Masahiko Uotani

Uotani was the first chief executive in Shiseido's history to come from outside the company, and he came from soft drinks. He had run Coca-Cola's Japanese business, been an adviser to Shiseido from 2013, and took the top job in April 2014 with a mandate to fix a company that had lost its way: sales stagnant around ¥760 billion, a Japanese business losing share to Kao and Kosé, and a portfolio that ran from ¥30,000 creams to drugstore shampoo without a clear idea of which it was.

His answer was Vision 2020, and it was unusually clear. Shiseido would be a prestige company, global, and concentrated in skincare. He restructured the Japanese business, cut brands, took a Dolce & Gabbana fragrance licence to learn the category, opened factories and a research centre in Yokohama, and bet on three sources of growth at once: Chinese consumers at home, Chinese consumers travelling through duty free, and American prestige brands — Laura Mercier in 2016 and Drunk Elephant in 2019 for $845 million. Sales passed ¥1 trillion in 2017 and operating profit exceeded ¥100 billion in 2018, both records. In 2021 he completed the picture by selling the mass-market personal-care brands — Tsubaki, Senka, uno — to CVC at around ¥160 billion, and the American mass brands to AS Beauty. Shiseido was now the company he had described in 2014.

The contested part is what that company turned out to be exposed to. China had gone from a tenth of sales to a quarter under his tenure, travel retail to a tenth more, and the mass brands that did not depend on either were gone. The pandemic closed the airports; the Chinese consumer slowed; in August 2023 Japan's release of treated water from Fukushima triggered a boycott of Japanese cosmetics that hit Shiseido first. Drunk Elephant, bought at the top of its trend, collapsed in 2024 and was written down. Uotani handed operations to Kentaro Fujiwara at the start of 2023 and the chief executive title at the start of 2025, leaving a company that earned roughly ¥7.6 billion of reported operating profit on nearly a trillion of sales. His defenders say the strategy was right and the timing was cruel. His critics say a strategy that depends on timing is not a strategy. Both are in the record.