Image source @ Visual China
If it weren't for a running injury in 2016, Jiang Pei might not have thought that he would have entered the sports rehabilitation industry.
Jiang Pei is a senior running enthusiast in Nanjing, often active in domestic marathons and cross-country races. After that run, he ran to a number of tertiary hospitals, and the doctor told him that the pain was inflammation and he had to rest.
Jiang Pei rested for about 20 days, and the pain was alleviated, but it began to hurt again as soon as he ran. He has also been to TCM massage, massage and acupuncture, and has not solved the problem. "Very distressed." Jiang Pei told Chuang Chuang Bang.
Until a chance, a friend told him he could go to a sports rehabilitation institution to see. That experience, in his words, was "a subversion of cognition." The rehabilitation doctor observed and evaluated for 30-40 minutes and told him how to do rehabilitation training. He went back and did it for almost half a month, and the pain was basically gone.
This is an experience that Jiang Pei still feels "very magical". Engaged in outdoor chains for many years, he has sensitively found that there are more and more sports enthusiasts in China, and sports rehabilitation will be a good development opportunity in the future. He and his friends quickly conducted research and soon decided to set up a sports rehabilitation brand.
"At that time, the decent and standardized rehabilitation institutions in China may have been counted with one slap." Jiang Pei recalled.
If you count from the birth of the first sports rehabilitation clinic in China in 2012, China's sports rehabilitation (note: "sports rehabilitation" here refers to private rehabilitation clinics/clinics) has gone through the first decade.
According to the National Fitness Program (2021-2025), by 2025, the proportion of people regularly participating in physical exercise will reach 38.5%, or about 500 million people. The incidence of sports injuries is 10%-20%, which is undoubtedly a huge market behind it, so sports rehabilitation is regarded as the "next medical service gold mine".
However, due to the lack of public awareness, uneven market quality and capital caution, this 100-billion-level blue ocean market is still in its early stages.
In the view of Jiang Xiaodong, founding partner of Changling Capital, the entire sports rehabilitation industry is in a stage of short supply. First of all, creating high-quality supply is not so simple and easy, there is a relatively high threshold; second, the amount of high-quality supply is gradually increased to meet the rapidly growing demand, which requires excellent doctors, rehabilitation, and mature management systems, which all take time.
Not long ago, with the heat of the Beijing Winter Olympics, a topic of "orthopedics at the end of the snow track" pushed sports medicine and rehabilitation to hundreds of millions of ordinary people, and also pulled the industry's attention to a new height. "A Winter Olympics is worth a year of our market education." Some people in the industry sighed.
Just need and urgent shortage, sports rehabilitation track and other winds come.
A new track that "quietly" rises
Sun Xiaoyi, a lawyer, has engaged in a variety of industries, medical aesthetics, dental clinics, and game companies. In 2014, her husband was involved in a car accident on a bicycle, and because he did not recover in time after the operation, his right hand became a "claw-shaped hand" and his basic function was blocked.
Sun Xiaoyi found no less than 30 orthopedic surgeons at that time. Dr. Ye Tingjun, an orthopedic surgeon at Ruijin Hospital affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, was the first and only one at the time to tell her that rehabilitation was as important as surgery.
Orthopedic surgery is very mature in China, but due to the influence of traditional concepts such as "one hundred days of bone injury", many patients lack rehabilitation, making it difficult to restore their original state. For example, we often see that some patients, although their bones have grown well, but because they have not recovered in time, they cause joints and soft tissues to stick, and they cannot stretch and bend freely, which will affect normal life. Even some traditional orthopedic surgeons do not connect with the international community, thinking that it is good to connect the bones after surgery.
In fact, with the progress of society, people's requirements for life have not stopped there, after breaking the bones, it is more important to restore the original life through scientific rehabilitation.
Because of this accident, Sun Xiaoyi became an entrepreneur in the sports rehabilitation industry, and Ye Tingjun became her partner. At that time, it was the time when the Internet entered traditional medical treatment, at the beginning of the business, Sun Xiaoyi did not directly open a store, but took the lead in doing an orthopedic patient management SAAS - medical number, helping orthopedic doctors and patients in thousands of hospitals across the country to establish a communication platform, and also doing some sports rehabilitation science.
In this regard, Sun Xiaoyi explained that the rehabilitation department of public hospitals is good at neurological rehabilitation, including stroke and cerebral palsy in the elderly, "so we made a product focusing on orthopedic rehabilitation."
It is also based on a group of vertical users gathered by the medical number platform and the accumulation of a large number of orthopedic rehabilitation data, Sun Xiaoyi has a clearer understanding of the real needs of patients.
When the time came in 2017, she began to test the water offline stores, and soon the first clinic landed in Shenyang.
"Shenyang is our '0.0 version', and I didn't expect the store to break even in four months."
The success of this water test allowed Sun Xiaoyi to confirm his judgment. In 2018, she returned to Shanghai and opened the first Youfu clinic in Jing'an District, but she did not expect that in the first week of soft opening, all the stores were full.
"Pretty scary," Sun Xiaoyi described afterwards.
Sun Xiaoyi's feelings are hot in demand at the C-end, and Jiang Pei's surprise lies in how so many peers have popped up at once.
In May 2017, Jiang Pei and his friends' sports rehabilitation brand opened, when 4 different rehabilitation brands in Nanjing suddenly appeared. Jiang Pei remembered very clearly that the same time period was almost the same, and the scale of each family was not small.
Sun Xiaoyi believes that the industry has two time points so far: one is that in 2017, after the red head document of the state to encourage the development of rehabilitation institutions was released, more and more people began to operate more standardizedly; the other is that after the epidemic in 2020, more and more people are more concerned about rehabilitation and pay attention to the industry.
In fact, domestic sports rehabilitation started relatively late, after the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the industry began to sprout, and in 2012, Hongdao Sports Medicine Clinic opened in Beijing, which was the first in China.
In fact, the industry really started in 2014. In this year, the State Council issued the "Several Opinions on Accelerating the Development of the Sports Industry and Promoting Sports Consumption" (also known as Document No. 46), which clearly pointed out that it is necessary to promote the combination of recreation and sports, vigorously develop sports medicine and rehabilitation medicine, actively develop sports rehabilitation technology, and encourage social capital to open various institutions such as recreation, physical fitness measurement and sports rehabilitation.
Then in 2017, the state issued a number of policies to encourage the development of rehabilitation institutions. Domestic sports rehabilitation institutions began to mushroom.
According to the "White Paper on China's Sports Rehabilitation Industry", the number of institutional stores involved in the field of sports rehabilitation exceeded 100 in 2018, and it has approached 400 at the end of 2020, with a compound growth of more than 40% in 3 years.
A business that is not easy to do
For a long time, sports rehabilitation has survived in a variety of institutions such as health centers and gyms.
According to the definition of the World Health Organization, sports rehabilitation is a branch of rehabilitation medicine, the essence is the integration of "sports" and "medical", with both medical and consumer attributes, involving muscles, bones, nerves and other fields, the goal is to help patients restore normal exercise ability.
However, in the general perception of the mainland public, the mention of rehabilitation often leads to neurological rehabilitation, elderly rehabilitation, which is what older people need to do, or some professional athletes, who need sports rehabilitation treatment.
Public hospitals do not pay attention, even orthopedic doctors also have some lack of awareness of rehabilitation, resulting in orthopedic postoperative, chronic pain and other sports rehabilitation audiences are often not valued enough, patients hear the most instructions are often: take medicine, pay attention to rest and maintenance.
Coupled with the cost of rehabilitation institutions at a time hundreds of thousands, it also reduces the public's willingness to consume.
Jiang Pei shared a set of their latest research data, only about 20% of people will think of going to a rehabilitation institution, 68% will go to a public hospital, and the rest choose to go to TCM massage and gym.
The problem that the business of sports rehabilitation is not easy to do is that whether it is medical qualification access, labor costs, site equipment investment, etc., every link is a threshold.
Taking medical qualification access as an example, medical qualification means formalization and legalization, and with supervision, it also means a guarantee for patients. However, sports rehabilitation medical licenses are not easy to apply for and are recognized as "scarce resources" in the industry.
An interesting point is that even if you invest according to the standards required by the policy, you may not make money in the end. Meng Po, general manager of the famous American sports rehabilitation equipment company DJO China and one of the initiators of yunkang federation, gave an example to the entrepreneurial state, some places said that to approve, it is necessary to meet certain standards, such as the area to reach hundreds of square meters, how many personnel to be equipped, with a few beds, but some entrepreneurs see this standard, after measuring the return on input and output of the operation, they will not apply.
The other is a shortage of talent: professional rehabilitation physicians and therapists; business people who understand both operations and medical care. The latter is even rarer.
In the view of Senior Medical Service Investor Lin, even if it is possible to build 100 rehabilitation clinics, it is difficult to operate 100 well.
Sports rehabilitation relies heavily on technical experts and operations teams. Experts have a relatively unified clinical path, a mature discipline system, and some institutions can also cultivate their own people, "but the operation team cannot be copied in batches." His analysis of startup states.
This is also one of the main reasons why the industry cannot copy in batches, and even the head companies that have received multiple rounds of financing do not dare to expand easily. Therefore, the large-scale development of the entire industry is very slow, so far there has not been a national large-scale chain operation brand, the above white paper shows that at present, 52% of domestic rehabilitation stores are single-store business models, and the rest are chained mode operations.
In addition, the chain model requires a unified set of standards, whether it is an operating system, a management system, or a technical system. However, for the sports rehabilitation industry, which is still in its early stages, these are relatively weak.
Let's take a look at the number of stores a few brands have so far:
Hongdao Sports Medicine Clinics: 4;
Ran Sports Rehabilitation: 6;
Sports power: 7;
Sports rehabilitation of doctors and families: 5;
Youfu Medical: 12;
According to Sun Xiaoyi, the 12 include 4 outpatient clinics and 8 stretching stores, and another 2 outpatient clinics and 12 stretching stores are still in preparation. And at present, all stores are profitable, with a single store's highest annual revenue of nearly 20 million yuan. However, Youfu has not yet left Shanghai.
In her view, the failure of many entrepreneurs lies in overconfidence, thinking that they know a lot of doctors, or that they are doctors, and that there are many patients who think that it is enough to spend money. "It's not enough to have these, we must have a complete team to support, including the operation team, the data team, the finance team and the marketing team."
Opportunities are always there, but don't try to make quick money
In 2021, Jiang Pei re-established a new brand - Ruikang HiSilicon.
Five years ago, in addition to having a little bit of resources, he wanted technology without technology, talent without talent, market without market, brand without brand.
And now everything is not the same. The new store did more than 200,000 flows in the first month, which is four times that of that year, and it has been stable at 200,000-300,000 in these months. "It's like spending a few months walking the original road of more than two years." Jiang Pei sighed.
Of course, the competition is also more intense.
As the founder of Yunkanglian, Meng Po has also clearly felt that the industry is undergoing some changes in recent years:
First, the biggest change is the idea of rehabilitation, which is becoming more and more accepted. In large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, more and more doctors and patients are beginning to receive sports rehabilitation outpatient services.
Second, the concept of sports rehabilitation, in the past few years, everyone talked about the most, one is orthopedic postoperative rehabilitation, one is the rehabilitation of elite athletes, before the rise of the sports rehabilitation industry, there may even be a possibility of operating in China, but also to go abroad to recover things. Now such cases are rare. At the same time, in the current sports rehabilitation service content, orthopedic postoperative rehabilitation accounts for only about 1/3-1/4, and more and more patients with orthopedic and sports conservative injuries do not need surgery.
Third, the content of sports rehabilitation services is also changing, from the original sports rehabilitation to expand, such as some white-collar work and habits of inappropriate caused by the neck, shoulders, waist and legs of chronic pain, adolescent scoliosis and so on, sports rehabilitation services have also become younger.
At the same time, more and more capital such as Matrix Partners and Changling Capital began to be laid out.
Many gyms and health care institutions have also rushed to launch sports rehabilitation services, the level of practitioners is uneven, and the national supervision is not in place at this stage, and the entire industry is still in a state of barbaric growth.
In this context, due to the long-term concept of "heavy clinical, light rehabilitation", the public often does not know the need to do rehabilitation, or even if they know, they often have no way to seek reliable rehabilitation.
In Jiang Pei's view, this phenomenon reflects the impetuousness of the industry in a sense, and the rush for quick success.
Of course, there will be such a phenomenon in the early stage of the development of any industry, the so-called bad currency expelling good money. However, in the long run, enterprises ultimately rely on word of mouth to obtain market recognition, which is also the consensus of many practitioners in the industry.
It is worth mentioning that players in the industry have also begun to appear more subdivided tracks, such as cervical health guards who focus on the problem of the spine and waist, and the spine is nearly perfect. Even on the market education side, there are some similar keeps in the field of sports rehabilitation that try to bridge the gap with user needs.
According to public information, sports rehabilitation clinics are one of the important sectors in the field of medical services in the United States, the number of sports rehabilitation clinics in the United States has exceeded 18,000, and the sports rehabilitation market size exceeded 30 billion US dollars in 2019. Take the well-known SelectMedical rehabilitation chain brand in the United States as an example, after decades of development, the total number of stores has exceeded 2,000. In contrast, domestic sports rehabilitation has huge room for growth in both market space and the number of institutions.
"I think the opportunities in the next 5 years are very good, the development space is also very broad, and this is also a track for social medical achievements." Jiang Xiaodong said.
In his view, sports rehabilitation brands with deep moats are still very scarce, and the industry must not only see great development potential, but also have patience and endurance, truly understand the needs of customers, and do a good job in service, in order to create products suitable for the entire diagnosis and treatment environment in China today.