Page 21 - Sphere No.9 (Sep 2003)

A CENTURY
OF PURITY
After a hundred years in business, Hong Kong’s favourite water brand is fresher than ever.
By Charles Anderson
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since
1903 when A.S.Watson & Co, chemists and drug-
gists of Hong Kong, introduced a drink of “guar-
anteed absolute purity” to slake the thirsts of its
more discriminating customers.
In those days, distilled water was something of a sideline for
the crown colony’s premier apothecary. It was sold alongside
toilet preparations, carbolic soap, gout tinctures, hair wash, den-
tifrice, whisky, ginger beer and wines from the company’s gran-
ite-and-brick premises in Des Voeux Road, Hong Kong. The
store was just a couple of streets away from the British Empire’s
most thriving harbourfront, perched on the south-east coast of
Imperial China.
Today, in its centennial year, the distilled water sideline has
moved centre stage. Watsons Water is a subsidiary in its own
right of A.S. Watson & Co, now part of the Hutchison
Whampoa Group, which acquired the business in 1981. Its
water distillation plant at Taipo in Hong Kong’s NewTerritories
is the largest in the world, producing 430 million litres annually
– enough to fill 140 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Long the market leader in Hong Kong with “superbrand”
status,Watsons Water is now becoming increasingly popular in
Singapore,Taiwan, Macau and Mainland China.
The brand has just completed a major overhaul of its image
and products to coincide with its 100th birthday.
M AKING HISTORY
The Watsons story, however, does not begin in 1903. It even
predates the founding of colonial Hong Kong in 1841. The
company which later took the Watson name first opened its
doors way back in 1828 in Canton, where its dispensary pro-
vided free medical services to the poor people of the southern
Chinese city now called Guangzhou.
In those days, Canton was the only legal access point to
China for pushy European traders doing business for big com-
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