhen in 1996. In 2001, he launched an eye massager, one of the earliest such products in China.

But the health-smart hardware market was not yet mature, and Ma and his company sat on the sidelines for many years.

In 2007, Liu Jie, a native of Guiyang, started his business in Shunde, Guangdong – the "Home Appliance Capital." Prior to that, he had run a restaurant in Chongqing and also operated a coal mine.

At that time, small home appliances were booming and became the main growth driver of the industry. Various players sought out niche application scenarios in the small appliance space and discovered market potential for massagers.

Thus, all kinds of massagers – better looking, more functional, and more diverse – were launched onto the market, riding the wave of new consumption and e-commerce. They not only revived Ma's Beiqing Song but also quickly built Liu Jie's Future Wear company.

Around 2014, Beiqing Song released an intelligent neck massager, once again leading the industry. In 2016, Future Wear pivoted to the health-smart hardware market and launched its first neck massager, the "4098 series." The SKG brand exploded onto the scene.

Two years later, Future Wear moved its company to Yuehai Street in Nanshan, Shenzhen – just half an hour's drive from Beiqing Song's headquarters in Huaqiangbei, Futian District. The global competition in the health-smart hardware market is in fact a derby between two Shenzhen companies.

Open Rivalry, Hidden Contest

In major shopping malls, Beiqing Song and SKG often open stores next to each other. At the peak of the health-smart hardware market in 2020, SKG signed Wang Yibo as its brand ambassador; in April of the following year, Beiqing Song secured Xiao Zhan as its global brand ambassador. The two brands fought fiercely, refusing to concede.

If channel and brand competition was just quiet tug-of-war, then the two brands filing for A-share IPOs one after another was an open race to the capital markets.

In June 2020, Beiqing Song submitted its IPO prospectus, catching the early wave of the Sci-Tech Innovation Board and successfully listing the next year, basking in glory. One year later, Future Wear filed its IPO prospectus, aiming for the ChiNext board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

At the time, Beiqing Song had a broader product line covering eye, neck, and head massagers, giving it a slight edge in scale. It was not only an "all-around champion" but also the de facto "first health-smart hardware stock."

Future Wear could only emphasize SKG's positioning as the "event champion" in the neck massager market, as well as the profitability advantages brought by its focused business and business model.

In 2021, Beiqing Song's operating revenue was RMB 1.189 billion and net profit attributable to parent company was RMB 91.8619 million, up 43.95% and 29.92% year-on-year respectively. In the same year, Future Wear's operating revenue was RMB 1.060 billion and net profit attributable to parent company was RMB 132 million, up 6.96% and down 7.69% respectively, but its net margin reached 12.45%, 4.7 percentage points higher than Beiqing Song.

However, fate played a joke on SKG: Future Wear, with stronger profitability, eventually missed the A-share market.

In July 2022 and December 2022, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange issued two rounds of inquiries, and the company responded twice, but still could not get the ticket, finally withdrawing its A-share listing application in July 2023.

There are many reasons behind Future Wear's failed A-share listing, but they boil down to one phrase – bad timing.

Starting in June 2022, SKG embarked on its IPO odyssey. After over a year of fruitless waiting, Future Wear considered the Beijing Stock Exchange in 2024, listing on the New Third Board in August 2024 and signing a tutoring agreement with China Securities Co., Ltd. Later, the CSRC and other authorities raised no objections. It wasn't until August 2025 that the company abandoned the Beijing Stock Exchange plan and headed south to pursue a Hong Kong IPO, officially filing its prospectus at the end of December.

Where Fates Diverge

With the proliferation of neck massagers, eye massagers, and other products, the health-smart hardware market has entered a phase of integration and adjustment.

In the early days, whether SKG, Beiqing Song, or other small and medium brands, each had its flagship product; now, a single category can hardly sustain any brand's upward momentum. Led by SKG, brands continuously expand from neck, eye, and waist massagers to full-body coverage – there is almost a massage assistant for every body part.

Of course, as categories blend, differences between brands become smaller and smaller, and product homogenization grows ever more severe.

Many young people use massagers not because they truly believe in the therapeutic effects, but as a fashionable lifestyle choice – a form of symbolic capital.

With growing homogenization in the health-smart hardware market and young consumers' declining interest in symbolic products, massagers are getting harder and harder to sell.

This has put industry players like Future Wear and Beiqing Song under profit pressure, with Beiqing Song suffering the more severe impact.

Beiqing Song's revenue in 2022-2024 was RMB 896 million, RMB 1.275 billion, and RMB 1.085 billion respectively; net profit attributable to parent was -RMB 124 million, -RMB 50.8654 million, and RMB 10.2532 million. In the first three quarters of 2025, business picked up somewhat, but its recurring net profit was still in the red by over RMB 3 million.

In contrast, SKG's performance remains relatively stable. Over the past three years, Future Wear's operating revenue was RMB 904 million, RMB 1.046 billion, and RMB 1.045 billion; net profit was RMB 119 million, RMB 127 million, and RMB 135 million.

In the first three quarters of 2025, the gap between the two companies widened further: Future Wear's operating revenue grew 16.22% year-on-year to RMB 878 million; net profit grew 24.92% to RMB 106 million. Beiqing Song's operating revenue fell 34.07% year-on-year to RMB 552 million, with net profit attributable to parent at -RMB 65.628 million, down 600.98% year-on-year.

Of course, besides market contraction and intensifying competition, Beiqing Song's profit pressure also relates to its own strategy. After its IPO, Beiqing Song aggressively expanded offline stores – especially high-traffic locations like airport and high-speed railway stations – misjudging the industry cycle and causing persistent declines in operating efficiency. Combined with online traffic pressure, it fell deep into an operational quagmire.

Recently, for suspected information disclosure violations, Beiqing Song and its actual controller, Ma Xuejun, were placed under investigation by the CSRC. Shortly before, Ma had reduced his holdings and cashed out RMB 64 million. This series of events has mired Beiqing Song in enormous controversy.

On the other hand, after achieving consecutive stable profits, Future Wear continued to pay dividends before its IPO, handing out nearly RMB 200 million in cash dividends in the first three quarters of 2025 alone.

So, Beiqing Song's earlier A-share listing eventually became its own "shackle," while SKG can sigh that a setback may turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

Differences in DNA

According to Frost & Sullivan data, by GMV, SKG ranks first in China's smart soothing wearable device industry, with a market share of 21.5%. In the same ranking, Beiqing Song ranks second with a share of 10.7%.

From being evenly matched to the point where SKG's parent company Future Wear has left Beiqing Song far behind – where does the problem lie?

Beiqing Song founder Ma Xuejun spent many years in health product sales, and later, Beiqing Song was also a sales-driven company.

In 2021, Beiqing Song's selling expenses were RMB 485 million, accounting for 40.75% of its operating revenue; among these, promotion, advertising, and marketing expenses were nearly RMB 250 million, and concession fees exceeded RMB 80 million.

Beiqing Song chose the path that looked easier: covering up its strategic conservatism with tactical aggressiveness, heavily investing in offline direct stores and e-commerce channels.

In the same year, Future Wear's selling expenses as a percentage of operating revenue were only 20%, and it devoted more resources to R&D. From 2019 to 2021, its R&D expense ratios were 2.87%, 4.76%, and 7.05%.

By the end of May 2022, the company held a total of 1,376 patents, including 48 invention patents, 999 utility model patents, 288 design patents, and 41 overseas patents.

During the same period, Beiqing Song's R&D investment declined year by year, with R&D expense ratios of 5.86%, 4.46%, and 3.97%. By the end of 2021, it held a total of 672 domestic and foreign patents.

This difference is related to the background of Future Wear's founder. Before entering the massager market, Liu Jie had been involved in the small home appliance industry for years and had solid manufacturing experience.

Moreover, looking at the shift in Future Wear's business focus, SKG has evolved from channels and branding toward technology and production. In recent years, Future Wear built its own factories, making up for the common industry weakness of shallow industrial depth due to OEM manufacturing.

With R&D and production capabilities, when the smart massager industry hit a ceiling, SKG was able to more quickly expand into fitness recovery and body-sculpting equipment, health smartwatches, and health home products, creating new growth curves.

In recent years, facing business pressures, Beiqing Song has also begun to learn from rivals like SKG, increasing R&D investment and controlling selling expenses.

But the company's DNA is deeply ingrained; Beiqing Song's "heavy marketing, light R&D" orientation is hard to reverse. By the time it woke up and tried to catch up against the cycle, the effect was very limited.

Thus, the already lagging Beiqing Song can only rely on the concept of "TCM + technology": on one hand enriching its massager product lines, on the other hand entering the physical massage market through its "Qingyi Yike" outlets – opening 15 stores by the end of October 2025.

But can this storefront-occupying massage format improve Beiqing Song's operating efficiency? Can this format, which is even more traditional than massagers, support a new narrative? Does Beiqing Song still have a chance to catch up with Future Wear?