Yatsen Holding Limited

Yatsen Holding (逸仙电商) is the Guangzhou-based beauty group behind Perfect Diary, founded in 2016 by CEO Huang Jinfeng (David) with co-founders Chen Yuwen and Lü Jianhua. It listed on the NYSE in November 2020 under the ticker YSG — the first Chinese beauty group to go public in the US — pricing at $10.50/ADS with a pre-market valuation of roughly $7 billion; Gaorong Capital led its early round in early 2018 and added in later rounds. At listing the group ran four brands — Perfect Diary, Little Ondine (acquired June 2019), Abby's Choice, and the French high-end skincare brand Galénic (acquired from Pierre Fabre in October 2020) — with over 48 million followers across official accounts. Its model is DTC plus data-driven product development: new products go from concept to launch in about six months, versus the 7–18 months typical of international brands, and it pushed out some 1,500 new SKUs across eye, lip, and base makeup categories in 2019 and the first three quarters of 2020. The numbers behind the hype: total sales of ¥3.5 billion in 2019, up 363.7% year-on-year, and ¥3.8 billion in the first three quarters of 2020, with gross margins holding around 63%. Gaorong partner Han Rui described the ambition as building "highway" infrastructure — Perfect Diary being "just the first car on that highway" — toward what Huang framed at the IPO as becoming "an incubation platform for new beauty brands in the new era." Note that elsewhere's coverage of Yatsen clusters around its 2019–2020 rise and listing; more recent developments aren't in the corpus.