Good morning, everyone. It is my pleasure to welcome L'Oréal back to CAGNI. Joining us today are CEO Nicolas Hieronimus, CFO Christophe Babule, and Head of U.S. Operations David Greenberg. L'Oréal is the world's beauty leader and has outpaced the market by leveraging its broad portfolio across 37 global brands. Since becoming CEO in 2021, Nicolas has continued to build on L'Oréal's leadership, achieving record margins and adding several new brands to the portfolio. We look forward to hearing more about L'Oréal's strategy to continue to outpace beauty peers, leveraging their leadership positions in key geographies, consumer cohorts, and technologies. Please join me in welcoming Nicolas and Christophe to CAGNI, and David as well.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's 9:00 A.M. You started your day with brushing your teeth. Now it's about getting ready for the day in a very beautiful manner. Apparently, some of you went to rinse, but I guess they'll be back a bit later. But as we want to start with a very beautiful morning, as L'Oréal, everything always starts with an introduction video. So please enjoy a little presentation of L'Oréal.
Thank you. Good morning again. Today I'm going to try to present L'Oréal to you, for those who don't know us, as the world leader in beauty.
I'm going to share a little bit about the performance in 2024 and the outlook for 2025, how we've transformed L'Oréal, and we are transforming L'Oréal to make it fit for the future, and the new spaces we're about to conquer to expand the playground of L'Oréal and increase our growth. But first, let's start with numbers. As you saw in the video, we are the world leader in beauty. We have over EUR 43 billion turnover, EUR 6.4 billion in profits. We sell a little bit more than 7 billion units, 7 billion units in the world in 150 countries. We have a bit more than 90,000 employees, and our market cap is currently EUR 180 billion. L'Oréal is by far the number one player in beauty. You can see here the proportions with the followers. You've seen some of them during this week.
We, of course, are not just happy to be the leader, but we fight very hard to play on the offense and to increase that leadership. We do only beauty. You will not see us talking about any other categories, about pet food, about detergents, about anything else. We just do beauty. That's what we know how to do. We've been doing it for over 115 years, and we focus on the best of beauty, which is why we focused mostly, if not only, on value-added categories. You see here the split of our portfolio. Our biggest category is skincare. The second is hair. Then you have makeup, fragrances, which have grown and taken a very significant part in our portfolio. And the other, the 4%, are on hygiene products, where we have a few SKUs, but they are really not our main focus.
We have the best brand portfolio, I think, in the industry, and we're regularly adding new brands to this portfolio. Aesop was added last year. We acquired a Korean brand called Dr. G, a new license in fragrance with Miu Miu and more recently Jacquemus. So it allows us really to cater to the needs of all consumers around the world. And as we are in the United States of America, I think it's important to say that amongst our 37 brand portfolio, we have 18 American brands, some very famous, Maybelline, the number one makeup brand in the world, Ralph Lauren in fragrances, Kiehl's, and many other brands that you know that allows us, and they represent a good part of our business in North America, that allows us to be very competitive with the American consumer. We have a billionaire brand club.
These are the brands which turnover is above €1 billion, sometimes above €2 billion. It's very important to have these very sizable brands, and they continue to grow at a very good level because every time one of these brands adds 5% or 10%, it adds €100-€200 million to the turnover. L'Oréal scale really does matter as it relates to the brands. We have four highly complementary divisions, which I'm going to detail a bit more in a minute: consumer products, luxury, professional products, and dermatological beauty. There are really four different divisions, not just based on the distribution channels, but more on the way they address consumers and the type of business they do. The first one is consumer products. Its mission is to democratize and premiumize. The two are very important.
Democratize is about reaching as many people as possible, and premiumizing, of course, is about creating value both for our P&L but also for our shareholders. It's a EUR 16 billion sales division. It's the number one and 21% operating margin. It has the number one beauty brand in the world, L'Oréal Paris, with over EUR 7.5 billion in net sales, which, by the way, L'Oréal Paris has had a high single-digit growth in 2024, which shows that you can be big and grow. And you can see here images of the défilé in Paris. But as I said, the consumer products mission is to recruit, and they are really the division that touches the largest number of consumers for L'Oréal. Over 1.1 billion consumers are reached by this division. Then we have L'Oréal Luxe. L'Oréal Luxe is the number one luxury beauty player in the world, EUR 15.6 billion in sales.
As you can see, there's a healthy competition inside L'Oréal for these two divisions to be the biggest. A nice operating margin. You see here an example of an animation on Prada. But in reality, this division is the one with the largest number of brands because we really want to address all types of luxury. And you know that the most sophisticated consumers have very specific expectations. So we try to cover all these expectations with our brand portfolio. And I have to say that there are two big, I would say not events, but achievements of this division. It has become a while ago the number one in the world in fragrance, but it's increasing this leadership. And the growth we had this year at plus 14% was again significantly superior to that of the market. And we have a fantastic position both in feminine and masculine fragrances.
The other major achievement, which is for me the event of the year for L'Oréal, is that L'Oréal Luxe has become the number one luxury beauty player in the U.S. It's the first time this year we've taken over our very good and strong competitor Estée Lauder in its home territory of North America, and here you have a good illustration of our Polo 67 ambassador who's about to strike a home run. I think that's what we did this year in L'Oréal Luxe, then we have the professional division. It brings the best of professional beauty to all. It's a very omni-channel division, so it's both in salons but also in selective and online. It's EUR 5 billion in sales. It's our smallest but oldest division, very profitable.
And it serves both 400,000 salons but at the same time 3 million independent stylists, which is a growing trend in the world where stylists tend to be more and more independent and to style to cut people's hair at home or in suites, as it is the case in the U.S. And I said this brand is omni-channel. It's really achieved great strides with Redken, which is our American brand, which has become the number one haircare brand in the U.S. across all channels, of course, being present in salons, at Ulta, and on Amazon. With the support of Sabrina Carpenter, it's been a great year for L'Oréal Professionnel products. And finally, our dermatological beauty division, which is here to answer the consumer's quest for health, for safe, healthy beauty products. It's EUR 7 billion in sales.
It used to be our smallest division, but it's the one that has been growing the fastest over the last couple of years, the most profitable of our divisions. And it has three of the four brands that are most prescribed by dermatologists around the world with La Roche-Posay, Vichy, and CeraVe. And not only are they prescribed by dermatologists, but they are only chosen by consumers. And two of our brands have entered the top five of global skincare rankings, all channels included, including mass, including luxury. La Roche-Posay has become the number three skincare brand in the world, and CeraVe, the number five. And that's something which is very spectacular considering the size of this division just five years ago. And CeraVe is clearly a great success story. We acquired it a couple of years ago, EUR 140 million just in the U.S.
Now it's €1 billion in the U.S. alone, and it's twice that size across the world. And it's been becoming the number one skincare brand. It's number one on Amazon and number one in many households. And now we're venturing into a new territory with shampoos and anti-dandruff. So fantastic success story. Then about geographies, we are very balanced in terms of region, and we are really focusing a lot on that balance. And in this world, it has become very unpredictable. Balance is the best way to stay on your two feet. As you can see, Europe is our biggest region. It's where we were born, 32% of our business. Second is North America. Then you've got North Asia. And this 24%, you would say that the Chinese ecosystem, you'll see it is around 17.
And emerging markets, which have doubled in size in just a few years, are now 17% of our business. We clearly do put China into North Asia, not into emerging market. This country has emerged, at least for us, a long time ago. So this is a little bit who we are. Now let's look at our performance in 2024 and our outlook for 2025. In 2024, it was another year of outperformance of the markets. I told you earlier, we are the leaders, but we're not happy to be just the leader. We want to increase our share. So we grew by 5.1% on a beauty market that we estimate grew around 4.5%. So an improvement of our market share. And you'll see it in different categories and regions. It's been achieved through both volume and value.
So, recruitment of consumers, plus 1.4% in units, but good value, which was mostly in the first half of the year because then we face the comparative of the price increases that most of them happen in 2023 to respond to inflation in cost of goods. The growth by category, our two main drivers of growth this year have been fragrance and hair, two categories that are premiumizing. We've grew plus 5% in makeup with a market that has been slowing down in the second part of the year, and 3% in skincare, a market where China plays a very, very heavy weight. So it has lowered the growth of this very important category. When we compare our divisions compared to their own relative market, you can see here that we outperform the market in three divisions out of four.
We beat the luxury market, the dermatological beauty or dermocosmetics market, the professional market. But we're slightly below the market in consumer products. So that's the one division where we have to do an even better job, even though a lot of it was influenced by regional mix. But still, even in the USA, we didn't beat the market en masse. So that's one of the areas where we'll be focusing in the weeks and months to come. We have outgrown the markets in all regions except North Asia. So as you can see, in Europe, in North America, in emerging markets. But we are slightly below the markets in North Asia, which is mostly a country mix as we beat the markets in most countries. But the weight of China in our business has taken us down.
And that's where I think we have to acknowledge that 2024 was really a tale of two cities. There's the global L'Oréal, and there's the L'Oréal excluding North Asia. As you can see, +5.1% is already a growth that's above the market, and we're quite happy with. But overall, if you exclude North Asia, it's a +8% like-for-like, which shows the extreme dynamism of regions like Europe, like emerging, and the USA. As far as China is concerned, what we can say is that the benefit of this rebalancing is that we've reduced our exposure to the Chinese ecosystem, which remains in the doldrums right now. It was 23% of our sales in 2022. It's now down to 17%, which is the size, and I'm going to talk about it in a minute, of emerging markets.
So now the weight of the Chinese engine is much lower in our business, which allows us to offset any twists of fate that can happen positively or negatively in this market. On the other hand, emerging markets, which have been one of my priorities since I became CEO of L'Oréal, have been really accelerating. They are representing 30% of our 36% of our growth in 2024, and now account for more than 16% of sales. As I said, it's the same size as the Chinese ecosystem. Now, one of the performances I'm most proud of for 2024, aside from beating the market, is our capacity to deliver profit and improvement in dividends, whatever the condition. It's been a very unpredictable, challenging market. Nothing happened exactly as planned. We were hoping for a rebound of China, which didn't materialize. There were a few events around the world.
Regardless of that, we delivered not only a good profit but a very healthy P&L with a gross margin that continues to improve. It's now 74.2%. We are controlling our costs at 18.9, but it's flat in basis points if you exclude ESOP, which as a retail brand has a very different structure in terms of P&L. That's why the comparable is higher. We have increased our brand investment. So again, if you exclude the ESOP bias, it's 10 basis points more than the prior years on the rest of the catalog, whilst reaching for the first time 20% operating margin, operating profit, increasing 20 basis points in published and 40 basis points in comparable. That's a very healthy P&L, and that's a great pride of the L'Oréal teams.
And if you look at our performance over the last five years since 2019, so including the year before the COVID, as you can see, our sales have increased by 46%. So it's a 7.6% CAGR. Our gross profit by 120 basis points. Our A&P spends 140 basis points of sales, and our margin expansion has been 140 basis points, so a 9.4% CAGR. So it's a very, I would say, predictable, determined, unwavering delivery of P&L results. And that translates into the dividends. As you can see again, if you compare to 2020, where our dividend was EUR 4 per share, it's now going to be EUR 7 in 2024, increasing by 6.1%. And there's a 10% extra for those loyal investors or shareholders of L'Oréal. So again, a very steady profit delivery and dividend increase. Of course, it's not just about the financial performance. It's also about the non-financial performance.
We continue to be committed to deliver on our pledge to transform the company into being more sustainable. We have our SBTi targets that have been approved. We are in the top 1% of the most sustainable company by EcoVadis. We are waiting for the next version of CDP, which should be equally very good. Right now, we're the only company with AAA eight years in a row. So we'll see the next awards hold. But that's something I am very committed to, and I believe it can be not only good for the reputation of the company but the driver of business. Now, if we look at 2025, what is the outlook? The outlook for 2025, first of all, depends on the growth of the market. So we know, because it's always been like this, that the beauty market is always and has always been growing.
The only exception you can see here was in 2020 when COVID prevented people from going to stores. Our assessment for this year, it should be in the area in 4%-5.5%, so slightly less than last year, or at best as much as last year or slightly less. Of course, it's very early to tell, and we don't have a crystal ball, but that's what we based our ambitions on, as clearly we want to outpace these beauty markets, which anyway will be positive because it's an offer market. And as the leader, we consider our duty both to win share but also to animate the market to constantly bring new innovations to this market.
And this year, we have really, because we felt that the market was a bit slower, we've really amped up our launch plan, and we have what we call internally the Beauty Stimulus Plan. There's lots of stimuli around the world, so we decide to create our own with extra launches and an increased weight of innovation in this year's plan. This Beauty Stimulus Plan is about more products, more new products, but also making sure that these products are visible. And that's why we have really focused on, since 2020, in increasing our marketing productivity. We have developed this AI-powered tool that's called BET IQ, which allows us to guide or help our marketeers allocate their media monies to the best media channels, to whatever is optimizable. And we started rolling it out.
In 2024, we were covering around 45% of our advertising and promotion optimizable media or monies, and it's going to be 60% this year with a real improvement in productivity, which means that we truly get more bang for our bucks, and that's a way also to stimulate the beauty demand. It's a very powerful tool. I'm very happy about it, and the good thing is that our teams want to use it, which is always a demonstration that it works. Then the next step of the L'Oréal adventure. First of all, we don't talk a lot about transformations, about all the things we do, but this company has been transforming for 115 years, and we continue to do so.
First of all, the biggest way to be ahead of competition and to constantly see what is starting is to continuously invest in R&D, or as we call it, R&I, research and innovation. As you can see, we spent EUR 1.4 billion last year. It's more than our competitor two and three together. It's 3% of sales, and that's really what allows us to continuously bring new molecules, new textures, new products that we can then sell at a more premium price and continue to win share. But R&D is not just what we do internally. And I think probably what's changed most over the last four, five years at L'Oréal is that we have developed an incredible array of partnerships, be it with startups, universities. It can be either partnerships or participations.
Many of the companies that you see here on the screens we've invested in, they come up with new technologies. They're biotech. They're working on longevity, and we'll talk about it in a minute. And they are very important because we know we can't be the sole inventors of everything new. And there's so much out there with technology allowing people to develop more and more new ideas that we have strengthened really this ecosystem with R&I. We want to amplify R&I, to augment R&I, but to augment the whole L'Oréal teams with AI. That's been another big focus of the last two to three years. I mean, we've been using AI for longer. With GenAI, it has been accelerating the game. So we do a lot on R&I. We talk about augmented research.
We've just signed a new partnership with IBM to generate more new technologies and new solutions for our brands. We are, as we just talked about it, augmenting the ROI of our A&P. That's BET IQ. We work on creativity. It's the early days, but we have created this what we call CreaTech. It's an internal lab where we work with GenAI to create more visuals, more content. As you know, beauty is the number one topic of conversation on TikTok and on many other platforms, and this needs a lot of content, and using GenAI to create a lot of this content allows us not only to be more creative but also to save money, and that's something we have invested on, and of course, we are augmenting our consumer services, so making the consumer happier.
One of the biggest issues of consumers is that there are so many beauty products out there that they don't know how to choose. That's why we've developed first for our brand, L'Oréal Paris, but then it will be expanded to other brands. Beauty Genius, which is a GenAI assistant, which has been launched in the US only so far, which allows consumers to be recommended the right products based on their skin needs, the picture they will take in, and the objectives they will have expressed. So we are really accelerating on AI, and I think this will be highly transformative for our industry and for L'Oréal in particular. We've been, and that nobody talks about, and it just has created a few fluctuations from one quarter to another when we opened these new IT systems.
We've been harmonizing IT from 21 SAP systems to 1, and then, of course, beyond the upgrading of the legacy systems, we're investing in future services or softwares that are going to make us more efficient. And it's really a big drive in terms of agility, scale, and therefore generating more efficiency. So that's something that's undercover, if I may say, within L'Oréal, but that's really preparing L'Oréal for the future. We've also invested a lot in our operations resilience because, in the end, again, in this fragmented world, you've got to be able to manufacture anywhere, to have your brands ready close to the consumer, and at the same time have economies of scale. So we've both invested in what is probably the most advanced distribution center we have at L'Oréal in the world, in China, which is the one you see on the left of the screen.
But also, we've made sure that our most popular brands, take the example of CeraVe, are manufactured not just in one country but everywhere where they are bought by consumers. So we have now factories that manufacture CeraVe all around the world. And you see here, in the end, what I think of a great strength of L'Oréal. It's our global R&I and operations footprint. We have factories and warehouses all over the world. You can see here in Europe, in the U.S., in Asia, but we also have R&I or R&D centers everywhere around the world. And why is that important? It's important because not only is beauty cultural, but beauty is highly related to climate, to the color of your skin, to the type of hair you have. And of course, you have to make sure that your researchers are close enough to the consumers.
That's why it's so important for us to have R&D centers in Rio, in the U.S., in South Africa, in India, in China, and everywhere. And that makes L'Oréal very fit for this world of fragmentation, this multipolar world. And of course, in terms of transformation, we continue to enhance our portfolio. L'Oréal has got 37 or 38 global brands. Only two were created internally. It's L'Oréal and Kérastase. All the others were acquisitions. So it's a continuous policy of L'Oréal to amplify its portfolio with new brands. So last year, we acquired, or at the beginning of this year, two new licenses, Miu Miu and Jacquemus, in luxury and for fragrances. We made the acquisition of a Korean skincare brand, Dr. G, and we took participations in brands or companies, Amouage, which is an Omani, a very premium fragrance brand that is extraordinarily successful.
And we took a 10% stake in Galderma as a way to explore a bit more the world of aesthetics, which is very close to our dermatological beauty activity. So as you can see, we've transformed industrially R&I, AI, partnerships, brands, and that makes us want to go faster and further. And to do that, of course, we want to conquer new spaces. We are not far from Cape Canaveral, so I couldn't resist putting a beautiful woman in an astronaut outfit because that's what this L'Oréal is about. It's about always seizing what is starting and exploring new avenues to always be in beauty, only beauty, but all of beauty. And there are three spaces we're exploring or wanting to conquer. The number one is new geographies where we've been traditionally weaker or where we see potential, new consumers, and of course, new technologies.
The geographies, well, clearly, as I'm in here in Orlando, I want to talk about the U.S. It's the number one beauty market in the world. It's 24% of our sales. Yet we only have 13% market share in the U.S. when our global one is 15%, and it's 20% in Europe. So it means that we have opportunities to grow in the U.S. And we believe in the potential of the American market to grow by itself. Why? Because amongst the mature markets, the United States of America are the only market with demographic dynamism. There will be extra 12 million consumers by 2030, and it's also a very multiracial population.
And when I say that, I mean the fact that there is a diversity of beauty needs, and having the portfolio of brands that we have and the capacity to cater to these differences gives us a pretty strong competitive advantage on the U.S. market. We have the leadership in two of the categories that are most important to these young targets: makeup and fragrances. And of course, these two are vector of acceleration, as is premium haircare. We've been making very important strides in the latest periods. So the U.S. is important also because this is where you have the highest proportion of affluent consumers. They represent 60% of the global spend, the affluent consumers.
And again, having become the number one luxury player in the U.S., puts us in a very strong position with all our new and extended portfolio of brands to seize this opportunity even better than others. And of course, there's emerging markets. I talked about it. It's two billion of our potential consumers. There'll be 500 million more consumers that can afford L'Oréal products by 2030. And out of this, half will be from India alone. I saw that you had a presentation about India in the Colgate presentation. It's definitely a market that was not ready for L'Oréal in terms of distribution network, in terms of purchasing power a couple of years ago, but now it's ripe for us accelerating. Emerging markets have been doubling sales in the last four years. They've moved from EUR 3.5 billion to 7 to over 16% of sales.
Really, it's a great moment for us to accelerate because of the development of e-commerce, because of the development of a middle class. Suddenly, you have millions of young men and women that can find our products and buy them from their phone instead of having to go to small stores where our catalog was not represented. Big opportunity for L'Oréal. Of course, it's an opportunity because most of our brands, or at least a good part of our portfolio, that's the white spaces on that chart, are not distributed yet in emerging markets. We just launched CeraVe last year in two cities in India. Half of the luxury portfolio is not even distributed there.
We are at the very beginning of our emerging market adventure, once again, because now there are consumers that can afford our products, but also that can have access to our products on their phone. So a big opportunity for us. Then we strengthen our presence, or at least we learn more about these new markets with the participations. That's why we made this investment as a minority shareholder and will remain a minority shareholder in Amouage, which is this incredible Omani fragrance brand that sells fragrances at like $300-$400 and does a fantastic job. And you may not know that the Gulf and the Middle East is one of the biggest fragrance markets in the world because it's both very cultural, it's part of the religion, and therefore fragrance will continue to thrive in these parts of the world. Then there's new consumer clusters.
You say, well, we're the worldwide number one in beauty, so we sell to everybody, well, actually, not totally, because first of all, there are new consumers, and there are consumers we haven't been speaking to so much in the last years. The first ones are the new consumers, the ones we need to conquer. Today, we estimate that we have 1.3 billion consumers that buy L'Oréal products around the world, most of them in mass markets, and there is 4.2 billion people that can afford our products, so it means that our ability to recruit has a lot of potential, and our objective is in the next decade to reach 2 billion consumers, so that's 700 million more. That's one of our big focuses. We are focusing on this penetration, which goes through formats, new brands, and of course, A&P activation.
Within these consumers, there are, I would say, three categories. The first one is Gen Z. They're just entering the market, have entered the market. They are one-fifth of our potential consumers. There will be 150 million more by 2030. They have, of course, a lot about beauty. They have very specific needs, and we'll be really focusing on them with innovation. A lot of our brands have designed specific products for the Gen Z because, of course, they are building habits at this time, and it's very important to recruit them. The Gen Zs, there's a very large number of them, and they'll be followed by a new generation, Gen A, which we've committed not to be targeting specifically, at least aside from sunscreens and more medicated products. Under 16, they are not our primary target, but they will be coming of age.
We know this generation is what we call beauty crazy. There'll be 200 million more that will enter our market by 2030, and it's a great opportunity. You have the young people. You have men. Men have not been the focus really of our brand portfolios. They represent 10% of the global beauty market. That's male products. The reality is that men represent 25% or a quarter of the global beauty usage, and they are half of our potential consumer base. We have to focus more on men, and men have changed a lot. I mean, before you had to go to Korea and Japan to see men using skincare products and to be being a bit more sophisticated. Today, everything has changed, and we really see the penetration increasing in many categories. Of course, in haircare, that was already the case.
In fragrances, men are representing one-third of the market, but also they are showing a greater part today in facial cleansing and face care. I was talking about the difference between Asia and Europe or the U.S., but if I show you these numbers today, this is the penetration of facial skincare and cleansing amongst men, 50%, so one man out of two in China, 32% in Europe, and it's the same in the U.S. If I had shown you this number, say, 10 years ago, the number in Europe would have been below 10%. It's really an acceleration. All the young generations are really, again, influenced by social networks, their peers, and the importance of appearance on your phone. They are investing in themselves, and skincare is developing for men. Men is a big opportunity for us.
And then the third one, and very important one, are the 60-plus cohorts. There'll be 850 million of them in 2025 and over a billion in 2030. In the mature world, we know that population is aging, which might be bad news for many industries. It's very, very good news for beauty and for L'Oréal. These 200 million potential consumers, and you see here Andie MacDowell, who's been a spokesperson of L'Oréal since 1988 or something like that, so very truly loyal. So we had her as a young woman, and now she's one of our 60-plus cohorts, proudly representing L'Oréal. These cohorts will be made of boomers and Gen X, and they represent 50%, and they are at 50% in the developed market. So in markets like the U.S. or Europe or Japan, focusing on 60-plus cohorts is a very important part of our growth strategy. Why?
Because they have a huge potential. Look at the amount they spent on beauty compared to Gen Y and Gen Z. It's great to recruit Gen Z because you have to nurture the pipe. But then these boomers and Gen X are spending a lot on beauty. They represent 21% of the population and 20% of the beauty demand, and they are growing. So this will be a specific focus of a number of our brands. We have dedicated lines and, of course, dedicated media strategies. Finally, the third and last space of conquest are the beauty of the futures, the new technologies. Beauty is fueled by technology, but also by social trends. And there's one big social trend that's a society trend that everybody hears about is longevity.
People are going to live longer, and people are beginning to invest more and more, younger and younger, into making sure they're going to live better for longer. They're going to look better for longer. Not just Bryan Johnson, but a lot of people are spending a lot of money, putting a lot of effort in looking better and feeling better for their older age. So that's why L'Oréal is investing in what we call L'Oréal Integrative Science, 15 years of advanced research, 38 scientific publications. And I think we have decoded at least not the secrets of longevity, but how to act on the longevity of your skin. And I invite you to discover a little video.
L'Oréal Longevity Integrative Science, a unique comprehensive approach focusing on the nine hallmarks of skin aging, nine interconnected biological mechanisms activated by the science of biomarkers.
Introducing the Longevity AI Cloud, a map of 267 biomarkers. The Longevity AI Cloud enables us to create three intervention models and extend skin cellular health span in ways we never could before. Early onset intervention to preserve skin's youth capital at a molecular level. Mid-age intercept to halt metabolic dysfunctions at a cellular level. More mature reset to reverse damaged biological functions at a tissular level. L'Oréal Longevity Integrative Science allows us to target the root causes of aging in a truly integrative way. Science to move the world.
So this new science is really a way for us, and of course, one of the ways has been powered by AI partnerships, is to really work on the biomarkers of longevity and to identify very precisely what molecule, what ingredient will trigger a reaction in your skin and allow you to reverse your aging or at least slow down the aging. So that's materializing, beginning to materialize. We presented at the CES, Cell Bioprint, which is a diagnostic biomarker tool that will be put on our stalls in luxury. And we're beginning to launch new products like this new cream, Absolue Longevity, which was introduced in Korea a couple of weeks ago and starting very well in China. And that's really something which is going to be a great revenue stream for L'Oréal.
Then we have other territories we're exploring, beauty supplements, part of this quest for longevity and health and beauty. Our beauty supplements, they are becoming part of the daily routine of people. I'm just talking here about specific beauty supplements. It's a EUR 15 billion market and growing above the average of the beauty markets. And we are entering progressively this category with our brands. Here's the launch that's happening right now from SkinBetter Science, our dermatological beauty brand. We've also started working in devices, beauty appliances. We've launched at the beginning of this year in 2024 in the U.S. this hair coloring tool, Colorsonic, which was in the early days in December, the number one hair color product at Target. And we've launched recently, presented at the CES last year, AirLight Pro, this incredible blow dryer.
That's powered with infrared lights, and which, as you can see by the reviews, is absolutely adored by both stylists and consumers alike. Finally, there's the world of aesthetics, which we are already part of with our dermatological beauty brands, SkinCeuticals, and SkinBetter Science that work with dermatologists around procedures. We're exploring this new avenue, trying to understand whether it's an area where L'Oréal would want to compete or not. Right now, we are piggybacking on it, as I may say, with our brands. That's why we've taken participation in clinics in China and in North America and taken this participation in Galderma with a scientific participation that allows us to understand more the possibilities offered by this world of aesthetics, which is part of people's longevity strategy.
As you can see, L'Oréal has had a good year in 2024, a very solid year with great profitability. We are now ready to embark on the next step of the L'Oréal adventure. This adventure will be clearly driven by science because beauty is about offering new products, but about performance. This science will be clearly augmented by AI, which is one of the big accelerators we've been invested in. That's why we have great confidence that within L'Oréal, we continue to explore new beauty galaxies and remain whether or not we are close to Cape Canaveral, the leader of the beauty world. Thank you so much.
We have just one question right behind you. Oh, here. Good morning.
Thank you for the presentation, Olivia Tong and Raymond James. A couple of questions. Obviously, the beauty market is in a state of evolution right now.
If you could talk about what you're most excited about, that would be helpful. And then since we have David here, if you could comment on the U.S. and the changing landscape within the U.S. and how you think about the next couple of years and how to combat some of the new competition. Thank you.
So I'll take the first one, and I'll hand over to David for the U.S. To be honest, there are many, many things that I'm excited about in beauty. I'm excited by the fact that there is a huge acceleration of the development of middle classes in emerging markets. And that's fantastic potential for L'Oréal because, again, our market share is globally around 15%. It's around 11% in the emerging markets because our products and the distribution were not ripe for L'Oréal. The markets were not ready for us.
So this is a big acceleration potential. We have huge recruitment possibilities that are truly incremental. It's great to conquer shares, but it's better to grow the market at the same time. And I think both the male and the boomers' opportunity are very important. Males are about recruiting, and boomers are just about talking to these consumers. They're often telling us all the advertising is about Gen Z. Please talk to me, and I'll buy more of your products. So we'll listen, and we do that. And then I would say, if I take a little bit more perspective, I'm very excited about the new possibilities offered by technology.
When I see the acceleration of research provided by AI, the way that this technology allows us to screen molecules in a couple of months and tomorrow weeks when it took us two, three, four years to find the right molecule that would impact a hair shaft or a skin. We have created digital twins of hair that allow us to screen these molecules in a couple of weeks, so the acceleration of research is truly what excites me most because it's an innovation race. Of course, everybody can do cool, fun products with funky colors, and that's always going to work at some point, but the reality is that people are getting more and more demanding. People are living longer, and they want the things that do work, and the acceleration allowed by technology in terms of science and discovery is really what excites me most.
So that was the real McCoy, as they say here. So I'll hand over to David on the U.S.
Good morning, everyone. So it's true that the U.S. market we continue to believe is a big opportunity. If you think about the last few years, in fact, probably the most disruptive and biggest shift has been the shift to omnichannel. And I'd say we were one of the earliest adopters of how to shift our business mix, taking advantage of what the consumer was looking for, obviously accelerated during the pandemic. So e-commerce became an important part of our mix. And even today, if we look at our business, we see more potential in omnichannel. We see most of our big retail partners investing. Walmart is one of them, developing their marketplace, developing their omnichannel, buy online, pick up in store.
Of course, Amazon and now TikTok Shop is new to the market, and we're one of the early pioneers of TikTok Shop. So the disruption in channels has been something that I think we've embraced. And because we have such a large portfolio of brands, we're able to pilot some brands and then bring other brands onto the platform once we find the right way to do it, always with respect to the brand DNA. The other disruption, I mean, you mentioned competition, but competition, of course, is the lifeblood of beauty. We always believe it makes us better. And we feel today, and we have a pretty powerful innovation pipeline. And for us in 2025 and 2026, we think we have the right initiative to really drive market growth.
And we're still, I'd say, underpenetrated, deeply underpenetrated in some high-growth categories, skincare being one of them, even fragrance being another. Haircare, we've been watching in our market, has been incredibly dynamic, especially at the more premium end, where we have a very strong market position. So again, we're bolstered by the fact that we have such a great portfolio of brands, all price points, all channels, and then we can embrace the shifts of the market. So we're optimistic. And fundamentally, I mean, despite everything else, you have a consumer who, by and large, is employed, wages have been rising above inflation for the last couple of years, and is in a pretty good place to continue to spend on the things that they want to buy.
So behind you. Thank you. Robert Ottenstein, Evercore ISI. I'd like to talk about China and North Asia travel retail.
The gist of the question is, obviously, tough markets right now. How much of what is going on right now is cyclical, and how much is structural? Are there important structural changes that we should be aware of that may make the market more or less attractive than in the past? And then specifically on the North Asia travel retail side, we get the sense that there's been perhaps significant overcapacity, that there's a lot of disruption between Korea and Hainan and some of the other traffic hubs. And it's hard for us to kind of really see exactly what's going on here, what's going on with Daigou, etc., all those sorts of things. I'd love to get your sense of where that is, what's going on with traffic conversion, and the overall footprint. Thank you.
Okay. So several questions in that one.
The first one on, well, first of all, on North Asia. Within North Asia, a few markets did pretty good in 2024. Japan, in particular. Of course, they were held by the weak yen and a lot of inbound tourists. But overall, the market was positive. And L'Oréal became the number one foreign group in Japan. There's lots of great Japanese competitors, but at least we're the number one foreign groups, and we've been gaining share. Good year too in Korea. And it's true that China was a difficult market, and actually it got worse in the second part of the year compared to the first part of the year. And it ended up in beauty in the mid-single digit negative. And I think here there are to answer your questions about what would be structural and conjunctural.
I think what is conjunctural, definitely, and I don't know how long this conjunctural will last, is the state of confidence of the Chinese consumer who's been hit in terms of both their savings and their level of confidence in the future, the jobs, the job market, and so on and so forth. And the confidence level that we measure regularly and that gets published is among the lowest in the big countries. So it means that today Chinese consumers are holding on to their savings for those they have, and they have quite a pretty significant amount of savings. So I think that's conjunctural because we see and regularly hear that the Chinese government wants to take measure and wants to stimulate internal demand. They need it. So I think there is a rising middle class. There are people that love beauty.
We see, by the way, that every time we come up with something exciting and new, that makes them want to open their wallet to go for it. So there is the love for beauty is there. The appetite for consumption is there. They just need good reasons to feel that optimism, again, that you find in other parts of the world. What's more structural, and frankly, is not a surprise and was expected, is that there is more local competition than there was before. The local brands have upped their game, and they are mostly mass brands. So it forces us to be more innovative and creative. And by the way, we see that some of the brands that have had strong plans in 2024 in China, be it Kérastase, CeraVe, Yves Saint Laurent, Prada, I could name a few, have had a very good year, very positive.
I would say that you have to raise the game to win in China again. We've won a little bit of share in 2024, not as much as the prior years, but you can still win in China, so that's going to stay, but it's good. As David says, competition makes us better, and we are increasing again our innovation level in China, and I'll finish very quickly because before I'm asked to stop, and anyway, we'll move to the next room for more questions. On travel retail, clearly the market has not recovered. That was one of the bad surprises of last year. There's very little conversion of the traffic in Hainan. The numbers are really down. It's the same for all industries, by the way.
So I would say that travel retail that's been probably inflated. Travel in Asia, that's been inflated for a couple of years by this Daigou phenomenon that we've all tried to control. And by the way, we have done a good job at it that has allowed our share in domestic China to continuously increase. Still, the market has gone back to a more normal level. It remains a great place to expose our brand, to have people discover the new brand, to show the best of each brand. But the numbers in North Asia are not going to go back to the heights they had in the past. But now travel retail for us is less than six% of our business. It's very dynamic in the West and in Europe and Middle East. So it's clearly a good channel to recruit consumers and expose our brands.
But the weight of Hainan and Korea will not go back, at least short term, to the heights it had, and its peak two or three years ago.
Thank you. And please join me in thanking L'Oréal and Nicolas and the team for the presentation. We'll take the rest of the questions and break out.