Kao's cosmetics sales grow 10% in a shrinking Japanese beauty market, led by Curél, KATE and a new SOFINA line
Kao's nine-month results show its Cosmetics Business growing sales 10% even as the company says underlying demand in Japan's beauty market slipped slightly -- a share-gain story for the most contested shelf space on a Japanese beauty floor.
Kao Corporation (花王), the maker of Kanebo, Sensai, Curél and KATE, said nine-month net sales rose 7.1% to ¥1,319.3bn in the January-September 2026 period, with operating income up 28.1% to ¥146.5bn and net income attributable to owners up 24.0% to ¥105.1bn, according to results filed November 5.
Currency did a lot of that work group-wide: 4.0 points of the 7.1% sales growth came from translation, leaving like-for-like growth of 3.1% (volume down 0.2%, price up 3.3%), Kao said. Operating income also carried an ¥11.5bn gain from a first-quarter land sale.
Cosmetics grows against a shrinking market
The Cosmetics Business -- Kanebo, Sensai, Curél, KATE and SOFINA -- grew sales 10.1% to ¥199.4bn and swung operating income to ¥9.8bn from ¥2.9bn, a gain of ¥6.9bn, the strongest performer among Kao's four consumer-care lines. In Japan, cosmetics sales rose 7.2% to ¥132.0bn even as Kao said consumer-purchasing survey data -- its gauge of underlying demand -- indicate the Japanese cosmetics market dipped slightly over the same nine months, even as retail sales performance in the category rose.
Kao named three drivers for the Japan gain: new products and seasonal promotions for the Curél derma-care brand; wider awareness of the KATE makeup brand, "with expanded shelf space through collaborations with retailers"; and strong early sales of SOFINA BASIC+, a new line launched in August under the SOFINA skin care and makeup brand. The company's own breakdown shows the gain was mostly volume, not price: of the Cosmetics Business's 6.5% like-for-like growth, 5.7 points came from more units sold and just 0.7 points from higher prices.
Outside Japan, cosmetics sales rose 23.8% to ¥40.6bn in Asia -- Kao credited progress in China and the KATE and Kanebo prestige lines in Thailand -- for 11.1% like-for-like growth once currency is stripped out. In Europe, cosmetics sales rose 7.3% on a reported basis but fell 2.7% like-for-like, which Kao attributed to a market slowdown, even as its luxury Sensai line grew on new products. In the Americas, cosmetics sales fell 4.5% like-for-like.
Like-for-like change year on year (%)
For a brand anchoring a large share of Japan's beauty-hall and drugstore shelf space, that combination -- sales growing while the company's own demand gauge slips -- reads as a share-gain story rather than a rising-tide one. The KATE detail is the sharper tell: shelf space won "through collaborations with retailers" is a presentation move, not a pricing one, and on a crowded cosmetics floor, a few more centimetres of counter rarely arrive without someone else losing them.
Kao's own breakdown already makes the real-growth case for Japan -- volume, not price, drove most of the cosmetics gain -- and the latest available official readings point the same way, even though they cover shorter, more recent periods than Kao's nine-month figure: national cosmetics prices were up 3.4% year on year in September 2026, the newest month the Statistics Bureau has published, while drugstore beauty-care sales -- the channel closest to where KATE and Curél actually sit -- rose 3.3% in August 2026, the newest month METI's Current Survey of Commerce covers. Even on these shorter, most-recent readings, Kao's Japan cosmetics growth was running at roughly double the pace of either benchmark, consistent with a company gaining share in a market it says is not itself expanding much, rather than simply riding dearer price tags.
Guidance was left unchanged from August's upward revision: Kao still expects full-year net sales of ¥1,800.0bn (+6.6%), operating income of ¥190.0bn (+16.2%) and net income of ¥135.0bn (+12.4%).