- 来源|Cosmetic Business Online
- 作者|Fan Huan
New organizational restructuring.
The Shiseido Group today announced that the Board of Directors has passed a resolution on July 30, 2024 to change the position of Shiseido's Chief Executive Officer on January 1, 2025.
● Shiseido Announcement
KENTARO FUJIWARA, currently Director, President and COO of the Shiseido Group, will become Director, President, President and CEO of the Group, with his appointment to take effect on 1 January 2025.
● Fujiwara Kentaro
Masahiko Fishtale, currently Chairman and CEO of Shiseido, will serve as a senior advisor to the Shiseido Group from 1 January 2025, providing advice at the request of the management team, supporting talent development, and participating in external relations. He will retire from his position as a director of Shiseido at the conclusion of the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders to be held at the end of March 2025, and will no longer serve as a director of Shiseido.
● Masahiko Uotani
Since 2019, Shiseido has been implementing a five-year CEO succession plan.At the board meeting on 10 November 2022, Kentaro Fujiwara was appointed COO as well as a candidate for CEO, a position that was announced alongside Masahiko Fishtale's planned December 2024 retirement. The Shiseido Group said the two men worked together to complete the leadership transition.
According to the biographical information released by the Shiseido Group, Kentaro Fujiwara was born in 1966, graduated from the Graduate School of Agricultural Science at Kagawa University and joined Shiseido in 1991, and has been with the Shiseido Group for 33 years.
During the decade 1994-2014, he was responsible for international business development in the European market and served as Managing Director of Shiseido (Korea) and Chairman and President of Shiseido Professional Korea, accumulating ample experience in international market expansion.
On 1 November 2015, he was appointed General Manager of China by the headquarters, and since then he has been surging ahead in the Chinese market, developing it into Shiseido's second largest market in the world in seven years. During the six years from 2016 to 2021, Shiseido China's performance has been in a growth momentum, with growth rates exceeding 10 per cent in all years except 2020.
Effective 1 January 2023, KENTARO FUJIWARA was officially promoted to the position of President and Chief Operating Officer of the Shiseido Group.
At that time, the current president, Masahiko Tani, said that he was very much looking forward to KENTARO FUJIWARA to drive the development of global business, ‘Since he joined the company, he has been engaged in overseas business in Europe, Korea and China, and has carried out exchanges with diverse cultures and human resources.’
Currently, Shiseido is entering the critical period of its medium-term strategy ‘SHIFT 2025 and Beyond’, and in order to achieve a core operating profit of 12% by 2025, the company is completing key strategic actions of structural reforms to reduce global costs and optimise its organisational structure to drive gross profit maximisation.
In terms of creating a more agile organisational structure, from 1 January 2024, the Shiseido Group has established a new Value Creation Strategy Headquarters, Corporate Governance Department, Global Brand Value Development Center, and Global Product Value Development Center. In particular, the new Value Creation Strategy Headquarters was established to realise the value-added business model proposed in the medium-term management strategy ‘SHIFT 2025 and beyond’, and the department is directly led by the Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer. In line with the above organisational restructuring, Shiseido has made 16 personnel changes within the company.
In the first quarter of fiscal year 2024, the Shiseido Group achieved net sales of 249.5 billion yen (about 12 billion yuan, calculated at the reported exchange rate of JPY20.7/CNY, the same below), an increase of 3.9% year-on-year; a decrease in operating profit of 8.745 billion yen (about 400 million yuan); a decrease of 3.3 billion yen in profit attributable to owners of the parent company (about 159 million yuan) ; core operating profit of ¥11.3 billion (approximately RMB550 million), a year-on-year decrease of ¥1.2 billion, but exceeded expectations, and compared to the previous quarter's (Q4 2023) core operating profit of ¥3.0 billion, profitability is steadily improving. It is worth looking forward to see how Kentaro Fujiwara, who has an international perspective, will lead Shiseido to make changes and realise its profit growth plans.