Opens in new window2025 marks 80 years of business for South Korean company Amorepacific. But the conglomerate’s aims to go global only began “in earnest” in 2000, says chief executive Sean Kim. As a result, it has faced new challenges that international expansion often brings.
Last year was the first year that Amorepacific’s North American business outpaced its China business (a “meaningful” milestone, as Kim describes it). In its first-quarter 2025 earnings announced in April, overall revenue increased 17.1 percent to $1.1 trillion won ($789 billion), buoyed by strong growth in Western markets and other parts of Asia, including Japan.
Amorepacific, owner of 31 brands, including its namesake line, Sulwhasoo and Iope, helped bring the K-beauty conversation global. Incubated lines like Laneige have captivated Millennials and Gen-Zers thanks to products such as overnight lip masks, while the acquisition of Cosrx popularised ingredients such as “snail mucin” into Western beauty markets. Newer labels that were previously exclusive to Korea like Aestura have recently landed in Sephora US.
“We look at the markets, we look at the customers, and then each brand, from their perspective, to identify any unmet needs that there are,” says Kim.
The Business of Beauty: What values have cemented Amorepacific versus other companies?
Sean Kim: We believe that the customer makes the ultimate selection. [That] has led us to the growth that we have established today, and we’ve always placed great value on innovation. We’ve always had this pioneering spirit where we’ve developed new things that didn’t exist before. For example, liquid foundation is a great product but is very difficult to carry around, so we developed the cushion foundation, which enables the liquid foundation to be in a sponge compact form. We’ve also pioneered the concept of ‘sleeping’ beauty. Usually, people just think of skincare as something that you do during the day, but we’ve developed products that mean skincare can take place while you’re sleeping. We applied that concept to a face product and a lip product, which has led to the great popularity of the Laneige brand in the United States. In the next five years, we’re really going to focus on accelerating our growth in North America, Europe and Japan, which are among the world’s top five beauty markets.
The Business of Beauty: What white space do you think your brands are filling?
SK: We have a very holistic portfolio from luxury brands like Sulwhasoo and Tata Harper to masstige like Cosrx, which we recently acquired. The regional subsidiaries look at the market from more of a channel perspective, and combining these perspectives lets us draw conclusions about the strengths of our brands [and] the areas they can’t cover. Initially, we would address white spaces by developing new products and lines from our existing brands. What we cannot cover with our existing brands, we engage [through] M&A, just as we have done in the past few years. For example, derma or clinical brands have seen a rise in demand globally. We thought of how our brands would be able to address this: we have Iope, which could cover derma at the high end, so we extended the products and line so that it’s able to. It’s not so much that we’ve changed the brand to meet that need, but we’ve expanded the brand itself. We also needed a derma brand that would be able to address the largest derma market in the world, which is the US. We found a masstige indie brand that was doing very well in the US, called Cosrx. Last year we [became] the majority shareholder.
The Business of Beauty: You mentioned that North America had outpaced China for the first time last year in terms of sales, and that you’ve moved a lot of your brands from the East to the West. How are you approaching that?
SK: We’ve traditionally had a phased approach in how we are launching brands, so we’d launch one brand, and then once it becomes successful, then we launch the next brand. We’ve always set up an overseas subsidiary to do business in that specific region, but recently, we found that the way that some indie brands do business is very different from our approach. They launch the same product simultaneously in multiple markets, with multiple retailers and distributors at the same time, and then they engage with customers on TikTok, and do seeding with influencers on Instagram. [With] Cosrx, we’ve been able to engage in a lot of communication with them since that acquisition, and we’ve been able to learn a lot from the way that they work. In key markets like the US, Europe and Japan, we [still] would need more of a phased approach. For markets like the Middle East, or Latin America, or Africa, we can learn from the indie brands, and collaborate with big distributors or retailers without having to set up our own subsidiary.
We found that the way that some indie brands do business is very different from our approach.
The Business of Beauty: The US is facing a great deal of uncertainty. What other pockets of regional growth are you interested in?
SK: Our most important market is North America. By far, it’s the largest market, but our success in North America also has a great influence in other English-speaking countries. It has a spill-over effect to other countries like the UK and Australia, and even though we don’t engage in a lot of marketing in those regions, the demand is very high. Once we enter those markets, the demand becomes very explosive. In the mid term, Japan [is] a very important focus for us. They also have similar consumption needs [to Korea]. In the [longer] term, we also have India [in mind]; the market is now just opening up to premium beauty, and then there’s also the Middle East, which sits between many different continents. There’s also quite a large segment of wealthy customers [there]. Then after that, the next wave would be [markets] like Mexico, Latin America, Africa and Central America.
Tariffs in the US impact Korea as a whole. We’re closely monitoring the situation, and we’re also preparing ourselves by simulating various scenarios. But it doesn’t just affect us, it also affects our competitors globally as well. Even US brands source many of their products from Korea and China, so it affects them, too. It could create a little bit of pressure because of increasing COGS, but looking at it from the competitive landscape, since almost all of the players are impacted, we feel that it’s a little bit of less pressure on us.
The Business of Beauty: The channel and marketing ecosystem is very different in different markets. What has been your approach in deciphering that?
SK: Ten years ago, most of our sales [were] through traditional channels, like department stores. Sephora was there, but it was quite small at that time. But we’ve seen major shifts in the channel landscape, especially in the US. Sephora is very much the leading channel in premium skincare, and it has really reshaped the beauty business — not only does [it] sell products, but it’s also a great partner in terms of brand building. For a company like us, which didn’t really have a very strong base in the US, partnering with Sephora also was one of the key drivers behind the success of our business in the US. In the last three to four years, we’ve been working very closely with Amazon. Social media plays an important role here as well, as brands or products that gain awareness and popularity on TikTok then gain traffic on Amazon. We also have other channels: for the luxury brand Sulwhasoo we need[ed] a premium channel that enables customer experience and service, so … we have a footprint in Nordstrom. Also, from March of this year, we’ve opened stores in Macy’s, so we have two Macy’s stores in California and one in New York.We’re also looking into expanding through Ulta Beauty as well. We’re also looking into offline mass channels, like Target and Walmart more into the mid term.
The Business of Beauty: How do you feel about the competitive environment today and what do you think is innovative for the customer?
SK: If we look at just Korea alone, 10 years ago, the number of registered cosmetics companies was maybe 1,000, but last year that figure jumped to 30,000. The intensity of the competition is now twentyfold what it was in the past. But many of the K-indie brands are sourced from a small number of ODM [original design manufacturer] companies, so sometimes you end up with products that are very similar. The beauty industry in Korea itself has been able to grow because of these dynamics, but many companies just disappear off the radar. But we believe this new ecosystem has been able to drive innovation in Korea.
The Business of Beauty: What do you think customers value today?
SK: If you look at the popular Korean indie brands, efficacy is important, but if you look at the average price point that sells well on Olive Young and Amazon, it’s usually around between $20 to $25. Customers in that segment really seek products with new concepts. Product quality is a given, but they want [to have] easy access. Setting the right price point for these types of products is very important. Differentiation is also important. If you go a little bit higher in the price tier, price is important, but there also you have higher expectations about efficacy, performance and claims. If you go even higher to the luxury segment, there are also expectations about brand values: branding, packaging and the experience. So, although we’re all in the same company, by brand, we have separate organisations as we seek to meet our customers.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
This article first appeared in The State of Fashion: Beauty Volume 2, an in-depth report on the global beauty industry, co-published by BoF and McKinsey & Company.
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