Marubeni moves to take up to 28% of ROM&ND's Korean parent, its third Asian-beauty bet
Marubeni will launch a tender offer, through a new Korean subsidiary, for 20-28% of iFamilySC, the Seoul-listed owner of K-beauty brand rom&nd, which already sells in Japan — a Japanese trading house moving upstream from distributor to part-owner of a brand on its own beauty shelves.
Marubeni Corporation said on October 23 that Welliant Co., Ltd., a newly established, wholly owned Korean subsidiary it set up this year, will launch a conditional tender offer under Korean securities rules for between 20% and 28% of the shares of iFamilySC Co., Ltd. (iFamily), a Seoul-based, KOSDAQ-listed beauty and personal-care company. Marubeni did not disclose the offer price or the total transaction value.
iFamily, founded in 2000, is the parent of rom&nd, the K-beauty cosmetics brand it launched in 2016 and calls an established name in Korea. iFamily sells rom&nd not only domestically but in Japan, China, Southeast Asia, the United States and Europe, according to Marubeni's release — meaning Japanese beauty floors already stock the brand Marubeni is now taking an equity position behind, rather than simply importing or distributing.
Marubeni said the stake is meant to pair its own business-development capability with iFamily's product-planning and marketing strengths, supporting iFamily's long-term growth and rom&nd's expansion abroad. The company frames the deal as part of its GC2027 medium-term strategy, which prioritises what it calls "strategic platform" businesses with growth potential, high added value and scalability, and said the goal is to build a business base across East and Southeast Asia centred on iFamily and Karmarts, widening its brand portfolio for younger, middle-class consumers in the region.
This is Marubeni's third Asian-beauty investment in three years, after two rounds into Karmarts Public Company Limited, the Thai-listed cosmetics group: an initial investment in October 2023 and a further one in November 2025. Where Karmarts gave Marubeni exposure to Thailand's cosmetics market, iFamily extends that same playbook to Korea, the industry whose products are increasingly what sits on Japanese drugstore and variety-store beauty shelves.
Marubeni's release put South Korea's 2025 cosmetics exports at about $11.4bn, up 12.3% from a year earlier, making it the world's second-largest cosmetics exporter after France — the growth story Marubeni is buying into. For a Japanese trading house, the shift from arranging imports of a hit Korean brand to owning a stake in the company that makes it is a bet that the fatter margin, and the greater say over how fast rom&nd's range reaches Japanese shelves, lies upstream of the retail floor rather than on it.