- Hong Kong-listed beauty brand posts over 30% growth in sales and profit
- Shift beyond makeup into skincare and fragrance signals maturation of china’s premium domestic beauty market
Maogeping, a Hangzhou-based Chinese-style cosmetics maker. reported record earnings for 2025, with revenue surpassing 5 billion yuan ($723 million) for the first time following its Hong Kong listing.
This earnings release came as China’s homegrown beauty brands push deeper into premium categories and reduce reliance on traffic-driven sales growth.
The company said annual revenue rose 30% year on year to 5.05 billion yuan, while net profit climbed 36.8% to 1.205 billion yuan, marking another year of rapid expansion after its December 2024 debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Maogeping became the first major domestic color cosmetics brand to list on the Hong Kong bourse.
Growth was increasingly diversified across product lines rather than driven solely by makeup, long the company’s core business.
Color cosmetics generated 2.996 billion yuan in revenue, up 30%, while skincare sales grew slightly faster at 31.1% to 1.873 billion yuan, lifting skincare’s contribution to more than one-third of total revenue.
A flagship premium product — the “luxury caviar mask” — exceeded 1 billion yuan in annual retail sales, underscoring the effectiveness of the company’s big-product strategy in high-end skincare.
A fragrance line launched in May added nearly 34 million yuan within months of release.
Online channels became the primary growth engine, with digital sales rising 40% to 2.477 billion yuan and overtaking offline retail for the first time.
The company also began testing overseas expansion, opening its first directly operated counter at Harbour City in Hong Kong in October.
Premiumization
Founded in 2000 by the Yue Opera performer-turned-makeup artist Mao Geping, the brand built its reputation through a hybrid model combining professional makeup artistry training with consumer branding — a strategy that helped differentiate it from mass-market domestic competitors.
The latest results suggest the company is evolving from a single-category cosmetics label into a full-spectrum beauty house spanning makeup, skincare and fragrance.
The shift comes as China’s domestic beauty sector enters a new phase of premiumization. Local brands increased their share of the overall cosmetics market to 57.37% in 2025, up from 55.2% a year earlier, reflecting continued “domestic substitution” in higher-end segments once dominated by international players.
Despite rising customer acquisition costs across the industry, Maogeping reduced its sales expense ratio to 48.3% from 49.0%, indicating improving brand efficiency.
Gross margin remained elevated at 84.2%, suggesting stronger returns on marketing investment as growth becomes increasingly driven by brand equity rather than platform traffic.
The company’s strategy — blending cultural collaborations, proprietary content and brand storytelling — has effectively turned brand identity itself into a distribution channel, allowing it to sustain rapid expansion while gradually improving operating leverage in an increasingly crowded premium beauty market.
