Guangzhou Pharmaceutical Holdings Limited (GPHL), the Fortune Global 500 Chinese medicine giant behind Walovi herbal tea, announced its plan to enter the global beauty market with the establishment of a dedicated beauty operating company in Guangzhou on September 12.
The opening ceremony of GPHL's dedicated beauty operating company, Dameili, is held in Guangzhou on September 12.
At the opening ceremony of GPHL Dameili Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (Dameili) held on September 12, the company positioned its overseas expansion in beauty business as the second growth driver for its traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) business, after achieving major success in China's domestic market.
According to the blueprint released at the event, GPHL's beauty products will make their overseas debut in six Southeast Asian markets — Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines — through mainstream e-commerce platforms including Shopee and Lazada, before expanding into Japan, South Korea, Europe, the U.S. and the rest of the world.
This means that in the near future, global consumers will be able to buy TCM beauty solutions, from Centella asiatica soothing repair masks to ginger shampoo and more, through fast e-commerce channels, sharing in China's thousand-year-old healthcare wisdom and practices.
A lineup of GPHL's personal care products.
A 400-year herbal heritage, repackaged for modern consumers
GPHL traces its roots back over 400 years in China and is deeply rooted in TCM product research and development, with 13 "China time-honored brands."
The company is betting that this heritage, along with its extraction and formulation science, gives it a differentiated edge in a global beauty market crowded with K-beauty and J-beauty players, said Dr. Jonathan Liu, Strategic Scientist of GPHL and Chief Advisor of R&D at Dameili.
This industry veteran, who has over 20 years of international pharmaceutical R&D experience at prominent companies including Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, is now pushing for Chinese beauty philosophy to go overseas through GPHL's newly established overseas beauty business.
"Many major beauty brands rely on chemical ingredients, but the Chinese lifestyle inherited over millennia emphasizes minimizing exposure to synthetic substances," said Liu.
When disclosing details of GPHL's upcoming beauty lineup, Liu positioned extracting active ingredients from natural substances and providing low-irritation, root-cause care as one of its core strategies.
Going big on R&D innovation to build pharmaceutical-grade beauty
The launch of Dameili also reflects a broader transformation in Guangzhou, China's largest beauty manufacturing hub, which in recent years has been moving from OEM/ODM contract manufacturing to R&D and brand-building.
Guangzhou Pharmaceutical Holdings Limited in Guangzhou.
In the released plan, GPHL is going big on product innovation and quality control in its overseas campaign.
In 2025, GPHL suspended new licensing agreements and cleaned up legacy white-label arrangements for its core brands. Following the same strategy, GPHL's overseas beauty business will also lean toward self-operated R&D and brand management, instead of white-label partnerships.
Qiu Jianhua, Chairman of Dameili, said at the company's opening ceremony that the beauty business will leverage GPHL's research institutes, China's state key laboratories, GPHL's large-scale herb cultivation bases, alongside China's advances in collagen industrialization and AI-driven protein design, to bring pharmaceutical-grade innovation into overseas beauty products.
A lineup of GPHL's personal care products.
"We are now aggressively recruiting engineers. The goal is for biotech to become the core competitiveness of herbal efficacy beauty, and to make Chinese beauty solutions heard overseas," Qiu said.
For global consumers, the pitch is straightforward: TCM-inspired skincare, backed by pharmaceutical-grade R&D, arriving soon on an e-commerce platform near you.
Text | Huang Xinyi, Sun Lulu (intern)
Photos | GPHL Dameili Biotechnology
