Saviors of the 'airpocalypse'

Panic buying swept Beijing during the "airmaggedon," as residents turned to what they saw as their only possible saviors - air purifiers and face masks.

Outside the IQAir corporate office near the US embassy, a Chinese secretary tried to fit four washing machine-sized units into her boss's Mercedes-Benz sedan. Parents spooked by news reports about choking smog contacted Torana Air Center owner Chris Buckley from overseas to order masks and air purifiers for their children spending a semester studying in Beijing.

Both IQAir and Torana had record sales days, selling out their entire inventories. Buckley's well-heeled and usually polite customers were arguing about who was in line for service first.

"I wished I'd trained my staff in counseling," says Buckley, who studied chemistry at Oxford in the UK. "We had some customers who were very agitated when you tell them you haven't got replacement filters for their children."

Record smog, record sales

The recent wave of severe smog peaked on January 13, when the air quality index hit 886, according to US embassy monitoring. The measure of various pollutants in the air was 17 times higher than the level considered "good" and almost triple the level considered "hazardous."

Buckley says he received a few extra calls that day, but not very many. "I think some people looked at the reading and couldn't believe it," he said.

However, the next day his two shops - in the CBD's swanky Central Park apartment complex and expat suburban haven Shunyi district - were flooded with customers, who had cleaned out his entire inventory by January 16.

"On Tuesday [January 15], we were just taking orders. The next shipment came on Friday [January 18], and we pre-sold two-thirds of that," he said.

Customers also swarmed the headquarters of IQAir, a much larger air purifier maker with seven stores in Beijing and a branch office in Shanghai.

Counting the cost of clean air

While most of Buckley's customers are expats, Swiss giant IQAir gets most of its business from multinational corporations, embassies and affluent Chinese. Air purifiers from Torana and IQAir cost more than 3,000 yuan ($482) and 10,000 yuan respectively for the smallest units, a luxury to most families.

The BBC purchased six units alone. The woman who tried to squeeze four units into her Mercedes gave up, requiring her boss's driver to ferry three purifiers home and her to follow with the final unit in a taxi.

"On Monday, our receptionist literally couldn't hear herself think, there was so much chatter," says IQAir CEO Mike Murphy.

IQAir saleswoman Christina Wang stepped in over the weekend to help manage the company's Chinese-language Sina Weibo account, which was inundated with inquiries, partly because of recommendations from customers with thousands of followers, she said.

"More and more Chinese people have satisfied their basic needs. They have an apartment and enough to eat. Now, they are worried about their health," she said.