The company established a dedicate wellness division last December, in a bid to bridge the gap between its pharmaceutical and consumer care products.
The Wellness Division is divided into three wings — Pure Herbs, General Wellness and Nutrition. The Pure Herbs range features tablets and syrups with extracts of herbs, General Wellness offers creams and capsules, while the nutrition wing offers health supplements under the brand name, HiOwna.
Last week it introduced HiOwna Momz, a nutritional health drink for pregnant and lactating mothers, and hopes to secure around 10% of the country’s US$10m pregnancy nutraceutical market.
It is available in vanilla and chocolate flavours and claims to increase immunity and improve the quality of breast milk.
Himalaya made its first foray in the nutraceutical market in 2012 with HiOwna-Jr, a health drink for children. It then launched HiOwna for adults and the elderly.
Key to reaching its 2020 target will be the building of relationships with India’s 1.2m doctors. Nutraceutical goods provided by doctors is growing at 10% a year in the country.
With the launch of HiOwna Momz, the firm hopes the three products will gain a 2.5% share of the total US$111m market.
New products
The company is thought to have a further nine products in the development stage for diabetes, weight management, women’s health and meal replacement.
“As this product has many competitive advantages in the market, the response is expected to be good resulting in the overall growth of the brand. We are planning to launch many more products as part of the nutrition segment,” said pharmaceuticals business head Anil Jiandani.
Speaking when the wellness division was launched, CEO Philipe Haydon said there was great scope for such products in the Indian market.
“Wellness is a very established and mature category in the developed world,” he told BusinessLine
“However, the wellness market in India has largely been dominated by cough and cold medicines and health drinks. We want to change that.”
“We will not go for traditional advertising but our dedicated medical representative team will promote the products to doctors and our retail team will make it available at leading supermarkets, retail outlets, chemists and pharmacies,” he added.
HiOwna goods are now available in 600 trade outlets, 179 of its own stores and through its e-commerce platform.