Touring Besmed, One of Taiwan’s Largest Medical Product Firms

May 27th, 2015 Medgadget Editors Exclusive

Besmed is one of the largest medical device exporters in Taiwan, manufacturing respiratory care, emergency care, anesthesia, and other health care products. We got a chance to visit their offices in New Taipei, just across the river from Taipei City, on our preview of the Medicare Taiwan International Medical & Healthcare Exhibition.

Besmed Besmed was founded in 1998, and currently has about 150 employees in Taiwan and 500 in Ningbo, China. They are rapidly expanding and have 16 research and development teams working on new products and improving the existing ones. They have an annual turnover growth of 30% and are building a new production facility in Chiayi, Taiwan to continue that trend.

They do their own mold tooling and 90% of product components are made in-house by Besmed to keep costs down. At its core, Besmed is an expert plastics manufacturer aggressively focusing on a few areas that require high capacity production. For example, the company produces resuscitation kits with safety valves in the masks that limit the pressure that can be delivered. They make about 50,000 of these a year. They also make some products sold by Acoma, a Japanese medical device firm.

The reps touted Besmed’s plastics expertise by showing us what they claim were the only non-PVC single use aerosol masks. These were dual material devices without any noticeable mold marks at the meeting points. They also make spirometers, which the company says have the highest accuracy on the market, as well as anesthesia products and other flexible plastic products.

One of their newest products is a nasal washer with nebulizer designed for people taking aerosol medications and those living in cities with high levels of air pollution. We actually took the opportunity to try it out for ourselves, since we’ve never seen anything quite like this. It’s essentially a non-ultrasonic handheld humidifier that you stick up your nostril and keep it in place for about a minute. It can be loaded with a medication so some moisture builds up within the cavity and condenses, grabbing onto microparticles within the nose and slowly washes out. Make sure to keep a tissue handy, you’ll need it.