‘C-beauty’ brands find retail expansion outside China a slow slog

With its signature fan-shaped wall of lipsticks displayed at the entrance, the Hong Kong store of Mao Geping Cosmetics at the Harbour City shopping complex in Tsim Sha Tsui appeared quiet on a recent weekday night.\nThat underscored a sluggish state of affairs at Mao Geping, about two months after opening its first overseas location in the city, and the broader challenges faced by Chinese beauty – dubbed C-beauty – brands seeking to expand sales outside the mainland.\nThe cosmetics firm was named after founder Mao Geping, China’s most famous make-up artist, who was behind numerous mainland films, television programmes and reality shows.\n“Mao Geping is finally here in Hong Kong,” trumpeted the firm’s account on the Chinese social media platform RedNote, which only had 30 followers. This post received four heart emojis.\nIt was a lethargic showing for the Chinese cosmetics firm more than a year after it made a blistering trading debut in Hong Kong, where it raised HK$2.34 billion (US$300 million).\nAccording to its prospectus, Mao Geping aimed to strengthen its “global brand presence and overseas market penetration”, using 15 per cent of its Hong Kong listing’s proceeds for that purpose. In a recent earnings call, the company told analysts that it had plans to expand into Singapore, Japan, France and the UK.\n\nDespite the challenges in growing overseas, Hou Juncheng – the founder of Proya Cosmetics, China’s largest beauty products maker – said in a recent trip to Paris: “We don’t want to be just the Chinese Proya … We want to be the world’s Proya.”\nAt Proya’s annual general meeting in May, Hou said the company would pursue mergers and acquisitions overseas via its Paris subsidiary. The focus would be on sectors such as baby care, fragrance and men’s skincare, according to Chinese media reports.\nShanghai-listed Proya has filed for a secondary listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange by late October. The company planned to use part of the proceeds to establish research and development centres and overseas sales networks.\nCompared to major Western cosmetics brands, “Chinese beauty brands are still relatively small in scale”, said Chris Gao, a consumer research analyst at CLSA in Hong Kong.\n“For established domestic cosmetics companies attempting to expand abroad, progress is still in its early stages,” Gao said.\n“To truly build brand power, you need offline visibility combined with online coordination. Offline penetration still takes time,” she added.\nIn the first six months of 2025, China’s total cosmetics exports reached 18.71 billion yuan (US$2.6 billion), up 12 per cent from a year earlier, with Southeast Asia as the major overseas market, according to a report from China Fortune Securities. It projected cosmetics exports to nearly double to 34.6 billion yuan by 2027.\n\nWhile contract cosmetics manufacturers for global brands accounted for the bulk of those shipments, a growing number of home-grown Chinese brands have been venturing overseas, aided by marketing campaigns on social media platforms like TikTok.\nAccording to CLSA’s Gao, some of these brands were created by Chinese contract manufacturers to specifically sell in overseas markets.\nSimilar to the strategy adopted by solar panel makers, electric vehicle manufacturers and on-demand delivery service providers because of fierce domestic competition, China’s beauty products makers have also explored overseas markets to drive growth.\nYoung cosmetics brands like Colorkey, Kans and Carslan have mainly used social media marketing to carve a niche in Southeast Asian countries.\nChinese make-up brand Florasis, which gained popularity on Chinese social media in 2019, opened in January its first international boutique in Tokyo, following its initial success selling through e-commerce platforms.\n