Finnish company Lifa Air is helping the Chinese people breathe amidst the country’s massive problem with pollution. Cooperation with China’s leading sound system manufacturer Edifier takes Lifa Air’s air purifiers into the biggest market in the world. While in Finland citizens can feel a little coughy because of street dust, in Shanghai, China people might not see further than a few metres ahead of them. There are dozens of cities in the rapidly growing country that have more inhabitants than the whole of Finland. “You can really feel the smog in your lungs,” says Johan Brandt, the CEO of Lifa Air. ”The problem is serious and people talk about it daily.” Lifa Air, founded in Finland in 1988, heard the Chinese consumers’ call for air purifiers, but alone the company would not have had the resources to conquer a whole new market. Chinese Edifier joined along through Golden Bridge programme by Finpro. Brandt explains that the multimedia audio manufacturer had been looking for a new business segment in the hope of further growth, and they had acknowledged the potential of air cleaning.

After their first date things proceeded quickly. In August last year a joint venture called Lifa Air (Dongguan) Air Purification System Co Ltd was founded, the ownership of which is divided 30 per cent and 70 per cent between Lifa Air and Edifier respectively. The first products were presented to the press in October, and consumers have been able to buy them from January onwards.air purifier cause sore throat The company targets the Chinese middle and upper middle class.what are ozone air cleaners “The customers are city people who worry about the quality of the air they breathe and who have the purchase price, about a thousand dollars, to spare,” Brandt describes.rochester carburetor air cleaner The air purifier system that has landed on the Chinese consumer market consists of an air purifier and a measurement and control unit called Lifa Smart.

Lifa Smart constantly measures, for example, the amount of particulates and carbon dioxide in the air, and it controls the air purifier according to these parameters. The indoor air quality can be monitored with a mobile app. Lifa Air’s own business revolves around professional devices. Brandt points out that one of the essential differences between professional and consumer markets lies in their volume. “Edifier has the skills and resources for mass production; Lifa Air provides the knowhow.” In addition to the joint venture in China, LIfa Air has offices in Dubai, Hong Kong, and New York City. Approximately three quarters of the revenue comes from abroad. The professional solutions have been sold in more than 50 countries, and Lifa Air has a network of distributors in 30 countries. Brandt says that once the Chinese need has been met, consumer products will hit the markets elsewhere. The most promising areas are Europe and the Middle East: not only do they need air purification, but they also have a suitable legislation and infrastructure.

“For example, in Dubai the conditions are challenging with plenty of skyscrapers and sand flying around. The air simply has to be cleaned.” Brandt sees immense opportunities for expansion. Also India and Pakistan are countries with plenty of people and big metropolises – and bad air quality. Latin America boasts an abundance of similar cities, but Brandt thinks that finding customers in the area might be a different story. Brandt says that the biggest competitor of Lifa Air’s professional solutions is simply doing duct cleaning mechanically. In terms of devices, the intensity of competition varies product by product. The competition is harsher outside of Finland. Making successful business in Finland was one of the prerequisites of Lifa Air believing the same could happen abroad. “If the carrots do not sell in your local market, they will not sell elsewhere either,” says Brandt. Lifa Air was founded in 1988 by two brothers, Pentti and Vesa Mäkipää.

The company continues to be full-on Finnish: the professional products are designed and manufactured in Finland, and all subcontractors are Finnish too. The minimalistic design is distinctively Scandinavian in style. Nowadays Lifa Air has nearly thousand employees, and growth is happening both in Finland and abroad. New team members are currently being recruited. Brandt himself joined the company a little over a year ago, and the founding brothers are both still involved, Pentti Mäkipää on the board of directors and Vesa Mäkipää as the president of the Asian region. There are plenty of plans for the future, but Brandt is not yet willing to go into detail. He does say that new devices and solutions to help decrease workload are being developed all the time. “IoT, the internet of things, will change a lot of things. Currently we are looking into different ways of making use of it in air purification.”BEIJING—Some pollution-weary Chinese consumers have moved beyond stocking up on home air purifiers and strap-on face masks and are now trying to breathe better with second-generation gadgets.

Li Lingling, who lives in the central Chinese city of Changsha, recently bought a snorkel-like device from Broad Group’s Lung-Pro line, an armband air filter that feeds purified air to a face mask via a breathing tube. mask suffocates me if I wear it too long,” Ms. Li said about one of the more popular types of masks available in China. She liked the Mini Lung-Pro, which retails for 190 yuan ($29), so much that she bought five more for her friends, though she admitted the nose-to-arm apparatus does turn heads on the street. China’s economic slowdown has meant slightly better air across much of the country in the past year. Still, a greater awareness of air quality among the general population has spurred Chinese companies—both startups and more traditional conglomerates—to bring new products to the market. The devices are aimed at reducing levels of PM2.5—fine particulate matter that penetrates deep into the lungs and is especially hazardous to human health. In a survey from market research firm Mintel last year, of 3,000 Internet users aged 20 to 49, 83% of respondents said they already owned face masks.

Of those surveyed, 61% said they were “very concerned” about PM2.5. And the number of air purifiers sold in China nearly quadrupled between 2010 and 2015 to 4.4 million units, according to market-data provider Euromonitor. Now, “the concept and market for wearable devices has become quite popular,” says Neil Wang, managing director at consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. There is little independent research on how well the new antipollution offerings work. “[Consumers] focus most on if a product works, and are willing to pay a bit more if the product is really proven to be effective,” said Lindi Li, a Mintel research analyst. Startup Beijing Zhongqing Technologies Co.’s CoClean looks like an amulet. Its manufacturer says the device’s technology is based on ionization, which reduces particles in the air, and data mining, which combines user information and locations to give CoClean users diagnostics on a larger scale. The result is a 1 cubic meter breathing space with PM2.5 levels reduced by as much as 99%, according to Zhao Fei, an environmental scientist who worked with his fellow Tsinghua University alums and an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, to create the CoClean.

It can be worn on a necklace or be pinned to a shirt collar. “The best distance from your nose is 20 to 30 centimeters,” said 31-year-old Mr. Zhao, 31. He said Beijing Zhongqing Technologies has shipped more than 5,000 CoCleans since launching in October and has raised about 10 million yuan in two rounds of funding from Chinese venture capitalists. The 799-yuan device comes with a charging station that doubles as a laser-based PM2.5 monitor. “I wouldn’t say this replaces a mask,” Mr. Zhao said. “Our goal is to be a supplementary system to giant devices.” Mr. Wang of Frost & Sullivan said many traditional manufacturers are also jumping into the second-generation antipollution market. Broad Group, which makes the wearable Lung-Pro, is a large air-conditioner manufacturer known as the provider of air purifiers in Zhongnanhai, the Beijing compound that is home to China’s top leaders. It also offers a Lung-Pro that cleans the air inside a car. But the new wave of devices aren’t just wearable or for cars.

Ecovacs, a Hong Kong-based robotics firm, introduced the Atmobot A630, an air-purification robot, in October with a sticker price of 6,999 yuan. It works like the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner and can be connected to a smartphone. The company says the Atmobot can purify a home in about half the time it takes for an ordinary air purifier to do the job. An Ecovacs spokeswoman said about 1,000 units have sold so far. To be sure, with the average cost of an air purifier at more than $300, antipollution products are still a niche market. Analysts say upper-middle-class urbanites are the primary buyers. Antipollution innovation hasn’t been limited to just protection. Beijing residents Liam Bates and Jessica Lam, who are married, created the Origins Laser Egg—a portable air-quality measuring device—out of a desire to know how clean the air in their home was—not what a government reading station was saying miles away. Mr. Bates said some pollution sensors on e-commerce sites that claim to measure PM2.5 simply measure dust or the transparency of air.