Surviving the Cycles: Reconstructing Bloomage Biotechnology
"In the past two years, our consumer-facing team was asleep and didn't know what was happening in the market."
In the sweltering summer of Beijing, during an almost two-hour interview, Zhao Yan, the leader of Bloomage Biotechnology, mentioned "being asleep" four times. She straightforwardly analyzed that if Bloomage had "woken up earlier", it wouldn't have been impacted by concept hype, and the value of hyaluronic acid wouldn't have been misinterpreted for a while.
At the beginning of 2025, this legendary female entrepreneur with over three decades of business experience decided to return to the front line, "personally organize a truly combat-effective operation team", and embark on a new entrepreneurial journey in the wave of AI and life sciences.
Currently, the cosmetics and medical aesthetics industries are extremely competitive. With traffic and channels reigning supreme, brands are going all out in marketing to reach consumers and capture their minds. Creating concepts, exaggerating product efficacy, and false "grass planting" have become common, and consumers are fed up.
Facing the fierce and almost distorted competitive battlefield, Zhao Yan launched a series of "offensive and defensive battles". Externally, she firmly refuted the accusations from former employees; called on the industry to return to scientific rationality and exposed the marketing chaos in the recombinant collagen track; advocated market communication based on scientific evidence and corrected remarks disregarding science. Internally, she proactively hit the brakes, carried out process and organizational reforms, and reshaped the entrepreneurial team.
Those with true entrepreneurial spirit won't be swayed by the environment but will change the rules and push things in the right direction.
From being the "real estate queen" who created the landmark on Chang'an Street, Huaxi Live·Wukesong, to crossing over to the biotech field and leading Bloomage to sell products in over 70 countries, Zhao Yan has repeatedly predicted macroeconomic trends and industrial prospects, entered the market early, and once ranked among the top ten on the "Global Self-Made Women Billionaires List".
Currently, hyaluronic acid still accounts for a large part of Bloomage's performance. However, according to those around her, Zhao Yan doesn't fully agree with the title of "Hyaluronic Acid Queen" given by the outside world. In her view, Bloomage is not just about hyaluronic acid. It is a science and technology innovation board-listed company supported by a synthetic biotechnology platform. The "scientific and technological strength" such as research and development capabilities, pilot-scale transformation capabilities, and market transformation capabilities accumulated through the anti-aging core substance "hyaluronic acid" can be replicated to other key substances in life science research, such as ergothioneine, extracellular matrix, and human milk oligosaccharides.
So, under the turbulent changes, can Bloomage find a new marketing strategy in the red ocean, regain the market voice in "skin science innovation", and reverse the declining performance?
While stabilizing the basic market, can Bloomage cross the cycle and replicate the success of hyaluronic acid to more product categories in the jungle surrounded by numerous startups?
In the era of the rise of Chinese biomanufacturing, can the largest synthetic biology pilot-scale platform in Asia, built with an investment of 3 billion yuan, truly bridge the "valley of death" from strain construction to mass production and push Bloomage to a higher level than its previous peak?
Stabilize the Basic Market and Revitalize Marketing Combat Power
For any listed company, performance is the coldest mirror.
From 2022 to 2024, the revenue and gross profit margin of Bloomage's functional skincare products declined successively, directly affecting the confidence of the capital market. Although the company's sales expenses decreased year-on-year in 2024 after optimizing the brand promotion strategy and marketing channels, the absolute value still reached 2.46 billion yuan.
The huge imbalance between marketing input and output has become the "Sword of Damocles" hanging over the management's head.
Indeed, the phenomenon of bad money driving out good money is common in the current market. But "even if the market is bad, there are always companies that do well," Zhao Yan said without hesitation. "I've always believed that we had some problems in team building and organizational capabilities, which led to a lot of ineffective and distorted investments."
During the market dividend period, the short-term effect thinking of live-streaming sales by anchors could still work. However, in the highly competitive market with limited growth, the cost of traffic is gradually increasing, and the influence of super top anchors is declining. The extensive operation mode of "allocating large budgets - outsourcing traffic investment" can hardly achieve the desired sales conversion. Not only are the profits harvested by big anchors and marketing platforms, but brands also fail to build their own brand and channel barriers.
Zhao Yan, who went deep into the front line, renamed the "Personal Health Consumer Goods Division" to the "Skin Science Innovation and Transformation Division" and took over the brand business. In her view, skincare products are first and foremost health products, which must be based on life science; secondly, they are products that can provide emotional value, like a "companion" that accompanies us every day; on top of that, they are also fashionable items related to aesthetics, and finally, they are consumer goods.
Therefore, Bloomage needs to return to its technical core of "skin science" and use scientific and technological strength and product power to support the brand and match the user group. It has shifted from relying on super anchors to investing in a "matrix of influencers" in the middle range. As Zhao Yan put it, "Instead of investing 500,000 yuan in an anchor with millions of followers, we may now spend the same amount of money on multiple influencers in different fields."
In terms of the brand's self-broadcasting channels, she led the team to negotiate with platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu: In the official live-streaming rooms of brands like Runbaiyan, they are required to speak with evidence such as scientific research data, patent achievements, and experimental results, and can scientifically promote anti-aging, cell repair, and other efficacy concepts; instead of passively using marketing jargon like "anti-aging" and "anti-allergy" that scientists can't understand, and competing with white-label products.
Zhao Yan's confidence comes from Bloomage's long-term investment in R & D and quality.
Part of the investment is embodied in a R & D center in Jinan with a total area of over 11,000 square meters. This is the "scientific and technological brain" for Bloomage's raw material and formula R & D, with project teams for hyaluronic acid process iteration, functional peptide development, and small molecule active substance development. In the laboratory, dozens of liquid chromatographs, gas chromatographs, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry detectors, and other precision instruments are working with researchers, supporting its raw material research and quality inspection system.
In the demonstration workshop for skin science innovation and transformation products that meets the standards of a "lights-out factory", automated equipment such as a three-in-one aseptic filling machine and packaging robotic arms worth up to 25 million yuan are bustling. According to the introduction, when the workshop is operating at full capacity, it can produce essence worth tens of millions of yuan a day, with only two workers on duty.
This scientific and technological strength was once briefly overshadowed by marketing noise. Now, Bloomage is trying to equip it with a marketing elite team more adaptable to the new environment, translating the hardcore and profound science and technology into product value that consumers can perceive.
According to Zhao Yan, she is leading the team to redefine the brand core of Runbaiyan and Quadi. For example, Quadi focuses on cell-level anti-aging and compares its core technology CT50 (composed of 50 active ingredients) to a "cell charger", trying to convey scientific principles in language that consumers can easily understand.
The short-term challenges of organizational adjustment are inevitable, but this is a necessary process towards long-term healthy development. Zhao Yan admitted that it may take another six months for the consumer-facing business to truly get out of the adjustment period, and it may not show real improvement until after the Spring Festival next year.
The bottom of the market often coincides with the turning point of confidence. In August, the controlling shareholder of Bloomage plans to increase its shareholding in the company by 200 - 300 million yuan at a price of no more than 70 yuan per share. The founder is using real money to convey her confidence in the new entrepreneurial journey to the market.
Recreate Bloomage: From Hyaluronic Acid to Glycobiology
In recent years, the outside world's perception of Bloomage has been overly focused on its cosmetics business, but this is just a part of its overall strategy. In fact, Bloomage's development process is a microcosm of Chinese enterprises rising from manufacturing and then advancing towards cutting-edge R & D. The explosion of the consumer-facing efficacy skincare business once helped Bloomage reach a market value of 100 billion yuan. When this business slowed down, the excessive focus on cosmetics actually obscured its positioning as a "synthetic biology technology company".
A typical example is that in May this year, the capital market hyped up the concept of "ergothioneine", boosting the stock prices of companies like Chuanning Biotechnology and Tuoxin Pharmaceutical. However, few people seemed to notice that Bloomage developed ergothioneine raw material as early as 2019 and has now achieved high-purity mass production. It has also been recognized as the "National First-Class Standard Substance for Ergothioneine".
In the past two years, Bloomage's B2B raw material business has maintained growth. In 2024, the raw material revenue was 1.236 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of nearly 10%; the revenue from exported raw materials increased by 17.65%. Many well-known domestic and foreign brand skincare products and health supplements that consumers are familiar with have added Bloomage's hyaluronic acid.
After hyaluronic acid was hyped for several years, the consumer market and the capital market need new concepts to meet consumers' unmet needs for anti-aging and beauty, and to outline the "wealth creation myth" that the next generation of biomaterials may bring. Recombinant collagen has been pushed onto this pedestal.
There is actually no superiority or inferiority between hyaluronic acid and collagen.
Animal-derived collagen has long been used in multiple medical fields, such as dural patches and bone repair materials in Class III medical devices. However, collagen has a large molecular weight, with thousands of amino acid sequences in the full chain and a triple helix structure. To date, few companies can use synthetic biotechnology to produce full-length recombinant collagen with a triple helix structure. If it is recombinant collagen spliced with ultra-short amino acid fragments and has a low homology with human collagen, its function will be greatly reduced.
It is understood that the essence of human skin aging is not the loss of a single component, but the structural imbalance and functional disorder of the entire cell survival microenvironment - the "extracellular matrix (ECM)" system.
The extracellular matrix is composed of components such as hyaluronic acid, collagen, and elastin. "During tissue regeneration, hyaluronic acid acts like a'structural engineer', first building a temporary water-rich scaffold to pave the way for the subsequent migration and differentiation of cells; collagen is like a 'construction worker' who comes in during the tissue remodeling stage to build a denser and tougher support network, giving the skin tissue toughness." Su Yang, the global R & D insight leader of Bloomage, metaphorically explained.
Contrary to the once-popular statement in the market that "hyaluronic acid can only moisturize and lubricate", Zhao Yan pointed out that currently, hundreds of scientists around the world are researching the role and mechanism of hyaluronic acid in cancer suppression, inflammation regulation, and life aging intervention. "To turn a substance into a large industry, a lot of basic scientific research is needed, and cooperation with many ecological partners is required. The key reason why Bloomage's pharmaceutical-grade hyaluronic acid can achieve 70% of the global market share lies in the continuous investment in R & D."
In addition to hyaluronic acid, the "cash cow" raw material, Bloomage's experience in substance development over the years, from strain modification, process optimization, and mass production scaling up to registration, product design, and marketing, will also determine Bloomage's future potential and direction in the new competitive landscape. Whether it can successfully replicate this experience to other components is crucial.
Choosing which components to develop is one of the crucial strategic decisions for a synthetic biology company. It not only requires considering the R & D team's ability to synthesize target products through metabolic network construction, gene editing, etc., but also requires the decision-maker to have an insight into industry trends and predict the future market scale of the components with large-scale production investment.
In response, Zhao Yan didn't directly name the components but explained that Bloomage's core basic technology is the precise molecular weight control of hyaluronic acid. Relying on cooperation with global universities, research institutions, and pharmaceutical companies, the company conducts reverse research on cell biology and glycobiology in the fields of aging intervention and tissue regeneration.
Based on the key role of carbohydrates in cell differentiation and signaling mechanisms, especially the fact that hyaluronic acid is the key command center for the extracellular matrix structure construction of cells, and the new scientific research understanding that hyaluronic acid can precisely regulate cell behavior through different molecular weight combination modes, Bloomage's research scope has extended from the extracellular matrix (ECM) where hyaluronic acid is located to intercellular communication and cells themselves, forming three core sectors: extracellular matrix, intercellular communication, and intracellular.
Su Yang further explained that the "sugars" here are far more than just energy providers. They refer to complex polysaccharides and oligosaccharides, which are key substances for forming the "identity card" of cells, activating signaling pathways, and building tissue structures. From regulating the gut microbiota to activating self-regeneration, carbohydrates play important roles in life processes such as immunity, development, and aging. Hyaluronic acid, boswellic acid, chondroitin sulfate, etc., which have become star molecules, all belong to carbohydrates or their derivatives.
Recently, Bloomage's chondroitin sulfate sodium produced by fermentation has completed the CDE filing, and the company has also achieved mass production of carbohydrates such as salidroside and sialic acid. According to the company, in the development of HMO (human milk oligosaccharides), relying on the "flexible" capabilities of the Tianjin pilot-scale platform, the team completed the leap from strain construction to pilot-scale production in six months and can produce multiple HMOs with different structures.
With the development of synthetic biotechnology, many technology-based startups have received capital support. The upstream raw material development of many substances has become highly competitive even before their downstream markets have taken off. For Bloomage, its opportunity lies in its rich resources such as strain libraries, enzyme libraries, and large biological manufacturing databases, as well as its full-chain development experience; the challenge is that in each niche market, it will encounter founders and capable teams who have "no way back and can only go all out".
As a 25-year-old large company, under the leadership of its founder, Bloomage is returning to the entrepreneurial state, inspiring the "fighting spirit of a startup" from top to bottom. This also means that it has the potential to replicate the success of hyaluronic acid and recreate multiple Bloomages.
