Chairman Suh Kyung-bae of AmorePacific delivers his congratulatory address during a ceremony marking the cosmetic giant’s 70th anniversary on Sept. 3 held at the company’s auditorium in Seoul.(Photo:AmorePacific)

Chairman Suh Kyung-bae of AmorePacific said the cosmetics giant has set up a plan to expand its market beyond China to Central and South America to truly be a global century-old cosmetics company. The media conference took place in celebration of the cosmetics giant’s 70th anniversary on Sept. 5 at a cosmetics company’s Beauty Shop in Osan, Gyeonggi Province.

Chairman Suh said the company will try to open up Dubai in 2016 and other countries in the Middle East, and move to Central and South America, including Brazil and Mexico, to expand its markets in those regions.

Suh said the company’s been eyeing Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran in the Middle East, and Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina and Chile in Central and South America. In the past seven decades, the company has been leading the cosmetics culture in Korea. In the next seven decades, the company will explore overseas cosmetics market to become a leading global cosmetics giant, the chairman said.

AmorePacfic has been expanding its overseas sales year after year recently, with overseas sales rising 52.8 percent year-on-year. In the first half of this year, the company recorded 2.399 trillion won in total sales, up 26.4 percent year-on-year. 

The chairman plans to steer the company to post 12 trillion won in annual sales by 2020, with 50 percent of that from overseas markets.

He feels the company must take care of three major areas — with the first being the development of cosmetics products with Asian philosophies; expanding overseas markets; and expanding the number of sales outlets overseas. For example, the company will try to market Innisfree with Jeju Island scenery and Sulwhasoo with Oriental medicine overseas.

The company will introduce its new cosmetics products, the Iope and Hera, to add to its five best selling brands; Sulwhasoo, Laneige, Mamond, Innisfree and Etude.

The five “champion brands” have led the company’s cosmetics sales amid the Hallyu wave sweeping the world.

Chairman Suh thinks the cosmetics market in China has a lot of room for expansion, as only 150 million women in China use cosmetics now, but that’s projected to increase to as much as 500 million in the near future. The company will introduce new cosmetics brands for young women in China as well as young women in Vietnam and Malaysia under a step-by-step strategy. The company will try to develop new cosmetics brands that will go with Asian women’s skin. The company introduced a new cream for the skin of Chinese women. It also introduced a cream to protect the eyelids of women living in the inland regions of China from the dry weather in those regions.

AmorePacific will display its products at duty free shops and sell them online shopping in key markets such as the U.S., China and Europe.

Chairman Suh said he will see that the company comes up with new cosmetics brands that surprise customers, just like the “sponge cushion” brand, which many had speculated would fail.

Chairman Suh Kyung-bae, in the meantime, ordered special gift sets for all of his workers both at home and overseas — totaling around 10,000 people — on the occasion of the cosmetics giant’s 70th anniversary on Sept. 5.

The gift sets included Sulwhasoo, which has become one of the five global champion brands.