Saint Bella births Hong Kong IPO, in race to nurture a postpartum empire

The company is feeding off growing Chinese demand for postpartum care, but could face headwinds from a slowing economy and plunging birthrates
Key Takeaways:
- Saint Bella has filed to list in Hong Kong, reporting its revenue grew 32% in the first half of last year as its loss for the period ballooned to 480 million yuan
- The postpartum care specialist has begun to expand overseas and also plans to enter the elderly care market
By Lau Chi Hang
One luxury handbag can easily cost up to tens of thousands of dollars. While the quality is undoubtedly very good, whether it’s worth that much is another issue. Instead, people who pay such big premiums are just as interested in the social and economic status they represent.
Saint Bella Inc. wants to take a page from that playbook, aiming to establish itself as the Hermès among maternity and baby care brands. To finance those big ambitions, the company filed for a Hong Kong IPO on the last day of 2024, hoping the New Year will bring it new bundles of cash as well. The company has spared no costs to burnish its fancy brand, resulting in 773 million yuan ($106 million) in cumulative losses over the past three years.
Saint Bella’s prospectus shows its revenue is growing strongly, even as its losses balloon. The company’s revenue more than doubled from 259 million yuan in 2021 to 560 million yuan in 2023, as its loss jumped from 119 million yuan in 2021 to 407 million yuan the next year, only to ease to 239 million yuan in 2023. Last year its revenue rose another 32% to 358 million yuan in the first half of 2024, while its loss ballooned sixfold to 480 million yuan.
The company ascribed the losses primarily to negative fair value changes in financial instruments issued to investors. Discounting those, its losses were much smaller at 29.9 million yuan in 2021 and 44.63 million yuan in 2022. And the company even logged profits of 20.77 yuan in 2023 and 17.15 million yuan in the first six months of last year.
Visionary founder
Saint Bella was founded in 2017 by Xiang Hua, a child of the 1980s. He received an engineering degree from Oxford University, only to ditch his field by joining the investment banking department of UBS on graduation, focusing on the healthcare sector. In 2016, he founded PrimeCare International, Saint Bella’s parent.
Xiang was astute enough to notice the lack of national postpartum centers in China, and that most existing centers were hiring nursing staff who could only provide mixed quality of service due to their background in other medical areas. Moreover, most providers were only caring for women’s physical health, ignoring the importance of their psychological health.
The company set out to tackle these issues and settled on a strategy of positioning itself as the crème de la crème of postpartum centers. Many of its facilities are housed in five-star hotels, and some are even in standalone mansions. Its star-studded clientele includes many famous actresses such as Qi Wei. With its focus on the top end of the market, Saint Bella quickly established itself as a royalty brand in just a few years.
That’s been good for business, since who doesn’t get just a bit of extra pleasure when telling friends that they’re sharing a postpartum center with such luminaries? Not only does it show how much you’re being pampered, but it’s also apt to draw admiring comments on how much your husband must love you, making the big spending seem worth it.
Pricey top plans
Saint Bella has three main businesses. Its biggest breadwinner is its postpartum centers, totaling 72. The Saint Bella brand is at the top of the food chain among several operated by the company. According to a list of its care plans obtained by media, the chain’s priciest plans can cost up to 1.25 million yuan, or about $170,000, for a 56-day stay at one of these centers. Among its other brands, Baby Bella caters to young middle-class families and Bella ISLA specializes in women’s psychological health.
Its second-biggest revenue spinner is home care services, where the company pairs families with baby care specialists. Its third biggest revenue source is women’s functional foods, built off its 2022 acquisition of the 20-year-old GuangHeTang brand whose products were repackaged to cater to women’s needs.
Saint Bella is also taking some baby steps overseas. It opened its first offshore postpartum center in Singapore in October 2023 and opened another center last year in Los Angeles.
Xiang is also eyeing opportunities in elderly care, another market with plenty of room for growth in China. Last June, the company established a strategic partnership with Kinoshita Group, Japan’s second-biggest healthcare specialist focused on care for the elderly.
Low birth rate overhang
China’s postpartum center market expanded rapidly from 2018 to 2023, growing 22.7% annually on average during that period, according to third-party market data in Saint Bella’s listing document. But evolving demographic and economic trends could also create some headwinds for the company’s prospects.
Two factors weight most heavily in this regard, the first related to birth rates and the second to China’s economic outlook.
China’s birth rate has plunged over the past decade, leading an anxious central government to rescind its decades-old one-child policy in 2017 and start allowing families to have two babies. In 2023, the rule was relaxed further to allow three babies. But the latest national government data shows new births continue to drop, falling from 15.2 million in 2018 to just 9 million in 2023, showing people just aren’t that interested in having big families.
The second factor lies in consumer willingness to spend, since postpartum centers fall into the category of discretionary spending that relies heavily on individual buying power. When the broader economy is slowing, something costing thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars may no longer seem affordable or appealing to many.
The non-recurring nature of postpartum services means some families are still willing to splurge on such services, especially the rich ones. However, such deep-pocketed consumers are still in the small minority and can’t singlehandedly sustain a growing company like Saint Bella. At the same time, its Baby Bella could feel the pain of China’s economic slowdown more acutely since it mainly caters to a middle class feeling the effects of the slowdown most acutely.
As a reference, we can look at the top postpartum center stock listed in Hong Kong, Aidigong Maternal & Child Health (0286.HK). The company lost nearly 180 million yuan both in 2022 and 2023 and lost another 39.4 million yuan in the first half of last year. Saint Bella might be better equipped to handle such headwinds due to its focus on the luxury end of the market, but navigating such a landscape won’t be easy.
To subscribe to Bamboo Works free weekly newsletter, click here