One New Plant in Bac Ninh Makes Vietnam Johnson Health Tech's Biggest Production Base, Overtaking Shanghai
Johnson Health Tech's second Bac Ninh plant opened in August. Once both Vietnam plants run at full capacity, the company says Vietnam will overtake Shanghai as its largest production base. It went there in 2019 for lower costs; since 2025, a 7.5-point US tariff gap has kept output moving.
[One New Plant in Bac Ninh Makes Vietnam Johnson Health Tech's Biggest Production Base, Overtaking Shanghai]
In early August, Johnson Health Tech, the Taichung-based maker of Matrix and Horizon fitness equipment, opened its second Vietnam plant in the Thuận Thành I Industrial Park in Bắc Ninh province. The company says that once both Vietnam plants run at full capacity, their combined annual output will reach USD 600 million, more than half of the group's worldwide production value, and Vietnam will replace Shanghai as its largest production base. As of mid-August, Shanghai still held that title.
The second plant sits on roughly 20 hectares and cost USD 70 million. It makes its own motors, control electronics, and treadmill decks and belts.
Vietnam's weight in the group has grown year by year. The first plant broke ground in 2019 to build mid- and low-priced home equipment, Johnson's first factory in Southeast Asia. At its August earnings call the company put capacity at 50 percent China, 30 percent Vietnam and 20 percent Taiwan. The first Vietnam plant does about USD 200 million a year; the second is twice that, which is how the company gets to Vietnam crossing the halfway mark at full capacity. China's share falls because the total is growing, not because Shanghai is cutting output.
The two moves had different reasons. In 2019 Johnson said it was cost: Vietnam was cheaper than China, so Horizon home equipment orders shifted from Shanghai while commercial products stayed there. From September that year, Chinese-made fitness equipment started paying an extra 7.5 percent US tariff. That gap never went away, but for several years Johnson only moved the home line.
The 2025 US reciprocal tariffs were the first to hit the company's gross margin in a visible way. Management told analysts that manufacturing in Vietnam costs 10 to 15 percent less than in China and that US-bound goods pay 7.5 points less in duty, so capacity will keep moving to Vietnam; this year the commercial products for the US that were still made in Shanghai moved to Bắc Ninh too. The US tariff regime changed again in February and July, shifting rates everywhere, but the gap between China and Vietnam is still 7.5 points. Taiwan's total rate is only 10 percent, lower than Vietnam's, but the Taiwan plant builds high-end commercial equipment and does not overlap with the Vietnam lines.
Besides absorbing the Shanghai orders, the Vietnam plants build the Vision line, a commercial range priced below the flagship Matrix brand. General manager Jason Lo describes it as building a wall against Chinese brands, to keep Matrix customers from drifting to cheaper rivals.
Johnson calls the Bắc Ninh site the world's largest fitness equipment manufacturing base. Rivals do not publish comparable factory data, so what can be compared is company revenue. In 2018 Johnson ranked third worldwide, behind Life Fitness of the US and Technogym of Italy. In 2025 its consolidated revenue was about USD 1.7 billion, ahead of Technogym's roughly USD 1.15 billion. Peloton booked about USD 2.4 billion, but nearly 70 percent of that was subscriptions and hardware came in under USD 800 million. Life Fitness and iFIT are private and have not published revenue in recent years. If USD 600 million of Vietnam output looks like less than half of group revenue, that is because output is counted at factory prices and revenue at selling prices; the two do not compare directly.
Vietnam will actually overtake Shanghai only once the second plant is fully up and running, which the company expects before next year's third-quarter peak season.
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