The Proya Global Expansion Playbook: Why China's Largest Beauty Group Is Buying, Not Building, Its Way Abroad
- May 12
- 8 min read
Key Takeaways
Proya, China's largest pure-play beauty company at RMB 10.597 billion (about US$1.5 billion) 2025 revenue, is choosing acquisitions and minority investments over direct international stores in its global push.
Three strategic pillars: the 2021 acquisition of Japan's Off & Relax (H1 2025 revenue up 103 percent year-on-year), the September 2025 exclusive Series B investment in Flower Knows, and a 2024 Paris R&D center positioned for technical credibility rather than sales.
Overseas revenue is still only 1.3 percent of total but up 69 percent year-on-year; a Hong Kong IPO is planned to fund the next wave of M&A in baby care, fragrance, men's skincare and prestige beauty.
The playbook mirrors the L'Oréal and Estée Lauder Companies M&A model of acquiring regional winners, applied in reverse from China outward.
For Western beauty independents looking to sell, the most credible buyer may now be calling from Hangzhou.
While Florasis was opening flagship counters in Tokyo and Flower Knows was telling the world about its fairy-tale aesthetic, the largest pure-play beauty company in China was doing something quieter: writing checks. In September 2025, Proya completed an exclusive Series B investment in Flower Knows. A few weeks later, the company announced plans for a Hong Kong IPO with a stated ambition to become a global top-ten cosmetics group within a decade. The contrast is striking. Most Chinese beauty stories now sound the same, with a flagship store, a TikTok push and a heritage narrative. Proya is choosing to be the buyer, not the brand. That decision deserves a closer look, because it may turn out to be the most durable global beauty strategy any Chinese company has tried.
Why Is China's Largest Beauty Group Looking Abroad Now?
For most of the last decade, Proya was the proof point that a homegrown Chinese skincare brand could lead the domestic market without leaning on heritage storytelling, celebrity founders or imported acquisitions. By 2024, it had crossed the symbolic 10 billion yuan revenue mark, becoming the first Chinese beauty pure-play to do so. Then growth flattened. The company reported full-year 2025 revenue of RMB 10.597 billion (about US$1.5 billion), down 1.68 percent year-on-year, with net profit of RMB 1.49 billion, off 3.5 percent. The flagship Proya brand fell harder, dropping 10.39 percent to RMB 7.689 billion. For a company that built itself on the back of a single hero brand and a 95 percent online channel, the math is uncomfortable: the engine has slowed.
The other numbers add to the pressure. Proya spent roughly RMB 11.9 billion on advertising over three years while keeping R&D investment under RMB 600 million, producing a 73 percent gross margin propped up by celebrity endorsements and traffic buys. That model worked beautifully when domestic e-commerce traffic was abundant and growing. It looks more fragile now that Tmall and Douyin growth has compressed and competitors like Mao Geping and L'Oréal's Lancôme are taking premium share. When the home market stops paying for marketing-heavy growth, the only honest options left are geographic and portfolio expansion. Proya appears to have picked both, and is choosing to fund them with patient capital deployed abroad rather than another round of brand investment at home.
What Are the Three Pillars of the Proya Global Expansion Playbook?
Pillar 1: Buy the label, scale it at home (Off & Relax)
In 2021, Proya acquired Off & Relax, a Japanese hair and scalp care brand founded just one year earlier. But this is best read not as "Chinese parent grows a Japanese brand in Japan" but as "Chinese parent acquires a Japanese-positioned brand and scales it inside China." Since the deal, Off & Relax has barely operated in Japan. Its real battleground has been China, where it sells primarily through Tmall, Douyin, and JD.com. In 2024 Double 11, the Douyin flagship grew over 450% year-on-year and Tmall grew 150% on Day 1. The brand ambassador is Chinese actor Lin Yi. Off & Relax revenue still jumped 103% year-on-year in the first half of 2025 to RMB 279 million, driven by these China platforms. The Japanese provenance, Bijinyu hot-spring positioning, and wabi-sabi visual language are storytelling layers aimed at Chinese consumers, not Japanese ones.
The real significance is therefore different from how it usually gets described. Proya has not proven it can manage foreign brands inside foreign markets. It has proven it can buy a category entry point dressed in foreign aesthetic codes and scale it through its dominant China e-commerce muscle. That is a distinctly Chinese form of M&A: use acquisition to access a category and a differentiated narrative, then let the domestic distribution machine do the work. The reusable capability is brand operations and platform marketing inside China, not cross-cultural brand management abroad. That is still valuable. It is just not the same thing as international operations.
Pillar 2: Invest into capabilities the parent lacks (Flower Knows, Flortte)
Proya is not a Gen Z color cosmetics company. The flagship brand sits squarely in mass-prestige skincare. Yet the gaps in its portfolio, younger demographics, color cosmetics, online-native storytelling, are exactly where Chinese beauty's next growth wave is happening. Rather than build new brands from scratch and dilute management focus, Proya has used minority investments to access those capabilities. In September 2025, it became the sole strategic investor in Flower Knows' Series B, a Gen Z favorite already exporting through Sephora and Amazon. Earlier in the year, Proya took a similar exclusive position in Flortte, a fast-growing domestic color cosmetics challenger. The intent is straightforward. Buy the lesson, not just the brand. Both targets carry the kind of cultural and category know-how that takes a decade to build organically and only one minority round to access.
Pillar 3: Build cross-border infrastructure before stores (Paris R&D)
In 2024, Proya opened a European Innovation Center in Paris. Notably, the company stated explicitly that the Paris office is not about commercializing products in Europe. It is about strengthening the innovation platform and acquiring relationships with European formulation talent. That is an unusual order of operations for a Chinese brand. Most start with a pop-up store on Boulevard Haussmann or a Sephora listing, then try to retrofit local R&D later. Proya is doing the reverse, building a credible technical base in the home of fine fragrance and luxury beauty before it tries to sell anything there.
Combined, the three pillars amount to one of the most disciplined sequencing strategies any Chinese consumer company has executed abroad. Acquisition gives operating proof. Minority investment gives category access. Cross-border R&D gives credibility. None of the three has produced meaningful international revenue yet, with overseas sales still only 1.3 percent of total revenue in 2024, though up 69 percent year-on-year. But each is the kind of asset that compounds over time, especially if Proya can secure new growth capital through its planned Hong Kong listing.
Why Does Buying Beat Building This Time?
The default narrative around Chinese beauty going global has been about brands. Florasis built an entire identity around East-Asian aesthetics and then opened a Tokyo flagship to prove it could travel. Flower Knows leaned on its fairy-tale visual world and pushed direct through Sephora. Into You relied on category innovation in lip mud. These are brand stories. Proya is telling a corporate story instead, and the difference matters strategically.
Building a single Chinese brand abroad means exporting a coherent cultural narrative, fighting for shelf space against entrenched local incumbents, and educating new consumers about a name they have never heard. The cost-of-customer-acquisition curve is brutal in markets where beauty consumers are loyal to known houses. Acquiring or investing in already-loved brands sidesteps that curve entirely. It is the playbook L'Oréal has used to dominate global beauty, snapping up Maybelline, Kiehl's, Urban Decay and CeraVe at successive moments when each was a rising regional winner. It is the playbook Estée Lauder used to build a US$15 billion empire on top of acquired Aveda, La Mer, MAC, Smashbox and Too Faced. Proya is, in effect, applying the late-twentieth-century Western beauty M&A playbook from the other direction.
There is a second strategic logic worth naming. Chinese capital is currently abundant; Western beauty assets are repricing. Independent beauty valuations corrected sharply through 2024 and 2025 as venture-funded DTC brands missed their growth plans, leaving a long tail of second-tier brands looking for strategic homes. For a Chinese acquirer with patient capital and a credible Paris technical base, this is the most attractive window for cross-border M&A in two decades. Proya appears to be positioning to take advantage of it.
What Could Go Wrong With the Proya Strategy?
The risks are real and worth being explicit about. First, Proya has so far proven it can scale acquired brand assets through its China distribution machine. Managing a multi-brand international portfolio is an entirely different operational challenge, and beauty M&A is littered with examples of acquirers who could not preserve the culture of what they bought. P&G's mishandling of Wella, Coty's troubled integration of P&G's prestige brands and even L'Oréal's slow journey with The Body Shop all show how easily good acquisitions become slow-growth assets.
Second, the parent brand is weakening. With Proya brand revenue down 10.39 percent in 2025, the company is increasingly dependent on its smaller subsidiary brands and acquired assets, but those still contribute less than 20 percent of total revenue. If Off & Relax's 100-percent growth normalizes before new acquisitions arrive, the consolidated story will look weaker, not stronger, in fiscal 2026. Third, the Hong Kong IPO is itself contingent on a sentiment window that has been narrow for Chinese consumer listings. A delayed or down-priced listing would constrain the very capital base needed to execute the strategy.
Finally, there is a quieter risk. Quality international beauty assets do not sell themselves to Chinese acquirers easily. French and US asset owners often prefer European or American suitors for cultural and political reasons, and competition for the few good assets is intense. LVMH, L'Oréal, Estée Lauder, Puig and Coty are all permanent buyers in this market. Proya will need to find acquisitions that other strategics have either passed on or cannot stomach, often meaning smaller and earlier brands. That, in turn, requires the operational chops to grow brands rather than just buy them.
What Should Beauty Operators Watch in 2026?
Three signals will tell us whether the playbook is working. The first is the Hong Kong listing itself. A successful raise at a credible valuation gives Proya the war chest it needs and signals that international investors believe the M&A thesis. The second is the next acquisition. Executives have specifically pointed to baby care, fragrance, men's skincare and prestige beauty as gap categories. Whether the next deal is a transformative purchase in one of those categories or another minority stake will tell us if Proya is ready to graduate from observer to operator. The third is what happens to the flagship brand. If domestic Proya brand growth stays negative, the case for international portfolio acceleration becomes more urgent. If it returns to growth, the M&A clock may slow.
For international beauty competitors, the more interesting takeaway is what Proya's strategy implies about the next phase of Chinese beauty's global ambition. The first wave was about visibility, with brands traveling abroad to plant flags. The second wave is starting to look like consolidation. Chinese beauty groups, with profit pools larger than most Western independents, are about to become serious cross-border buyers. The question for Western brand owners and investors is no longer whether Chinese beauty travels. It is whether the next time you sell, the most credible buyer will be calling from Hangzhou.
Double V is a cross-border operating partner and intelligence house for emerging consumer brands, based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. We help brands connect China and the world through three businesses: Brand Operation (marketing and distribution for brands on retainer), Brand Incubation (sister company Glam Infinite and our own-built brands), and Industry Intelligence (cross-border research and reports). Talk to our team.
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