Seunghwan Kim, global CEO of Korean beauty conglomerate Amorepacific, is clearly playing the K-beauty long game.
Over a recent dinner in midtown Manhattan, joined by Amorepacific North America CEO Giovanni Valentini and VP of Corporate Communications Seonjoo Lee, Kim spoke candidly to BeautyMatter. When asked what he thought of the estimated 20,000+ indie K-beauty brands taking his market share, Kim said he recognizes these indie brands are agile, “only needing three months” to bring a product to market. But he also sees that these thousands of brands churned out by ODMs (original design manufacturers) may be cannibalizing each other through their uniformity and distributors' rogue discounting. “They [the indie brands] are obviously doing quite well, but they are sometimes only a few months old, and the discounting affects their bottom line and reputation with retailers and consumers.”
Kim also knows Amorepacific can learn from these indie brands: how they leverage data to be strategic in product releases and to create market strategies that resonate with digitally native Gen Z and Alpha. “These indie brands are nimble because they don’t need to invest in marketing or R&D,” Kim said, and by quickly translating trend data into product launches, these indie brands often beat Amorepacific to the shelves.
But Amorepacific is not interested in winning a race to the shelves—they don’t need to be.
Backed by more than 10,000 employees globally, Amorepacific is one of the largest Asian beauty and cosmetics manufacturers. With more than 30 brands under its umbrella—including Sephora top-seller Laneige, prestige brand Sulwhasoo, dermacosmetic brand Aestura, and subsidiary COSRX—the more than 80-year-old conglomerate is focused more on its 10-year strategy than going head-to-head with indie brands.
In fact, particularly in the North American market, Amorepacific doesn’t always consider indie K-beauty brands its biggest competitors. “Look at Laneige’s performance in Sephora,” Valentini told BeautyMatter. “Our biggest competitors are [US brands] Summer Fridays and rhode.” He also pointed out that many North American consumers don’t even know that Laneige is a K-beauty brand. “The name sounds French to them,” Valentini said.
Though Valentini admits there are limitations to selling derma brands like Aestura and COSRX when it comes to educating the Sephora beauty advisors, “we are addressing this issue by heavily investing in education and ensuring we arm the beauty advisors with useful nuggets of scientific information that they can easily convey to the shoppers.”
It’s hard not to picture Amorepacific’s strategy as a poker tournament: Kim confidently folding every hand, as he watches his competitors play loose, aggressively knocking each other out. He knows that if he plays tight, waiting to join a hand until he gets dealt pocket aces, his smaller pool of competitors won’t see him coming.
But Amorepacific is not idly waiting for its pocket aces. While indie K-beauty brands duke it out for consumer attention, Amorepacific is busy leveraging its more than 400 researchers and scientists in R&I (Research & Innovation) to develop the company’s next breakthroughs and technologies.
The conglomerate also controls much of its supply chain by growing its own active ingredients. Amorepacific partners with ginseng farms across Korea and operates an organic green tea farm in Jeju totaling approximately 1 million pyeong (approximately 3.3 million square meters or approximately 817 acres) of land.
After all, Amorepacific’s history illustrates that it knows how to come back from a “bad beat” (a poker term for when a player has a statistically better starting hand but still loses). In 2017, the company took a monumental hit when China retaliated against South Korea for the deployment of the US’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system by boycotting Korean products and banning Chinese tourist groups from visiting the country. Before the 2017 shake-up, South Korea exported approximately 50% of its products to China and invested heavily in marketing and physical stores.
In 2017, Amorepacific’s sales were down 9.2% YoY, totaling KRW 5.1 trillion ($3.42 billion). The company immediately pivoted its distribution efforts to North American and European markets, but didn’t see the fruits of its labor until 2018, when it recorded an increase of 3.4% YoY to KRW 6.3 trillion ($2 billion), with its international sales surpassing KRW 2 trillion ($1.34 billion) for the first time since its foundation.
Most recently, Amorepacific reported that its 2025 revenue was up by 8.5% YoY to KRW 4.6 trillion ($3 billion). And announced in late April of this year that its Q1 2026 revenue is up 5% YoY with KRW 1.227 trillion ($851 million), largely credited to Amorepacific’s top-performing derma line, Aestura’s triple-digit YoY growth in North America, its expansion into 17 European countries, and its Amazon performance, as well as COSRX returning to revenue growth in 2025 after a year of restructuring its distribution network.
After Kim spoke about the success of the derma brand COSRX, BeautyMatter asked if he is eyeing any potential targets for the next COSRX. He made it clear that the company is looking to evolve its categories and explore new ways to expand, such as within K-Clinic. “We are looking at injectables and other services that consumers get in-clinic,” he said.
AI is not just a priority for Amorepacific but a pillar of the business’s growth strategy. Kim explained that the company plans to incorporate a data-driven decision-making system. Lee added that the new technology “makes us more efficient internally” and that the company employs teams to rewrite and polish its data specifically for AI chatbots.
But Lim recognizes the limitations of technology. “It’s easy to get excited watching Chinese robots jumping around on YouTube, but when we seriously considered robotics, we came to the conclusion that these robots cannot be precise enough [in creating beauty products] to bring value to our production lines.”
While thousands of indie K-beauty brands compete for shelf space and consumers’ attention, Amorepacific is expanding its reach in key markets. In early May, the company announced it had exclusively launched Mamonde, its Gen Z/Alpha-targeted brand, on Amazon Premium.
And according to Valentini, Amorepacific is currently soft-launching haircare products on Amazon in the US, with plans to bring its entire haircare category to North America in the next 12 months.
Amorepacific’s long game is paying off, and judging by its trajectory, the company will have no problem going “all in” against its competitors over the next few years.