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Kossan Rubber Industries Bhd

Kossan makes rubber gloves used by doctors, hospitals and factories around the world.

Kossan Rubber Industries makes rubber gloves — mostly the stretchy blue and white ones that doctors snap on before they touch a patient. That is the whole business, and it is a big one: the company churns out billions of gloves a year and sells them to hospitals, clinics, dentists, labs, and factories that need clean hands for handling food or electronics. The customers are not regular shoppers. They are distributors and healthcare buyers who order by the container, and they choose Kossan because gloves are a boring purchase that must simply never fail — a torn glove in surgery is a disaster. Price matters, but so does trust. Kossan is one of the big four Malaysian glove makers, and Malaysia supplies a huge share of the world's medical gloves.

Think of it as the world's largest box of disposable gloves, refilled every single day. The money comes in per glove, and the margin depends on two things: the cost of raw materials (nitrile, a synthetic rubber made from oil chemicals, plus natural latex) and the selling price, which swings wildly with global demand. During the pandemic, demand exploded and prices spiked, then crashed when the world stocked up and stopped panic-buying. Kossan also runs smaller arms: a technical rubber division making things like engine mounts and bridge bearings, and a clean-room and infrastructure unit, but gloves are the engine and the reason anyone owns the stock. Revenue in recent years has run in the range of a couple billion ringgit, with gloves making up the vast majority of sales.

The company started in the 1970s as a small rubber-products outfit and grew into gloves because that was where the volumes were. What matters now is that the glove boom has cooled, so Kossan is focused on staying lean and expanding into higher-value products — thinner gloves, specialty coatings, and surgical gloves that fetch better prices than commodity exam gloves. It pays dividends and keeps cash for automation and capacity upgrades. The stock trades on Bursa Malaysia, and the ticker is KOSSAN. Its fortunes rise and fall with hospital budgets, oil-linked nitrile prices, and how fast competitors in China and Thailand add capacity. Investors mainly watch one number: the average selling price per thousand gloves.

Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026