Pre-Read Memo
JB Air Purifiers
India is a horrendously polluted country. The air is pathetic indoors and out.
Air Purifiers are a proven, 200M+ units sold category in SEA. ~25 brands (Daikin, Mi, Philips, Toshiba, Sharp, Panasonic, Hitachi, +) have produced this outcome, manufactured predominantly by ~8 OEMs in Shenzhen.
India is at the start of this demand curve.
The category is currently pull only, entirely premium, and fully imported. Mi, Philips, Honeywell, and Coway do 70% of sales, and the remaining 30% is Dyson, Ikea, Qubo, Sharp, and Eureka Forbes, etc.
~350K
Units/year across 9 brands
~1%
Household penetration
40M
India TAM (households)
2x
Nearly doubled each year, organically
Together, the industry does ~350,000 units per year across 9 brands. It's a space that has nearly doubled each year, entirely organically.
Out of a 40M household India TAM, current penetration is ~1%. Only Coway and Qubo do any semblance of category creation and push marketing.
Almost all products are uninspired catalogue picks of existing Chinese products.
There is nothing wrong with their offerings. They work great. This is pretty much a perfected product category. But their devices & filter replacements are prohibitively expensive, and poorly distributed even within e-comm. They're also, ugly.
The market wants:
✓ A well designed HEPA 13 Purifier
✓ Priced affordably — ₹4,990 to ₹9,990 across multiple sizes
✓ Simple filter replacement mechanism (pop in, pop out)
✓ Cheap filters — ₹449 to ₹750
✓ Rock solid, radically transparent, design-first brand
✓ Very well reviewed by key opinion leaders
✓ Equals or exceeds competition on CADR
✓ Same-day delivery + blazing fast WhatsApp support
By virtue of being the last & latest entrant in the space, we get to tick all the boxes from the get go, and launch an appliance that 1 million households will buy in the first 24 months, and 10 million households will have bought by the turn of the decade.
The incumbents are unenthused and resting on their laurels. It will be many quarters before they react. And when they do, we will have already set the price floor, be the de-facto first choice, be remarkably well distributed, and have permanently redefined customer expectations.
Air Purifiers are the no-brainer, last big appliance opportunity in the 2020s–30s, and we are excited to be the runaway category leaders starting Q2 this year.
Oh, also, the B2B demand is about as large as B2C's.
