Cosmetics giants brush off any talk of slump in China

Top names drive up sales 16.5% in the first 10 months to $17.3b

You don't need a crystal ball or an industry analyst to tell you that the 13-percent drop in imports of cosmetics into China for the first half of this year was probably a blip.

True, the volume of cosmetics imports dropped heavily compared with the same period last year, according to the China Luxury Report 2012.

But retail sales of cosmetics in China rose 16.5 percent in the first 10 months of the year, totaling 107.7 billion yuan ($17.3 billion), compared with the same period last year, according to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics.

"The market is still growing, but just at a slower pace than in previous years," said Wang Jiajun, an analyst with China Market Research Group of Shanghai.

But the strongest evidence that China's cosmetics industry is coasting, comes from the massive expansion plans being made by some of the industry's biggest international companies - such as Estee Lauder Companies Inc and Mary Kay Inc of the United States and Shiseido Group of Japan.

Industry figures show there are more than 5,000 cosmetics companies in China, 90 percent of which are small or medium-size domestic brands.

However, international brands have a market share of more than 80 percent, according to Global Entrepreneur, a leading business magazine in China.

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