A Recurring Question Posed to China Cosmetic Regulatory Affairs Consultants

Since I have been working with Reach24H Consulting Group I actually have been asked a certain question by foreign cosmetics producers more often than others. "We are thinking about the possibility of releasing our products on the Chinese market, could you please advise which kind of product we should start with?" There is not always an easy answer to this question because we need to know what kind of products the client is intending to release in order to assist the client perfectly.

Normally I would suggest to start with a General Use product first because a) the registration fee is lower and b) the registration process is faster, namely 6 to 8 months, whereas a "Special Use" product can take up from 10 to 12 months. This way you can start faster selling your products and already start with your profit until your Special Use product is ready to be sold in China.

I decided to spend some time browsing the internet for the shopping behavior of Chinese women and the associated demographics. To make this research a bit clearer, I decided to do some population based investigations to assess market stratification and gender based shopping preferences. According the internet there are a total of 1.382.323.000 people living in China, this amount does not include foreigners.  

The 2 largest demographic groups are 25-29 years olds and 45-49 years old, I also added 20-24 and 40-44 in the equation. Next thing I did was to divide the 4 groups into 2, namely the 20-29 years old and the 40-49 years old.  There are 109.203.517 women in the first group and 121.644.424 women in the second group. It would be smart for newcomers to focus on any of these 2 groups. In the next paragraph I will show the results of these groups' preference.

Both groups are increasingly focused on skin care and anti-aging products. But there is also a difference in consumer psychology between these groups. For example young women between 20 and 30 years old focus on skincare products but also the whitening aspect of their cosmetics is very important, besides that they tend to choose colorful cosmetics and of course fashion is very important. The other group already has a family and a job so they pay more attention to skincare products that make the skin look more youthful and the anti-aging aspect is also very important, especially in Asian cultures. The working group does not really care about the price and they tend to choose a higher end brand like Olay, LANCOME, Shiseido and SKII where the younger group would focus on brand Like AVON and Maybelline.

China's economy has also been booming for the last 2 decades with a direct result of improvement of living standards. With the expansion of internet services, web based marketing and social media, there is now a more open China where more and more women can buy the cosmetics they want. As a result you will have a society with stronger women who do not follow all the foreign brands automatically.

Then there are also two other factors namely market trends and the increase in the personal disposable income per capita. As you can see China's Disposable Income per Capita keeps rising which will have a direct influence on the shopping behavior of women in China, more high end brands will become available for the middle class consumer. 

In conclusion, my research for this article led me to believe that skincare products are still the most popular for both the younger and the older group. The skincare product market is very large and the number of international brands focusing on the older group is relatively small. I believe it would be a smart move to release a skincare product as your first SKU in China.