Say goodbye to money-printing growth, medical beauty giants collectively "going to Southeast Asia"

Ask AI: Can overseas expansion reverse the valuation compression facing China’s beauty-focused medical aesthetics (“medical aesthetics”) stocks?

21st Century Business Herald reporter  Yang Chen  reported

With growth slowing, gross margins declining, and valuations shrinking… the “medical aesthetics champions” that once looked unstoppable are now facing a collective transformation triggered by the collapse of underlying logic.

Recent financial reports show that growth has stalled across the collagen protein segment, and in most listed companies, net profit growth has largely fallen back. Two major leaders are the first to be hit: Jinpo Bio’s net profit attributable to shareholders was 651 million yuan, down 11.08% year over year; and Juzi Bio, after six years since listing, saw both profit and operating profitability decline for the first time, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 1.915 billion yuan, down 7.2% year over year.

With domestic dividend tailwinds shrinking and homogenized competition intensifying, medical aesthetics companies’ strategic focus has started shifting toward global markets.

Moves have followed one after another. Jinpo Bio obtained D-category access approvals in four Southeast Asian countries; Juzi Bio has deeply penetrated Malaysia’s end terminals; and Chuangjian Medical and Sihuan Pharmaceutical have entered the US and European markets through mergers and acquisitions and BD models. Overseas expansion has increasingly been seen as a new grab handle for future performance growth.

Behind the collective push overseas are the heavy pressure from explosive growth on the supply side and the dilution of product premium pricing. Companies are trying to offset the decline in domestic profits through internationalization.

When single-market access advantages are no longer a guarantee for performance, China’s collagen protein companies are entering a real contest period for global access and operating capability. This is not only an attempt to find incremental growth, but also a critical breakout that leverages the certainty of overseas markets to repair the “ace card” of valuation in the secondary market.

Collagen protein was once a “import” into China. After rapid iteration of the local industry and technological breakthroughs, a “reverse export” led by Chinese companies is now unfolding.

In Southeast Asia, domestically produced reconstituted collagen protein has made its first trial showing global competitiveness.

On March 7, at an open event in Shanxi Province, Jinpo Bio’s founder Yang Xia made a rare appearance to speak. She said that human-sourced collagen, now, not only breaks the limitations of traditional materials, but also reaches heights traditional materials cannot achieve, and is expected to be applied in high-precision areas such as cardiovascular repair and cancer therapy.

At the same time, Yang Xia revealed that Jinpo Bio’s products have moved from the domestic market to the international market.

And not long before this conference, Jinpo Bio had just released a message: the company’s reconstituted Type III human-sourced collagen protein lyophilized fiber was approved for listing in Malaysia. This is another landing in the core Southeast Asian market after the product entered the Vietnam, Philippines, and Thailand markets.

No sooner said than done. Another major player in collagen protein, Juzi Bio, has also been taking frequent actions.

The company first signed a cooperation with medical device company Nordberg Medical at the end of 2025. Co-founder Yan Jiany a and the company’s secretary for the board of directors, Yan Yubo, attended the event in a low-key manner.

Then, in the latest disclosed 2025 annual report, Juzi Bio stated that it aims to promote an overseas plan not only for channels and brands, but also for the organization and the industrial ecosystem. For the first time, it also disclosed that its products have entered stores in countries including Singapore, Malaysia, and South Korea, and it has also reached North American online channels.

When the leaders turn around, it often signals a turning point in the industry. The sequential shift of Jinpo and Juzi indicates that the collagen protein segment has formally entered the “deep-water zone” of overseas expansion.

From the direction of overseas expansion, companies’ paths are shifting from low value-added raw material sales to full-category exports of higher value-added formulations and medical devices, accompanied by deep operational work at the capital level.

Created to focus on R&D and production of bio-materials for reconstituted collagen protein, Chuangjian Medical reached a strategic cooperation agreement with DKSH in 2024, aiming to introduce reconstituted collagen protein products into the US market. In the same year, French HTL acquired Modern Meadow’s beauty and biomedical departments. The latter has a reconstituted human Type III collagen protein platform and was once backed by investments from Li Ka-shing.

This kind of collective “going overseas” reflects industry consensus. On the eve of a domestic market upheaval, whoever gets the “passport” to the international market first will take the initiative in the next round of valuation game.

The collective surge of going overseas maps to the accelerating decline of underlying domestic dividends in the medical aesthetics sector.

At one point, a single medical device registration certificate was a ticket into high valuations. In the chaotic early period of reconstituted collagen protein, first-mover advantage meant a multi-year market vacuum and absolute pricing power. The “medical aesthetics three musketeers”—Huaxi Bio, Aimeike, and Haohai Biotech—used this to build trillion-yuan market-cap moat, leaving latecomers far behind.

But this “get paid just because you have a certificate” seller’s-market dynamic didn’t last long.

First came the gradual “penetration” of channel pricing. In 2024, Jinpo Bio released “Letter to the General Consumers,” openly “lauding and blasting” Meituan, pointing out that Wei Yi Beauty listed under Meituan’s “Billion-Cny Subsidy” catalog had not been authorized.

It is reported that at the time, Wei Yi Beauty’s market guidance price was as high as about 6,000 yuan per bottle, but on Meituan’s subsidy interface, the price was aggressively pulled down to 1,339 yuan per bottle.

The game and impact between channel pricing and manufacturer pricing were extremely intense. Less than a year after the “crossing-the-air” outcry event, Jinpo Bio publicly signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Meituan Health and, as an official partner, Wei Yi Beauty was launched under “Billion-Cny Subsidy.”

By 2025, three categories of medical aesthetics product approvals were “approved in batches,” further intensifying competition.

According to incomplete statistics, in all of 2025 alone, there were 52 three-category medical aesthetics product approval filings approved domestically. Among them, hyaluronic acid products accounted for 25 approvals, and collagen protein products followed closely with 7.

As of mid-March 2026, approved by the National Medical Products Administration, the number of collagen protein filling agent products in the three-category medical devices category had reached 17.

This means compliance is no longer a threshold; it is the starting line. What used to be a crowded track is now a “close-quarters” fight, and homogenized competition has made barriers nearly disappear.

The “opening of the floodgates” on the supply side quickly transmits to the profit end in financial statements. The industry is going through a brutal transformation from “high pricing premiums” to “industrialization.”

When the brands available to consumers rise from single digits to double digits, both the voice power of medical aesthetics institutions and that of consumers further increases, forcing manufacturers into the full-scale phase of a price war. The space that once supported high net profits for pharmaceutical and medical-device manufacturers is being squeezed from two directions: channel split-offs and ever-rising customer acquisition costs.

As the “easy-win” logic collapses, it forces leading players to search for a “second battlefield.” At this point, going overseas is no longer a decorative “nice-to-have,” but a “life ring” that offsets survival pressure. Opening new growth opportunities overseas using technology premiums is obviously a better option.

In the secondary market, the pricing system of the medical aesthetics sector is also showing a de-foaming process of “overhauling from scratch.”

Among them, Jinpo Bio’s total market value also fell: it once exceeded 50 billion yuan, then fluctuated and declined to date. As of March 26, it was 156.88 yuan per share, with a total market cap of 18.05 billion yuan—down by more than half.

Juzi Bio has also gone through a dramatic re-rating. In the past six months, its market cap shrank by more than 50 billion Hong Kong dollars. As of March 26, Juzi Bio closed at 29.02 Hong Kong dollars per share, with a total market cap of 31.08 billion Hong Kong dollars.

Against this backdrop, leading companies are seeking breakthrough points with multiple lines of effort: on one hand, they go overseas against the current, offsetting domestic stockpiled competition through internationalization; on the other hand, they expand across sectors, trying to rebuild growth logic in new tracks such as high-end medical and high-precision areas.

In June 2025, Jinpo Bio officially announced that Health Mansion, controlled by Zhong Shengteng, would invest 3.4 billion yuan to take an equity stake, becoming the company’s second-largest shareholder. After the transaction, Yang Xia still retains absolute control, while the board of directors added a representative from the “Zhong Shengteng group,” Chen Bin. Not long after, Yang Xia announced that she would take over the position of general manager, fully responsible for the company’s operational management.

In the same year, Children’s Place and Juzi Bio jointly announced that, through a controlling subsidiary, Jiangsu Xing Siyu, they would acquire 100% of the equity in Siyu Health Hair through a deal worth 1.65 billion yuan. Of this, Juzi Bio contributed 66 million yuan for a 10% stake.

Worth noting is that Juzi Bio also has a brand focused on scalp care—Han Deshi. From the industrial chain perspective, this acquisition by Juzi Bio connects terminal distribution channels, and it can also serve as a supplier of core technologies and raw materials.

In an environment where industry survival is intensifying, whether it is pushing for overseas expansion or expanding across sectors, at a fundamental level it is about delivering a core capability to the capital market: arbitrage space across regions and resilience that can withstand volatility in a single market.

As valuation bubbles fade away, the industry is moving on from excessive profits and officially entering the deep-water zone of “earning hard-earned money.” Investors’ collective cool-headedness signals that the medical aesthetics track has moved from the “fast-money era” of simply chasing growth rates into the “long-distance running era” that tests endurance.

The winners of the future are no longer those who are good at weaving capital-idea concepts. True winners must have operational capability to achieve efficient turnover across the global footprint, execution capability to complete compliant rollouts across different jurisdictions, and certainty in continuously converting underlying technology into global profits.