WHIEDA: who is behind the products

Chinese companies are always described the same way: factories, science, international standards, government support. You listen and realize — there's nothing to hold on to. Not a single figure you could go and check.

We came at it from a different angle. We opened the registers of four countries — and it turned out to be more interesting there than in the presentations.

You've already googled it. And drowned

The search results are either distributor sites full of enthusiasm, or posts from regional branches with figures like “1000 patents” and “100 research institutes”. The trouble with these figures isn't their size. The trouble is that there's no number, no register, no link behind them — the source is a promotional post, not a document.

What can be checked is something else entirely: licenses, trademarks, legal entities, astronomical catalogs, certificates with numbers. That's where we went.

Six things you can check in five minutes

The company controls none of these sources. Details unfold under each item.

A license that can't be faked

This is the most underrated fact in the whole story, and it's exactly where getting to know the company should start.

In China, direct selling is licensed by the state. After the wave of pyramid schemes in the nineties, the authorities first banned the model entirely and then brought it back — but under a licensing regime. The requirements for capital, payout structure, product quality and reporting are such that fewer than a hundred licenses have been issued for all of China.

The difference between a license and a pretty number is simple: behind a licensed company stands the regulator that issued it. It's not decoration for a presentation, it's someone else's signature under your reputation.

An asteroid was named after their scientific advisor

When we read this, the reaction was predictable: sure, and they were probably given a star too — one of those sold as gift certificates for three thousand rubles.

And here's the important difference from gift certificates. An asteroid can't be bought and can't be ordered — it isn't a service. The name is proposed by the object's discoverer and approved by the Working Group of the International Astronomical Union: fifteen professional astronomers from around the world. The rules explicitly prohibit names that could be confused with a trademark or product — so by definition it can't be a marketing stunt.

Whether that makes the insoles work is a separate question. But it says a lot about the man: Professor Zhang Daning is an academician of the Eurasian Academy of Sciences and one of the founders of nephrology in traditional Chinese medicine. Names like that don't end up in the minor planet catalog by accident.

Here, what usually doesn't match up matched up

Import and distribution in Russia are handled by Garmoniya LLC, TIN 9701164645, Moscow, operating since November 2020.

The company has two owners: Qu Junsheng — 66.7% and Liu Ting — 33.3%, who has also been the general director since the very founding.

Now compare that with what the alliance says about itself. Qu Junsheng is the executive chairman of WHIEDA and president of Fohow (Tianjin) Pharmaceutical. Liu Ting is the chairman of the Eurasian Association and president of Health Priority, the man with whom it all began in 2015.

It matches. And this isn't a slide from a presentation: information is submitted to the register under legal liability, anyone can see it, and it can't be retrofitted to a pretty legend after the fact. And the director hasn't changed since 2020 — in an industry where legal entities are sometimes re-registered every couple of years, that's a telling sign in itself.

Revenue grew almost ninefold in a year: from 258 million to 2.3 billion. An equity ratio of 0.66 means the business runs on its own money, not borrowed. No commercial court cases, no bankruptcy, no signs of a shell company.

Strictly speaking, you don't build a trend on a single year — a one-off deal can produce growth like that too. But seven people on staff and ninefold growth don't square well with the story of a mighty sales department. It looks more like something else: the product sells itself. Someone tried it, saw the result, told three others. That is exactly how things that work grow, and exactly how something that was pushed on someone once does not.

What is known about Aaron Ciechanover

The company's materials mention Professor Aaron Ciechanover — winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded jointly with Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. Put simply, for how a cell breaks down and disposes of worn-out proteins. The prize is confirmed on the Nobel Committee's website.

Here is what is known for certain: the professor took part in the alliance's events, and this is documented in photographs with official banners.

• A strategy seminar on biotechnology products. The banner reads “Laureate of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Aaron Ciechanover” and “WHIEDA Biotechnology Product Strategy Seminar”. Round-table format, about ten participants.
• The first biotechnology conference of the WHIEDA International Association: “中医养生智慧 · 现代生物科技”, which the Russian translation on the same banner renders as “Centuries-old wisdom of health preservation in traditional Chinese medicine. Modern biotechnology”. An international line-up of participants on stage.

There are no publicly available contracts about his role — and, frankly, there are unlikely to be. Agreements with scientists of this level are covered by non-disclosure terms; publishing the contract would be a direct breach of them. The absence of a document on the internet proves nothing here, one way or the other.

So we say exactly what the pictures show: a scientist of this caliber comes to the company's events, sits at the same table as its management and takes the stage under its logo. People with a Nobel Prize are usually quite particular about whose banners end up behind their backs.

How many countries, really

The company's materials mention “20+”, “30+” and “39+ countries”. We won't name an exact figure, and here's why: with ninefold growth in a year, any number we give will be out of date before you finish reading this line.

The geography, however, can be checked right now, without any figures. The company runs local official websites in various countries — for example, the British and Uzbek. Representative offices are open in Moscow, Istanbul, Astana, Almaty, Bishkek, Tashkent and Ulaanbaatar. Launching a site in another language with a local legal entity behind it is more expensive and slower than adding a figure to a presentation.

The bottom line

A Chinese state license that cannot be bought. A trademark in the principal US register. A Russian legal entity with a turnover of 2.3 billion and owners who match the stated management. 55 documents that open via a link. An asteroid named by decision of an international astronomical committee. A Nobel laureate on stage under their logo.

And separately — a thousand patents and a hundred institutes we could not find, and the largest factory in the world that in fact turned out to be simply large.

The difference between these two lists is the answer to the question of who is behind the products. The company turned out to be noticeably more real than the enthusiastic posts make it look, and noticeably more modest than those same posts suggest. In our experience, that is the best possible outcome of a check: it's where absolutely everything adds up that you should start to worry.