L’Oreal India plans to become a €1 billion company in 3-5 years in India

In these complex times, brands have no choice but to move at the speed of culture and technology. However, it’s still not enough these days. A few years ago L’Oreal went on to become a beauty tech company from a pure beauty company with India playing a pivotal role in this journey. Aseem Kaushik, country managing director, L’Oreal says the beauty market in India is very buoyant. It’s growing between 10-12 percent depending on the channel we are talking about. Online is much more buoyant but offline also continues to grow.

The online beauty market in India is about 17 percent of the total beauty market and it is growing at almost twice the speed of the offline market.  In this very dynamic market, Loreal being a pure beauty company, has been doing extremely well in the last couple of markets, growing twice as fast as the market in all the categories. The expectations from India are always high from a group level. It’s a market to grow at least at a 10 percent CAGR for next three years. The biggest category in the beauty market is skincare which is 30 percent, followed by haircare which is 20percent and then followed by makeup at 15 percent and hair oil at 16-17 percent, followed by hair colour at 10 percent and then there are smaller categories like fragrances, hygiene, and body.

The 6.5 billion euros India market itself is going to grow to 9 billion euros in the next three years. "This is going to led by all categories being very dynamic because today the beauty consumption per capita in India is about seven and a half dollars and you compare that to Indonesia which is about 20. There is so much for the Indian consumer to understand what their particular beauty needs are., whether they are looking for solutions or trends, or the celebrity they are trying to follow. For Loreal, in India we are looking at a consumer who is earning more than 20 dollars a day.," Kaushik says.

"We are talking about 250 million i.e. 25 crore consumers here who could be L'oreal's later universe, this universe is at the same spending level as Indonesia when it comes to per capita consumption. This is what China was about 15 years ago. 70percent of this market in urban India happens with 250 million consumers overall, so there is a huge opportunity both from increasing the number of routines at the consumer’s end and for them to also upgrade to more innovative and more effective products in the country," he further adds.  The strategy is to be the beauty advisor to India, Kaushik concludes.  

Catch the full interview on Media Dialogues with Storyboard18 on CNBC-TV18.