China’s top beauty conglomerate is ready for its world takeover.
After becoming the first Chinese beauty company to surpass 10 billion RMB ($1.4 billion) in annual sales last year, and with an estimated market cap of around $4.8 billion, the 20-year old Hangzhou-based Proya Cosmetics has been on an international M&A drive with an explicit goal to become one of the world’s largest beauty companies. In its most recent earnings report in August, it announced its board approval to list its shares in Hong Kong as secondary to Shanghai in order to support its international expansion efforts.
With a portfolio that includes its namesake skincare line Proya, rising star makeup label Timage and seven other brands in hair, skincare and cosmetics, chief executive Hou Juncheng has expressed the company’s plan to purchase EU and US labels in the hopes of reaching an annual revenue of at least 50 billion yuan ($7 billion) within the decade. (Proya did not respond to media inquiries by Business of Beauty.)
“It’s probably one of the first [cases] where a Chinese conglomerate went from thinking, ‘Okay, I’m just happy being one of the biggest in China,’ to saying, ‘Well, we actually now want to become a global conglomerate,’” said Ariel Ohana, managing partner of investment bank Ohana & Co., which has closed multiple M&A deals with Japanese, Korean and Chinese companies.
With an oversupply of beauty brands in the US and EU seeking an exit to a dwindling pool of local buyers, Proya is one of a handful of rising Asian beauty giants presenting new opportunities for acquisitions.
The skincare line often bests Lancôme, L’Oréal Paris and Estée Lauder in e-tailers’ best-seller rankings and has maintained growth even as competitors face China sales declines. Proya hasn’t been immune from the slowdown at home: According to their most recent earnings, the company’s 7.2 percent revenue growth in the first half of the year missed expectations, and is a steep decline from the 21 percent growth experienced in 2024.
To keep up momentum, the company is looking west. To date, Chinese brands have typically looked to foreign labels they could make big in China. But the conglomerate will need to find the right match to deliver the expansion into the foreign markets it’saiming for.
How Proya Wins At Home
Since launching its hero skincare brand Proya in 2003, Proya Cosmetics has thrived in the rapidly growing China market alongside the e-commerce boom and arrival of top global beauty brands.
The success of the Proya brand demonstrates the larger conglomerate’s operational advantages at home. The skincare label dominates rankings on the top e-commerce platforms including Tmall, Douyin and JD.com. Local production and fast turnaround has helped them tap quickly into viral product trends on social platforms like Douyin, ByteDance’s TikTok counterpart in China.
“Their response rate is really quick. They’re really leveraging these trends, being in the culture of it all,” said Iris Chan, VP of growth and marketing at global advertising firm Maison BETC, which has Shanghai offices. With an extensive digital marketing and livestreaming presence, along with local cultural knowledge, Proya has thrived across social platforms and upped the calibre of its celebrity ambassadors to A-list names like Song Jia, Jackson Yee and Liu Yifei.
“They’ve reached the level to be able to contract the same ambassadors as YSL,” said Dao Nguyen, the founder of marketing firm Essenzia.
Proya has succeeded where international brands have struggled in China. Consumer sentiment has been unusually fragile in recent years due to a property crisis and slumping stock market. ELC’s Asia-Pacific sales decreased by 7 percent in its 2025 fiscal year ending in August, while L’Oréal Group’s North Asia sales declined by 1 percent in its first half of 2025.
With economic pressures, a beauty market once heavily-focussed on expensive foreign brands is moving toward a downgrade — “either fewer pieces in your routine, or pricing down to the more basic version,” said Chan. Proya has found the sweet spot for pricing as a premium skincare label significantly cheaper than these foreign counterparts, which have been aggressively discounting to keep up.
The skincare brand’s advantage lies in its smart mid-market positioning. “It avoids direct battles with international luxury brands while also standing apart from low-cost domestic players,” said Olivia Plotnick, the founder of Shanghai-based social media marketing firm Wai Social.
How Proya Could Win the World
Proya’s domestic growth has slowed in recent years, culminating in late August, when US financial firm Jefferies downgraded its stock rating from “buy” to “hold,” reducing its price target due to “lacklustre” performance. As Proya’s profile shifts from a high-growth upstart to a mature conglomerate, it’s been aggressively looking abroad, establishing its European Innovation Centre for R&D in Paris in October 2024.
“So far, Proya has not yet pushed hard on M&A,” said CEO Hou in a May 2025 shareholders’ meeting. “We want to acquire some European brands with history and technology through our French branch to fill current gaps in categories such as children’s products, fragrances and men’s products, and then introduce them into China,”
In addition to product category gaps, acquisition of international brands can help the company tap into existing overseas channels, supply chains and local expertise in R&D and brand-building that “reduce the risks of expanding abroad,” said Plotnick.
With so many successful beauty brands on the market and a challenging M&A environment dominated by giants like E.l.f. Beauty and the L’Oréal Groupe, there is significant opportunity for Proya to expand its portfolio. The US and European market is not in a spending free-for-all, and even the most active buyers have been sticking to tried-and-true strategies. L’Oréal’s 2025 acquisitions have doubled down on themes in its existing portfolio, including colour-focused hair care with Color Wow and dermatological skincare with Medik8.
Hou’s emphasis on brands with “history” might bode especially well for established labels with a long track record rather than the plethora of buzzy newcomers on the market. That would track with Chinese conglomerates’ existing focus so far with recent acquisitions: In 2024, Changsha-based S’Young Group acquired 28-year-old luxury skincare label Révive Skincare from Tengram Capital Partners, which had bought the brand from Shiseido. Yatsen, the parent of Chinese makeup label Perfect Diary, acquired 40-year-old UK skincare brand Eve Lom in 2021.
Proya can look at the results of recent acquisitions by other East Asian companies to determine how to achieve the best ROI, as some have struggled as of late. US masstige cosmetics brand Tarte has long been a growth driver for the Japanese conglomerate Kosé, which acquired the company in 2014, although the brand has faced a more difficult market in 2025, according to company earnings. Shiseido has been struggling with skincare brand Drunk Elephant, which it acquired in 2019, and previously sold off Buxom, Bareminerals and Laura Mercier in 2021.
The challenge of making sure a new acquisition keeps the magic that made it successful is not exclusive to cross-border acquisitions. Unilever shuttered Ren Skincare this year, while L’Oréal sold Sanoflore and closed Decléor in 2023. But integration in terms of brand positioning, culture, supply chains and complex regulations are inherently trickier.
That means for Asian conglomerates in particular, it’s especially important to keep existing management and expertise in place, said Ohana. If the founder is still at the brand, it’s considered crucial they stay on.
“What our Asian clients tell us is there’s a sensitivity to making sure management can stay afterwards. It’s just higher than with other buyers,” said Ohana. Proya, in particular, is likely to prioritise this given its goal of global expansion, rather than Chinese conglomerates’ previous goal of making acquisitions to launch global brands in the China market.
After Ohana’s firm represented Revive on the S’Young acquisition, he declined to share which brand or brands he’s advising to enter talks with Proya. But he made it clear that the industry can expect Proya to acquire a “relevant” international brand.
Chinese conglomerates “were thought of recently as ‘tier-three’ buyers for really small companies that were not necessarily the top brands you would think of,” said Ohana. “They’re slowly moving up.”
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