Public summary
KYMIRA is a technology company developing smart garments for the sports and healthcare sectors. In 2013, they launched their first technology, an infrared emitting textile, used to enhance athlete performance and recovery. Sales from these products represent a key and growing revenue source (£199K in 2019/20). Having established the effectiveness of their smart textiles as sportswear, with all current products (~1,200 SKUs) having gained US Food & Drug Administration medical device status, they intend to develop and progress these for medical applications. Since 2016, KYMIRA has been developing smart garments, simultaneously establishing routes to market through growing sales and distribution channels. The company is growing its staff, production and R&D capabilities and strong brand recognition.The UK sportswear sector is currently estimated to be worth over £7bn with the global figure upwards of $123bn (Sports Goods Retailing, Mintel, 2016). Approx. 41% of this market is performance sportswear. With connected devices (especially for sports and fitness) surging in popularity, innovativeness and functionality currently, we estimate that roughly 10% ($5bn) of performance sportswear consumers are receptive to performance monitoring technology which is largely underserved by current technologies. We predict a modest initial capture of global market share of around 0.002% (c.£1m) in the first 2 years, conservatively increasing to 0.01% (£6m) after 5 years.
Other companies in the elite player tracking market are Catapult Sports (Australia - 10%), Stat Sports (Ireland - 0.4%) and Kinexon (USA - 0.1%) however each of these companies are producing solid devices which attach to athletes physically, rather than garments. A few micro-companies (e.g. Athos, Myant, Hexoskin, Master Caution) are offering garments with very limited tracking capabilities but none with similar capabilities to those being developed by KYMIRA and none with more than 0.1% of the market. In the longer term, KYMIRA will launch into the healthcare wearables market - one of the fastest growing markets of this decade (Telematics and Informatics, 2017). KYMIRA’s novel garments will sell
into the home healthcare market, capturing a very small percentage of the rapidly growing (7.8%) market (predicted value of $517bn globally by 2025 (GVR, 2018)). With an ever - increasing ageing population and rising healthcare costs associated with lack of clinical staff time and bedspace, KYMIRA is also perfectly positioned to disrupt this market and commercially succeed by being the only medical-grade smart garment producer selling into NHS and private healthcare. The wearable medical device market (the closest relevant sector) has a predicted global value of around $19bn by 2021 (Cision: PR Newswire, 2018)
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| Category of impact | Economic, Technological |
|---|---|
| Impact level | Benefit |