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Hengan makes and sells everyday paper and personal care products like tissues, sanitary pads, and baby diapers.
Hengan International is one of China's biggest makers of the small, cheap, everyday things you grab without thinking. Its two main businesses are hygiene products — tissues, wet wipes, and paper — and personal care — sanitary pads, baby diapers, and adult diapers. It sells to ordinary families through supermarkets, convenience stores, and online shops across China. Think of it as the company that quietly stocks your bathroom shelf and your baby's changing table, earning a little bit of money every time you reach for a tissue or a diaper, millions of times a day.
The biggest chunk of its money comes from tissues and paper products, which are its original bread and butter. The personal care side — pads and diapers — is smaller in sales but often more profitable because the products carry stronger brands and people don't switch easily once they find one they trust. Hengan's own brands, like Anle and Q·Mo, let it charge a bit more than the no-name stuff. The tricky part of the tissue business is that the raw material, wood pulp, swings in price a lot. When pulp gets expensive, margins get squeezed; when it falls, profits can jump. That single input cost is one of the biggest drivers of how good or bad a year looks.
The company is based in Fujian, China, and was founded in the 1980s by Sze Man Bok, who started it after noticing how little quality homegrown hygiene product choice there was in China at the time. Today it faces stiff competition from bigger rivals like Procter & Gamble and Unicharm, plus fast-growing local players, so it spends heavily on advertising and on pushing into premium products to protect its turf. A slow Chinese birth rate hurts diaper demand, but an aging population is quietly boosting adult diapers, which is a promising new growth area. Hengan generates steady cash and tends to pay healthy dividends, which is part of why investors treat it as a relatively defensive consumer stock rather than a high-flyer.
Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026