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China's 2000 cosmetics sales seen up 20 pc

SHANGHAI: Sales in China's booming cosmetics market could jump 20 percent to 34 billion yuan ($4.1 billion) this year, the Shanghai News reported Sunday.

Intense competition among domestic makers and sino-foreign joint venture companies as well as imports had propelled sales to 28.5 billion yuan in 1999 from a mere 4.0 billion in 1990, it said.

Among the 3,514 licenced manufacturers in China, 703 were joint ventures, whose products along with imports had 60 percent of the market share, it said.

The joint venture by U.S. consumer product giant Procter and Gamble Co topped the list, with its 1999 sales accounting for 23 percent of the total market, the newspaper said.

It quoted market surveys as showing that about one percent of the affluent Chinese urban population were buyers of high-priced imports and 2.5 percent of the urban consumers bought domestically made brand-name products.

The low-end skin creams and perfumes were mainly sold in China's vast rural markets, it said, without giving other details.-Reuters