A Small Company Makes Big Waves in Exports Arena : Trade: The British royal family and an Arab sultan are customers of Life Support Products, an Irvine firm that manufactures special emergency medical equipment.
Life Support Products Inc., a small Irvine manufacturer of resuscitators and other emergency medical equipment, counts among its clients the Tokyo fire department, the Sultan of Brunei and the British royal family.
Since beginning an international marketing campaign six years ago, Life Support’s foreign sales have soared. In the last three years alone, international sales have risen five-fold, from $325,000 in 1987 to $1.7 million last year.
The Commerce Department has recognized Life Support’s success in the export market by naming it as a recipient of its “E” award for outstanding contributions to bolstering U.S. trade. In May, the Small Business Administration’s Santa Ana office will select Life Support as Orange County’s Exporter of the Year.
“We’re the ‘stop-gap’ company,” said Robert A. Hovee, the company’s 47-year-old president. “Our products operate from the emergency room to the injured victim lying on the street. We thrive on emergencies.”
While Life Support’s resuscitation systems have become standard equipment in emergency medical services departments in a number of major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Houston, San Jose and Cleveland, company officials concede that they were slow to recognize the opportunity for doing business overseas.
“We started getting overseas calls in 1984, and that was when we decided to see what was out there for us,” Hovee said. “We gave the international market a hard look and decided there’s money out there for us.’
But Life Support’s foreign sales didn’t catch on until 1988, when it created an international marketing department. The effort paid off quickly when later that year the firm signed a five-year distribution agreement with Drager AG, a West German medical and safety equipment manufacturer.
Hovee mapped out a strategy to expand in the international market.
“We spent two months on each target country, intensely studying its technical rules covering our products and setting up demonstration booths in trade shows abroad,” Hovee said.
Hovee and his marketing staff traveled to each target country, scouting for reliable distributors to market its medical equipment.
While parceling out rights to 11 distributors in Europe and Asia was easy, tailoring the devices to meet foreign specifications took time, Hovee said. West Germany, for instance, does not allow Teflon to be used in medical devices. Life Support engineers had to replace the Teflon with kel-f, a non-flammable plastic material that turns to gas once it reaches a certain high temperature.
And different countries have varying requirements for the color of oxygen hoses used in breathing equipment. In the United States and Japan, the hoses are supposed to be green. In France and Britain, they’re white. And in West Germany, they’re blue.
“There are cultural sensitivities in every country that our people had to know before they went to train people in those countries,” Hovee said.
Another reason for Life Support’s export success is that some of its products are not made anywhere else in the world, Steve Badolato, Life Support’s manager of international sales, said. For example, it is the only maker of a body splint and litter that keeps an accident victim’s spine immobile to prevent further injury while the victim is being transported. It also claims to be the only supplier of a full-body pack for burn victims.
Its latest device, AutoVent 2000, a breathing regulator the size of a Sony Walkman radio is widely used by the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard.
Life Support had its origins as the Anaheim division of Robertshaw Controls Inc., a former Fortune 500 company that makes control devices for the aerospace and medical industries. After another brief ownership change, the company was purchased in 1983 by Burn Pac Inc., a Torrance company that manufactures burn-treatment systems.
“As Life Support’s business grew, it became more important to us and we incorporated some of Burn Pac’s products into Life Support, “ said Tom Zapara, 67, the majority shareholder of Life Support who also owns Burn Pac, now a division of Life Support.
Although Zapara does not see Life Support going public any time soon, he said the company might consider doing so if sales continue to grow.
“If sales reach $20 million to $25 million with good prospects of increasing sales in the future, and if we can show a substantial growth in profit, we’d consider going public in the next five years,” Hovee said.
Although the company’s devices are selling well in the European market, Hovee said his company has no plans to build a manufacturing facility there.
SALES OF LIFE SUPPORT PRODUCTS
Overseas sales have grown from about 1% to more than 22% since 1983.
Projected 1990: Overall sales: $11 million International sales: $2.5 million
Source: Life Support Products Inc.
