Praveen Paramasivam, Reuters
August 21, 2025

Summary

India's luxury beauty market to quintuple by 2035
Domestic brands account for less than a tenth of sales
Global brands modify offerings for India

India’s luxury beauty market is expected to quintuple to $4 billion by 2035 from $800 million in 2023, driven by its young, affluent, social-media savvy shoppers with rising disposable incomes, consulting firm Kearney and luxury beauty distributor LUXASIA said in a report.

Luxury beauty makes up just 4% of the $21-billion beauty and personal care market, compared with 8% to 24% across top Southeast Asian countries and 25% to 48% in developed markets including China and the United States.

That means there is plenty of room for growth.

“India is the last bastion of growth for premium beauty,” said Sameer Jindal, managing director for investment bank Houlihan Lokey’s corporate finance business in India.

“The Indian consumer is willing to experiment and try out new things.”

U.S. beauty giant Estee Lauder home to the brands Clinique and MAC, expects a strong runway for expansion and long-term growth in India, even as it grapples with soft sales in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.

“India today, within the Estee Lauder network, is looked at as one of the priority emerging markets,” said country general manager Rohan Vaziralli, highlighting plans to initially target 60 million women in the nation of more than 1.4 billion.

Homemaker R. Priyanka, based in the southern city of Chennai, said she was thrilled to have better access to Estee Lauder’s Jo Malone London fragrance in India, as a benefit of the companies’ efforts.

“It is easier than asking someone (abroad) to get it for you every time,” she added.

While global beauty brands might have to modify some of their products for India, which bakes in sultry temperatures in summer and oppressive humidity at other times, they face little competition from homegrown brands.

Kearney and LUXASIA identified only Forest Essentials and Kama Ayurveda as their major rivals, underscoring how domestic brands make up less than a tenth of luxury beauty sales.

In the more established markets of China, Japan and South Korea by comparison, domestic brands account for a 40% share.

“There is, of course, a premium perception gap between globally established brands and Indian brands,” said Devangshu Dutta, founder of retail consultancy Third Eyesight.

Global beauty giants’ huge marketing budgets also give them an edge over domestic brands, other industry watchers said.

WOOING INDIAN SHOPPERS

Estee Lauder is studying online sales patterns to identify the smaller cities to target, such as Siliguri in West Bengal state, partnering with designers such as Sabyasachi Mukherjee, and launching products such as kohl, an eyeliner Indians favour.

It has also invested in Forest Essentials, a brand with herbal ingredients, and in a programme offering funding to domestic beauty start-ups.

This year France’s L’Oreal said it was investing more in India and tapping into the “elevated beauty desires” of the nation’s young, digitally savvy, empowered women shoppers to drive growth. It declined further comment.

South Korea’s Amorepacific, known for brands such as Innisfree and Etude, is trying to leverage the Korean beauty craze in India with products geared to the market.

These include items for the popular “cleanser, serum, moisturiser, and sunscreen” beauty regimen, the country head, Paul Lee, said.

Japan’s Shiseido, with a history of more than 150 years, brought its NARS brand to Indian beauty retailer Nykaa’s website this year, and plans to step up growth of its brands in the subcontinent.

Global brands are very excited about India, where consumers are splurging more to stay on top of trends such as “cherry makeup”, Nykaa co-founder Adwaita Nayar said, referring to a look featuring flushed cheeks, glossy lips, and soft pink eyes.

Amazon, which has also been seeing a big boom in beauty demand in India, aims to identify emerging global trends and bring in more brands, said Siddharth Bhagat, director of beauty and fashion at the e-commerce company in India.

Retailer Shoppers Stop, which also pioneers foreign labels, plans to open 15 to 20 beauty stores in each of the next three years to boost its revenue from the segment to a quarter from less than a fifth now, its beauty business CEO Biju Kassim said.

Reporting by Praveen Paramasivam in Chennai; Editing by Dhanya Skariachan and Clarence Fernandez

(Published on Reuters)

Sagar Malviya, The Economic Times

September 13, 2022

Uniqlo, Asia’s biggest clothing brand, has turned profitable in India in less than three years after it opened its first store in the country despite operating in a period marked by Covid-led lockdowns and restrictions.

The Japanese brand posted a net profit of ₹21.4 crore for 2021-22 compared to a loss of ₹36.1 crore in the previous year, according to business intelligence firm AltInfo. Its sales rose 63% year on year to ₹391.7 crore for the year to March 2022, a slower pace compared to FY21 when it clocked 86% sales growth on a low base.

Experts feel Uniqlo’s strategy of pricing its merchandise at least 20% higher than rivals Zara and H&M has helped it earn better margins despite inflationary pressures in terms of raw materials.

“The market is not easy and turning profitable at a time when most rivals are spending aggressively is a good indication of success. As an international brand, they (Uniqlo) are able to get good locations and are preferred tenants, which helps in generating sales, especially in top cities,” said Devangshu Dutta, founder of Third Eyesight, a strategy consulting firm. “However, the pricing is a bit premium and until they are able to source locally, selling products at a right value for the market will remain challenging.”

The Japanese brand opened its first door in the country in September 2019, but stringent lockdown measures announced in March 2020 to contain the Covid-19 outbreak delayed its store expansion plans, restricting its store count to about seven outlets so far.

Uniqlo has said India is one of the most priority markets where consumers are increasingly shifting from ‘fast-fashion’ to long-lasting essentials and functional wear. “India is an important and very big priority market,” Tomohiko Sei, CEO of Uniqlo India told ET in June.

(Published in The Economic Times)

In a blog-post a few days ago, I’d expressed my long-held view that retail is not an easily globalized business. (Retail models are not global, and global certainly not inevitable)

Local nuances have a big part to play in the success of a retail business – they could be related to the customer, products, packaging, pricing, customer service norms, government regulation, or anything else from the hundreds of local flavours that retail success hinges on.

An example that I often use is that of Asda in the UK.

When Wal-Mart bought Asda back in the late-1990s, there were cries of doom and gloom, calls for government protection, etc. etc.  However, the reality was that Tesco clearly emerged as the leader, other UK retailers remained strong, even though Asda gained in stature and market share. Wal-Mart’s takeover of Asda may have pushed its competitors to rethink their business strategies and become more competitive. In the UK market, it’s Tesco that is seen as the 800-lb gorilla, not Wal-Mart.  While Asda is a smart retailer (to the extent that possibly even the parent company, Wal-Mart, has learned from it), it does not have the same advantages that Wal-Mart enjoys in the US.

And now comes this news item in the UK newspaper – The Telegraph. Provocatively titled, “Could Asda be kicked out of Wal-Mart?”, it talks about how Wal-Mart considered a partial or complete exit from Asda.

Wal-Mart, like many other retailers who expand internationally, have found that what works at home doesn’t always work overseas – among Wal-Mart’s burdens are Germany (exited) and Japan (underperforming). It is probably too early to tell whether Wal-Mart will achieve its objectives in China, and the Indian business is still to open its doors.

At this time, neither Wal-Mart nor Asda will give credence to the report, for obvious reasons. But the fact is that, like all smart management teams, Wal-Mart’s management evaluates its markets on an ongoing basis, and it has not let historical reasons or sentiments keep it from exiting underperforming subsidiaries (e.g. Germany).

Differences not just in the customers and the market conditions, but even different management styles among countries can throw a retailer’s global ambitions off the planned trajectory.

And these differences keep many a retailer from venturing out of their home market at all. 

Its a “big, bad world out there”, and sometimes it’s good to be just home! 😉