Intco Medical Brand Guidelines: From a 1993 Los Angeles Office to Zibo Vinyl and Nitrile

A Los Angeles company and a Shandong glove base.

Intco Medical traces itself to the United States. The company says it began in 1993 with its first US company in Los Angeles, set up to manufacture and export medical consumables and care products, and that it opened a marketing centre in Shanghai in 1998. Today Intco Medical Technology is based in Zibo, in Shandong province, and is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange; the company says the listing came in 2017. Its chairman is named on its website as Frank Liu and in the trade press as Fangyi Liu.

The US federal record shows Intco-named companies with gloves earlier than that. The US Food and Drug Administration’s premarket database shows Shanghai Intco Plastic & Rubber Products receiving a clearance for synthetic powder-free nitrile examination gloves in June 1999; Jiangsu Intco companies clearing manual wheelchairs in 2000; and Zibo Blue Intco Plastic & Rubber Products clearing powdered and powder-free vinyl examination gloves in 2005.

The company’s own history places the move into its own glove plants in Zibo. It says it set up its first disposable-glove base there in 2009, specialising in PVC and PE gloves, and describes the step as a key transition “from trading to in-house manufacturing.” The FDA records list Zibo Intco Medical Products with powder-free vinyl examination gloves in September 2009.

Other lines came earlier, the company says: an ECG electrode base and hot and cold therapy products in Shanghai in 2003, and a wheelchair base in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, in 2004, which it now calls the core production centre for its rehabilitation devices.

Vinyl, nitrile and a family of Syn- names.

Glove capacity spread across eastern China. The company lists a base at Qingzhou in Shandong from 2010 making PVC, nitrile and PE gloves; a base in Huaibei, Anhui, in 2017; and bases in Jiangxi and at Anqing, Anhui, in 2020, the Anqing site making nitrile and PVC gloves. A 2019 base in Quang Ninh province, in Vietnam, makes physical-therapy products and medical consumables, it says. FDA filings match several of these places: Shandong Intco Medical Products of Qingzhou cleared latex examination gloves in April 2022 and blue nitrile examination gloves in August 2023, and Anhui Intco of Huaibei cleared clear and yellow vinyl gloves in 2019 and nitrile gloves in 2024.

The named ranges give the brand its vocabulary. Synmax, a synthetic vinyl examination glove in blue, was cleared by the FDA under that name in November 2013; Synguard is the name on its blue nitrile examination gloves, cleared in 2023; and Syntex, a synthetic latex glove, was launched in April 2025, Rubber World reported from a Zibo announcement. In April 2026 Scientist Live reported that the company had introduced Syntex and Synmax Pro gloves for healthcare settings, medical examinations, food processing and industrial work, quoting its chairman on “ongoing adjustments in global supply chain structures.” Its website lists latex, nitrile, vinyl and PE gloves alongside the Syntex and Synmax lines.

Gloves sit inside a wider business. The company describes three segments: medical consumables, rehabilitation equipment such as manual and electric wheelchairs, and physical therapy. It also lists electrodes, hot and cold packs, non-woven products and feminine-care lines, and the FDA cleared a tampon from Shandong Intco Hygiene Products of Zibo in January 2025. Its Zhenjiang company, Jiangsu Intco Medical Products, has continued to clear mobility products, from the Y207 electric wheelchair in March 2021 to the Virgo mobility scooter in June 2026, and a Hong Kong affiliate cleared surgical face masks in March 2021.

The sales network also grew abroad. After Shanghai, the company says, it opened marketing centres in Canada in 2013, Germany in 2016, Japan in 2021 and Malaysia in 2022, the same year it set up what it calls the INTCO Medical Intelligent Science & Technology Park.

How glove makers present themselves.

Disposable gloves are among the most anonymous products in healthcare. They arrive in plain dispenser boxes, are worn for minutes and are thrown away, and most of the companies that make them sell to distributors, hospital buyers and other brands rather than to the public. Their visual identities are therefore built less around the product in use and more around the factory, the material and the scale of output.

The pictures repeat across the category. A gloved hand in blue or purple nitrile is held against a white ground; long dipping lines carry rows of ceramic hand-shaped formers through tanks of latex or nitrile; finished gloves are stripped, stacked and boxed; and dispenser boxes are piled into walls of colour, each size and material given its own shade. Cleanroom and hospital scenes supply the setting, with gowned staff, stainless steel and soft, even light.

Geography is part of the story. Malaysia and Thailand, both rubber-growing countries, are home to many of the makers in this series, and corporate material from the region often opens with aerial views of factory complexes, rows of long white sheds, alongside figures for lines, plants and annual capacity. Makers in China, Europe and elsewhere use the same vocabulary of automation, testing laboratories and certificates.

Trade fairs are where many of these brands meet their buyers. Stands at MEDICA in Düsseldorf and at the Dubai healthcare show long known as Arab Health tend to show stacked boxes, glove samples and product walls, with a company name in a clean sans and a colour that can carry from carton to booth. The guides in this series look at how individual makers handle that shared language.

Scale, stated in the company’s own words.

Scale is the centre of how Intco Medical presents itself. Its website calls it the world’s largest non-latex glove manufacturer, with annual capacity of more than 107 billion gloves, ten R&D and production bases and seven marketing centres, among them Los Angeles, Essen and Tokyo, serving more than 150 countries and regions; these are the company’s own figures. Its stated mission is “Global INTCO, Global Health,” and it writes its name in capitals, INTCO, across its website and releases. The website also lists recognitions including a place in the 2025 Shandong Top 200 Enterprises ranking and a 2025 ESG award for listed companies.

Colour shows up in the names of the gloves. The FDA device names for Intco gloves describe blue Synmax vinyl, blue Synguard nitrile, and vinyl gloves in clear and in yellow. The glove names share a prefix, Syn-: Synmax for vinyl, Synguard for nitrile and Syntex for the synthetic latex glove.

For a design guide, Intco Medical shows how a company that started in trading can brand a commodity product by naming its materials. Compare Top Glove, the Malaysian glove maker, and Ansell, the Australian glove company. For this guide we use a deep navy, a vinyl blue and a cool grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Intco Medical’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.