A few days ago, at Olive Young, I meant to buy a tube of sunscreen and instead stood in front of the shelf for a long while. Not because I was choosing — because I couldn't. The display held far more brands I didn't know than brands I did, and the unfamiliar names all wore the confident faces of things that sell. The names that used to sit on the vanity at home when I was small, the names that for decades were almost synonyms for the word cosmetics in Korea, were either not there or off in a corner.
In the last chapter I watched a company that makes no clothes take hold of the clothing market. On the vanity table, almost the same thing is happening. Except that here the inversion is far more dramatic. A fortress wall that no one could once challenge has been coming down within a single generation.
Until now I have mostly looked at walls that hold. This story is the counterexample. A story that shows not how strong a wall is, but how a wall falls.
Two Castles
For a long time, in Korea, the word cosmetics meant two companies. AmorePacific and LG H&H. Their wall stood on three pillars. Brands built up over decades, a distribution web woven of department stores and door-to-door sales, and factories they built themselves. Anyone who wanted to sell cosmetics had to clear all three at once, so it was, in effect, a wall that could not be climbed. The arrangement went unshaken for decades, and so people assumed this wall, like the ones before it, would last. To be honest, until a few years ago, so did I.
The Moment the Numbers Flipped
Then, in 2025, the numbers quietly flipped.
| Company | 2025 revenue | 2025 operating profit | Note |
|---|
| AmorePacific Group | 4.6232 trillion won | 368 billion won | Best in six years, on growth in the U.S. and the West |
| LG H&H | - | 170.7 billion won (-62.8%) | Market cap at one-seventh of its peak |
| APR | 1.5273 trillion won (+111%) | 365.4 billion won (+198%) | No. 1 in cosmetics by market cap |
| Gudai Global | 1.4718 trillion won (about 4x the year before) | 273.4 billion won | Roll-up of Beauty of Joseon, Skin1004, and others |
APR — a name scarcely anyone knew only a few years ago — rose in 2025 to the largest market capitalization in Korean cosmetics. It passed both castles at once. More surprising still is the scale. APR's revenue is only a third of AmorePacific's, yet its operating profit was nearly the same. The old yardstick of revenue and the forward-looking yardstick of market cap pointed in opposite directions. And beside it stands another newcomer, Gudai Global. Starting from a brand called Beauty of Joseon, it bought up Skin1004, TIRTIR, Round Lab, and Skinfood in turn, building a body with annual revenue approaching 1.5 trillion won. And the largest share of that revenue now belongs not to the original Beauty of Joseon but to Skin1004, one of the brands it bought. The brands it acquired have outgrown the brand it began with — a wall built up by acquisition.
The People Who Removed the Threshold
Why did this wall fall so fast? The answer lies not with the side that attacked it, but in the fact that one of the pillars holding it up quietly slipped away. The pillar of manufacturing.
Korea today has two enormous cosmetics factories: Cosmax and Kolmar Korea. They sell no brand of their own. Instead, they make other people's. Bring nothing but an idea and a design, and these factories will press out the finished product — a cream, a sunscreen, whatever it is. At that moment, the highest threshold in cosmetics — the factory — disappeared. Anyone could now build a brand without owning one. The structure the last chapter showed through Musinsa and Sae-A Trading — the separation of the hands that make from the hands that sell — went, in cosmetics, all the way to tearing the wall down.
And then hundreds of small brands came pouring in from outside the wall. Names like Beauty of Joseon, TIRTIR, and d'Alba borrowed ODM factories to make their products, sold them through Olive Young and online, and went out to Japan and the United States. These were the very brands whose names I didn't know as I hovered at the shelf. Korean cosmetics exports set an all-time record in 2025, and the protagonists were not the two castles but these small brands. The old distribution pillar of department stores and door-to-door sales shook alongside, up against Olive Young and the internet. The wall's three pillars slipped out almost at once.
The Same M&A, Opposite Directions
The newcomers grow in two different ways as well. APR dug one well deep — its own brands and beauty devices — while Gudai Global bulked up by collecting brands that were already selling. And here the last chapter's Sae-A Trading comes back to mind. Its holding company, Global Sae-A, also grew through M&A. Only the direction was exactly opposite. Gudai Global bought brands inside its own trade, cosmetics, and succeeded; Global Sae-A bought construction and paper outside its trade, clothes, and staggered. The same acquisitions — and what divided their fates was whether you buy inside the courtyard where you can name your own price, or outside it.
There was a time when AmorePacific and LG H&H could name their own price. The name on the label commanded a premium. But the moment a similar ODM-made cream appeared on the next shelf at half the price, that power evaporated fast. The wall that once named the price found itself chasing prices instead.
That is why cosmetics is the most important counterexample in this series. Walls are not forever. Above all, the moment the technology that formed a wall's threshold is released for hire, the wall comes down astonishingly fast. This is why, when you look at a wall, you must look not only at its height but also at the doors and thresholds set into it.
The People Who Don't Leave
The difference between a falling castle and a newly rising wall is inscribed, too, in the time of the people who work inside them.
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Revenue per employee | Operating profit per employee |
|---|
| AmorePacific Co. | 4,748 | 102.26 million won | 13.7 years | approx. 900 million won | approx. 71 million won |
| LG H&H | 4,013 | 87.57 million won | 15.1 years | approx. 1.58 billion won | approx. 43 million won |
| APR | 657 | 95.46 million won | 2.2 years | approx. 2.3 billion won | approx. 560 million won |
| Gudai Global | 189* | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | approx. 2.4 billion won | approx. 740 million won |
What held my eye longest in this table is the bottom row. A company turning over 1.4718 trillion won in consolidated revenue keeps 189 people at its head office. Even on the parent's own books alone, that is about 2.4 billion won of business per person. The number, of course, comes with a caveat. The body of that 1.4718 trillion is made not by the 189 at headquarters but by the people of the brand companies it bought — TIRTIR, Skin1004, Round Lab. And the hands that stir the cream and fill the jars are not among them either. The making is done by ODM factories; the company holds only the brands and the contracts. So these figures are not some superhuman productivity, but the value that lays bare the nature of the brand roll-up as a business. Take the factory pillar out of the wall, and what remains in the company is names and contracts. And on that alone, nearly 1.5 trillion won turns over.
The grain of time divides just as sharply. On the castle side, people stay thirteen to fifteen years. Even while the companies shook, the people did not leave, or could not. On the side of the new wall, people stay barely two. Even while the company grows white-hot, people pass quickly through. Which side's time is the better one, I cannot easily say. The companies of those who kept fifteen years left 71 million and 43 million won of profit per head; the company of those who stay two years left 560 million per head. A difference in density of roughly eight times. The difference between the fallen rampart and the new wall is, in the end, this difference in density too.
Next time I go to Olive Young I will hover in front of unfamiliar names again. Some of them will still be there in ten years, and some will have quietly disappeared. And perhaps one of them will become the next generation's fortress wall, and the protagonist of another story about being torn down by someone else. The story of walls carries on that way.
This is where the story of walls built alone comes to an end. Walls that stood each by themselves — by law, by habit, by time, sometimes even by falling. But there is another way to raise a wall. If a wall built alone can fall this easily, might several walls standing shoulder to shoulder, defended together, last a little longer? From the next story, we enter the walls defended by many — oligopoly.
This piece is part of the "Korea Value Chain" series and is an original work. It is an analysis based on public data and industry sources; some figures and assessments are estimates. It is not intended as a direct basis for investment decisions.
By Alexandro Lee · July 2026
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