After a year of large shop openings, including a three-floor Tainan flagship in January and a two-floor Zhubei hall location in April, Taiwanese mattress chain Bedding World Co., Ltd. (TWO: 2938) just took a bigger step.
On Sept. 16, It listed on the Taipei Exchange, the island’s second-tier public market for growing firms. Stock started at the equivalent of about US$0.56 and rose as high as US$0.59 early hours.
The listing is not the company’s first stock market rodeo though. In 2016 it joined a smaller “emerging” board with lighter rules and thinner trading. This week’s move lets far more investors buy and sell the stock each day. The new listing moved 20.14 million existing shares from the Emerging Stock Board to the main board and added 2.7 million new ones.
The timing matches the firm’s push into smart beds. Bedding World now sells what it calls Sleep 3.0: mattresses and frames that lift, massage and follow a specific night-time routine. Its newest flagship, the Jobs AI Smart Sleep Bed, is marketed as the “Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) (ETR: Tl0) of mattresses.”
This bed can raise the legs, ease reflux, move into a weightless pose, lift the head to quiet snoring and run eight pulse motors for a body massage. An app sets a TV-watching angle and a morning wake-up that shakes the sleeper and then sits them up. The mattress also holds a small German “Schumann-wave” chip. This chip gives off a faint pulse that follows the Earth’s natural magnetic rhythm, so the brain settles faster and stays longer in deep sleep, according to the company.
Bedding World currently runs 29 shops in 12 cities and counties throughout Taiwan, plus online stores. It makes beds at a Zhongli plant that can turn out about 44,000 mattresses a year. The firm takes roughly 9 per cent of Taiwan’s mid-to-high-grade mattress trade.
Last year’s sales totalled about US$26 million. Chairman Chen San-chieh is planning two new shops per annum at home, then wants to ship Taiwan-made smart beds abroad.
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