As we approach 2026, the valuation gap within Hong Kong's new consumption sector is widening, with capital increasingly concentrating on leading companies possessing "strong barriers, high certainty, and long-term growth potential." In China's cosmetics and skincare industry, CHICMAX (02145) stands out as a unique entity. It capitalized on the surge in traffic dividends to quickly ascend into the top tier of China's beauty market. Subsequently, through multi-dimensional synergy across product categories, sales channels, and innovation, it has built a replicable and verifiable value system. The company's 2025 annual results, released on March 26th, serve as a crucial key to interpreting its intrinsic value. Adhering to a core strategy of "single focus, multi-brand, globalization," the company is actively building a formidable moat through category innovation, channel refinement, and profit optimization, thereby redefining its long-term value in the Chinese beauty landscape.
A multi-brand matrix is creating a sustainable, relay-like growth cycle. Looking back at 2025, CHICMAX's growth trajectory was clear and robust. As a rapidly expanding beauty enterprise, the company demonstrates strategic foresight and long-term planning. By maintaining leadership in its core business, deploying a rich product portfolio, and fostering internally-driven incubation, it continues to solidify its leading industry position, injecting strong momentum for sustained growth. Financial performance remains the ultimate litmus test. The financial report shows that in 2025, the company achieved operating revenue of approximately 9.178 billion RMB, a significant year-on-year increase of 35.1%. Gross profit for the year reached 7.015 billion RMB, up 37.3%, while net profit hit 1.154 billion RMB, surging 43.7%. Furthermore, CHICMAX announced a final dividend of 0.75 RMB per share. Combined with an interim dividend of 0.5 RMB per share, the total annual dividend payout amounted to approximately 498 million RMB, further evidencing robust profit growth and management's confidence in the business. Reportedly, the company has consistently prioritized shareholder returns since its listing, with cumulative cash dividends exceeding 1.573 billion RMB. More importantly, CHICMAX is constructing a sustainable growth model characterized by a "solid foundation, comprehensive product portfolio explosion, and precise positioning of a reserve pipeline" through its all-category, all-age-group brand strategy. From a product perspective, the core brand KANS, serving as the "ballast," generated annual revenue of 7.36 billion RMB, up 31.6%, securing a profit safety net and ensuring the sustainability of its major product lifecycles. Throughout the year, KANS not only maintained strong growth of its bestselling Red Waist series, with cumulative sales exceeding 18.1 million sets across all channels, but also launched new product lines based on core technologies like "X-Peptide" and "Boswellin." The X-Peptide Super Series alone sold over 2 million sets across all channels. CHICMAX's proven capability in managing blockbuster products underscores its core support for stable cash flow and valuation underpinning. Notably, this year, KANS achieved a major breakthrough in category expansion, with strong performance from body lotions, shampoos, masks, facial cleansers, and other categories, signaling an accelerated upgrade towards becoming a "comprehensive beauty and fashion brand." This category extension not only enriches KANS's product matrix but also builds long-term connections with consumers by meeting diverse needs in skincare and personal care. While its flagship brand grows steadily, CHICMAX's second growth curve, newpage, comprehensively addresses skincare needs for ages 0-18 through its infant, school-age, and teen series. Core products like the Soothing Cream and Acne Removal Essence Oil experienced rapid growth, solidifying its leading position in the mid-to-high-end infant efficacy skincare segment. The brand achieved revenue of 880 million RMB for the year, a remarkable 134% increase, demonstrating powerful momentum. Beyond this, CHICMAX is actively cultivating its N-th growth curve, building a long-term growth "moat" through an ecosystem of multiple brands and categories. Diverse brands, including Anminyou and Jifang, are growing steadily in their respective niche markets, continuously honing product and operational capabilities across multiple channels, contributing stable incremental growth. The expansion into personal care and color cosmetics reflects CHICMAX's deep exploration across all categories. In personal care, KANS continues to enrich its category matrix, while Jifang precisely targets niche markets, achieving dual precision in customer targeting and market positioning, fostering steady brand development. In color cosmetics, the KANS brand continues its positive development trend, while the emerging brand NAN beauty focuses on specializing in the makeup primer sub-category, achieving stable growth through differentiated positioning and becoming a vital piece of the multi-brand puzzle. Crucially, CHICMAX's multi-brand strategy fosters synergistic growth empowered by a central R&D platform. The explosive growth in 2025 is merely the beginning of sustained profitability from this core diversified matrix. The company's focus on core proprietary technologies allows for reuse across multiple brands. The marginal cost of R&D investment continues to decrease, with scale effects gradually emerging.
The dual engines of scientific research and intelligent manufacturing are reshaping the valuation logic for domestic beauty brands based on hard technology. At present, the valuation rationale for consumer companies in the Hong Kong market has shifted from "traffic-driven short-term growth" to "technology-driven long-term value." CHICMAX has keenly recognized this trend, constructing a rare hard-tech barrier in the domestic beauty industry through "scientific R&D foundation + intelligent manufacturing enhancement," making it a representative stock for "China's Intelligent Manufacturing" in the Hong Kong market. R&D capability is the core moat for beauty companies and CHICMAX's key differentiating advantage. In 2025, CHICMAX filed 61 new patent applications and was granted 49 new patents. By the end of 2025, CHICMAX's new R&D center became operational, marking a new stage for the group's scientific research capabilities. In the same year, Dr. Karl Lintner, a pioneer in global peptide cosmetics, joined as Chief Scientific Advisor. By establishing a "1+N" open innovation and independent R&D platform, CHICMAX continuously promotes the efficient transformation of "industry-university-research-medicine," connects with global cutting-edge research fields, and builds a solid product technology barrier. The independent development of core ingredients and technologies not only frees the company from reliance on international ingredient giants but also consistently drives improvements in product gross margin and profit quality. This fundamentally addresses the industry's chronic issue of "emphasizing marketing over R&D," laying a core foundation for the company's long-term growth. Intelligent manufacturing capability is the core guarantee for translating R&D achievements into large-scale profitability. In 2025, the KANS Smart Factory commenced operations. Covering 20,000 square meters with a daily production capacity of up to 2 million bottles, the factory represents a significant investment. The combined daily capacity of the Phase I and Phase II projects of the CHICMAX Technology Park, with a total investment of 1.2 billion RMB, reaches 3.5 million bottles. This heavy-asset intelligent manufacturing layout not only ensures supply chain autonomy and control with optimized scale costs but also endows CHICMAX with stronger profit resilience during consumption recovery cycles. Through a full-chain quality control system, it continuously enhances brand power and user reputation while providing solid support for omnichannel expansion and global strategy. The dual drive of R&D and intelligent manufacturing ultimately translates into continuous optimization of profit quality: core technologies bring product premiumization, pushing gross margins steadily higher; proprietary intelligent manufacturing enables cost optimization, improving cost efficiency and driving sustained improvement in net profit margin, facilitating high-quality growth characterized by "profitable revenue and profit with cash flow."
An omnichannel foundation supports the global strategy, building cycle-resilient capabilities. Competition in the beauty sector fundamentally revolves around channel reach and user experience. Through years of strategic layout, CHICMAX has validated a closed-loop omnichannel strategy encompassing both online and offline channels. It is one of the few companies in the industry that has mastered comprehensive online traffic while achieving scalable offline channel implementation, with its channel value now being deeply realized. In 2025, online channels contributed 8.618 billion RMB in revenue. Centered on Douyin, the company achieved full coverage across major e-commerce platforms like Taobao, Tmall, JD.com, and Kuaishou, demonstrating a balanced layout of "stable growth on core platforms and rapid breakthroughs on emerging platforms." More importantly, the company's online operations have evolved into a refined model focusing on "brand mindset + hero products + user operations," leading to continuously declining customer acquisition costs and steadily increasing user repurchase rates, gradually reducing reliance on traffic红利. The online self-operated revenue of approximately 7.838 billion RMB, a 47.6% year-on-year increase, serves as strong evidence. Furthermore, since re-entering the offline market in 2024, KANS has partnered with retailers like KKV and Sanfu. The company's offline strategy is not merely about distribution but is based on the core strategy of brand mindset penetration and all-scenario user reach. The recent grand opening of the KANS counter at Shanghai New World Daimaru Department Store is a significant milestone in building KANS's "Five Goods" brand image—"Good Brand, Good Products, Good Quality, Good Happiness, Good Value"—and achieving online-offline integration. This bidirectional empowerment of online and offline channels provides CHICMAX with strong anti-cyclical capabilities amidst fluctuating consumer environments and lends greater certainty to its performance growth. Currently, the omnichannel strategy holds three core significances for CHICMAX: First, it enhances brand power, with frequent online blockbusters maintaining leadership while offline channels genuinely build user brand affinity, driving continuous brand premiumization. Second, it improves operational stability, as user loyalty and repurchase rates offline are significantly higher than online, effectively hedging against risks from online traffic volatility. Third, it accumulates core capabilities for global expansion, as the experience in operating and managing offline channels will form the foundation for future overseas offline market ventures.
During the earnings conference call on March 27th, CHICMAX clarified its core strategy of "single focus, multi-brand, globalization." This presents a practical, verifiable long-term growth blueprint supported by solid underlying capabilities, opening up incremental space for the company's long-term valuation upside. CHICMAX's globalization strategy, driven by the dual engines of "technology出海 + brand出海," will initially target Southeast Asian markets, potentially replicating the path of international beauty giants. Firstly, the company possesses independently developed core ingredients, a world-class scientific team, and a self-controlled intelligent manufacturing supply chain, equipping it with the ability to export technological standards. Secondly, its mature multi-brand matrix can adapt to the consumption needs of different countries and demographics, enabling precise positioning in diverse global markets and mitigating the risks of "cultural misfit" associated with single-brand expansion. Thirdly, its proven domestic omnichannel operational capabilities can be directly replicated in overseas markets, facilitating rapid deployment of integrated online and offline channels. This multi-brand model, characterized by "shared technology, complementary brands, and full customer coverage," mirrors the growth path of international giants like L'Oréal and Shiseido, aligning with the core logic for which capital markets grant long-term valuation premiums. For the market, the core value of the internationalization strategy lies in CHICMAX fundamentally breaking the growth constraints of a single market, unleashing long-term growth potential.
From a capital market perspective, Hong Kong's market is never short of capital but lacks truly high-quality targets with certain growth, core barriers, and long-term value. Particularly driven by the confirmation of annual results, the new consumption sector in Hong Kong, with its relatively low valuations and high earnings elasticity, is attracting increased investment interest. Through these annual results, CHICMAX has comprehensively demonstrated the underlying logic of its high-quality development: a multi-brand matrix enabling sustainable growth, R&D and intelligent manufacturing building core barriers, an omnichannel layout ensuring operational stability, and a globalization strategy unlocking long-term growth space. It presents a compelling case for the transition of domestic beauty brands from "Made in China" to "Intelligently Made in China." Currently, CHICMAX stands as one of the most certain and scarce targets within the new consumption sector. From a risk-reward perspective, the company possesses a strong downside safety net and high upside potential. However, its current valuation appears severely misaligned with its leading position and growth prospects, remaining in an oversold state. As the company's strategy continues to be executed, global capital is expected to conduct a systematic reassessment of its value, potentially leading to a Davis Double Click of both earnings and valuation.
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