“Two years ago, our consumer-facing team fell asleep and lost touch with the market.”
In the sweltering Beijing summer, during a two-hour interview, Bloomage Biotechnology chairperson Zhao Yan repeated the phrase “fell asleep” four times. With disarming candor, she said that had Bloomage “woken up earlier,” it might have avoided the hype-driven speculation that once distorted the value of hyaluronic acid.
At the start of 2025, after more than three decades navigating China’s business world, Zhao decided to return to the frontlines. Her plan: personally build a stronger operations team and launch a new entrepreneurial chapter at the intersection of artificial intelligence and life sciences.
Today, cosmetics and medical aesthetics are crowded markets where distribution channels and consumer traffic dominate. Brands compete for attention with inflated claims, misleading product information, and pseudo-scientific jargon. Naturally, consumers are increasingly skeptical.
Against this backdrop, Zhao has rolled out both defensive and offensive campaigns. Publicly, she has refuted accusations from former employees, called for scientific rationality, exposed hype in the recombinant collagen space, and pushed for evidence-based marketing. Internally, she has slowed operations to restructure processes and rebuild a startup-style team.
For Zhao, entrepreneurship means resisting the current and instead reshaping the rules.
Her track record supports that view. She once earned the title of “property queen” for developing landmarks on Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue. Later, she pivoted into biotechnology, building Bloomage into a company that exports to more than 70 countries. She anticipated shifts in economic and industry cycles early, and at one point ranked among the top ten on Hurun’s list of richest self-made women.
While hyaluronic acid remains Bloomage’s core revenue driver, Zhao avoids being defined by it. To her, Bloomage is a science-driven, publicly listed biotechnology company built on a synthetic biology platform. Its core expertise in anti-aging substances like hyaluronic acid, she argues, is transferable to other molecules such as ergothioneine, extracellular matrix components, and human milk oligosaccharides.
The question now is whether Bloomage can rediscover its marketing strategy in a hypercompetitive landscape, reclaim its role in innovation, and reverse its earnings decline. Can it stabilize its base business while extending hyaluronic acid’s success into new categories, even as it faces competition from startups?
And as China’s biomanufacturing sector rises, will Bloomage’s RMB 3 billion (USD 420 million) investment in Asia’s largest synthetic biology pilot-scale facility bridge the “valley of death” between lab strains and commercial production, and push the company to new heights?
Keeping it steady
For any publicly listed company, financial results are the clearest, coldest mirror.
From 2022 to 2024, Bloomage saw declines in functional skincare revenue and gross margins, which eroded investor confidence. Even after optimizing brand promotion and marketing channels in 2024, selling expenses still totaled RMB 2.46 billion (USD 344.4 million).
The mismatch between marketing spend and returns has hung over management like a sword of Damocles. Zhao is blunt in her assessment:
“The market may be difficult, but there are always companies doing well. I’ve always believed the problem lies in our own team-building and organizational capacity. Too much of our spending was distorted or ineffective.”
During the boom years, live streaming by popular content creators delivered quick wins. But in today’s saturated market, traffic costs are rising and top influencers have less clout. Old playbooks no longer translate well into sales. Instead, margins flow to livestreamers and platforms, leaving brands without loyal customers or defensible channels.
Zhao responded by taking direct control. Divisions were renamed, and brand operations came under her leadership. In her view, skincare is first a health product grounded in life sciences. It must also deliver emotional value as part of daily life. Only then does it become a fashion item, and lastly, a consumer good.
This shift led Bloomage to emphasize its scientific foundation. Instead of relying on top-tier influencers, the company is building a network of mid-tier creators across niches. “The same RMB 500,000 (USD 70,000) we used to spend on one influencer with millions of followers can now go to multiple mid-tier influencers in different fields,” Zhao said.
The company is also betting on self-operated livestreaming channels. Zhao’s team has pushed platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu to allow Bloomage brands, including Biohyalux, to market with scientific data, patents, and lab results, making claims about anti-aging or cell repair backed by research.
Her confidence rests on Bloomage’s sustained investment in R&D and quality.
Part of that investment is visible in its 11,000-square-meter R&D center in Jinan, where teams work on hyaluronic acid process iteration, functional peptides, and small-molecule active ingredients. The labs are equipped with advanced systems, from liquid chromatography to mass spectrometers, supporting material research and testing.
Its automated skincare production facility includes a RMB 25 million (USD 3.5 million) sterile filling and packaging line. Operating at full capacity, the line can produce daily batches of single-use serums worth millions of RMB with just two staff on duty.
These capabilities were once overshadowed by marketing noise. Now Bloomage is trying to align them with a leaner marketing strategy, translating science into tangible product value.
Zhao said her team has redefined brand DNA for both Biohyalux and Quadha. Quadha, for example, emphasizes cell-level anti-aging with its proprietary CT50 compound, a blend of 50 active substances described as a “charger for cells.” The metaphor is designed to make complex science more accessible to consumers.
She acknowledges the transition will be bumpy. It may take six months for the consumer business to emerge from its adjustment phase, with visible results unlikely before the next Lunar New Year.
Signs of renewed confidence have begun to surface. In August, Bloomage’s controlling shareholder announced plans to repurchase RMB 200–300 million (USD 28–42 million) worth of stock at up to RMB 70 (USD 9.8) per share, signaling Zhao’s conviction in the company’s revival.
Rebuilding Bloomage
In recent years, public perception of Bloomage has focused on its skincare brands. But that is only one part of its broader strategy. The company’s trajectory reflects how Chinese firms have leveraged manufacturing strength to move toward frontier R&D.
The surge in consumer skincare once pushed Bloomage’s market capitalization past RMB 100 billion (USD 14 billion). But when growth slowed, the spotlight narrowed to cosmetics, obscuring its positioning as a synthetic biology company.
A telling example came in May, when capital markets hyped ergothioneine and sent shares of Chuanning Biotechnology and Tuoxin Pharmaceutical soaring. Few noticed that Bloomage had already developed ergothioneine in 2019, achieved high-purity mass production, and secured national recognition for it.
Meanwhile, Bloomage’s B2B raw materials business has expanded steadily. In 2024, it reported RMB 1.236 billion (USD 173 million) in raw material revenue, up nearly 10% year-on-year, with export sales rising 17.65%. Many skincare and health supplement brands, both domestic and international, source hyaluronic acid from Bloomage.
Still, after years of attention on hyaluronic acid, both consumers and investors are seeking the next big molecule to drive anti-aging products and industry growth. Recombinant collagen has been a focal point.
In reality, hyaluronic acid and collagen are complementary rather than competing.
Animal-derived collagen has long been used in medical applications such as dura mater patches and bone repair. But collagen is structurally complex, with chains of thousands of amino acids forming triple helices. Few companies can produce full-length recombinant collagen with intact triple-helix structures. Short peptide fragments with low similarity to human collagen fall short on functionality.
Skin aging, scientists argue, is not caused by the loss of a single component but by imbalances across the extracellular matrix (ECM), the microenvironment that supports cells. The ECM includes hyaluronic acid, collagen, and elastin.
Su Yang, Bloomage’s global head of R&D insights, explained: “During tissue regeneration, hyaluronic acid acts like a structural engineer, building a temporary, water-rich scaffold for cell migration and differentiation. Collagen then enters as the construction worker, laying down a dense, resilient network to provide strength and elasticity.”
Contrary to the common perception that hyaluronic acid is only for hydration, Zhao noted that scientists worldwide are studying its roles in cancer suppression, inflammation control, and aging interventions. “To build a large industry around one molecule, you need fundamental science and collaboration with ecosystem partners,” she said. “Bloomage supplies 70% of the global pharmaceutical-grade hyaluronic acid market because of continuous R&D investment.”
The company now hopes to replicate that success with other molecules. Its expertise spans strain engineering, process optimization, scale-up, regulatory approvals, product design, and commercialization—all critical for entering new markets.
Choosing which molecules to pursue can be a high-stakes decision, requiring both technical skill in metabolic engineering and foresight.
Without naming specifics, Zhao said Bloomage’s strength lies in precise molecular weight control of hyaluronic acid. Building on partnerships with universities, research institutes, and pharmaceutical firms worldwide, it is expanding into cell biology and glycobiology for aging and tissue regeneration.
Carbohydrates, Zhao emphasized, play a central role in cell signaling and structure. Hyaluronic acid, for instance, orchestrates ECM formation and regulates cell behavior through different molecular weight combinations. Bloomage’s research now spans three domains: extracellular matrix biology, intercellular communication, and intracellular processes.
By “carbohydrates,” Su clarified that the term refers not to simple sugars for energy, but to complex polysaccharides and oligosaccharides that act as cellular ID cards, trigger signaling pathways, and build tissue structures. These influence immunity, development, and aging. Hyaluronic acid, pro-xylane, and chondroitin sulfate are all part of this category.
Recent milestones include Bloomage’s fermentation-based chondroitin sulfate sodium completing Center for Drug Evaluation (CDE) filing, and commercial-scale production of compounds such as salidroside and sialic acid. In its human milk oligosaccharides (HMO) program, the Tianjin pilot facility enabled the team to progress from strain construction to pilot-scale production in just six months, producing multiple HMO structures.
Competition, however, is intense. Many startups backed by venture capital are entering synthetic biology, sometimes before downstream markets are ready. Bloomage’s advantage lies in its strain and enzyme libraries, biomanufacturing databases, and full-chain development experience. Its challenge is that every segment has entrepreneurs betting their careers and operating with startup-level urgency.
Now 25 years old, Bloomage is adopting a startup-like mode under Zhao’s leadership, rekindling a fighting spirit that could help it replicate the hyaluronic acid success story across multiple new categories.
Crossing synthetic biology’s “valley of death”
To understand global synthetic biology, Zhao once spent 20 days visiting companies across several continents. What struck her most was the decline of once-celebrated US players:
“Ginkgo Bioworks was founded by top graduates from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a market cap that once hit USD 38 billion. Now it has fallen into the nine-figure USD range and even faced delisting risk. The problem is that while US labs are strong at strain engineering, the country lacks a robust manufacturing base. They sometimes rely on computer simulations for scaling up, but real pilot-scale validation must happen in factories. Without it, you can’t cross the ‘valley of death’ in biomanufacturing.”
A scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences explained the challenge more technically: a strain that performs well in a flask may falter in a five-liter fermenter. Even if small-scale tests succeed, conditions in 50- or 500-liter fermenters, including pH levels, oxygen transfer, feeding strategies, and mixing, can cause major differences.
That means success requires both frontend strain design and backend fermentation expertise, plus coordination between the two. Technical feasibility must be tested alongside economic viability, factoring in costs for raw materials, utilities, labor, and depreciation.
Here lies the paradox: building pilot-scale facilities requires significant investment. For universities and startups, raising such capital early is difficult. Even if they succeed, a failed validation can wipe out the investment. But without pilot-scale testing, lab results remain theoretical.
This is why Zhao believes flexible pilot-scale platforms are essential infrastructure for synthetic biology in China. “Bloomage was among the earliest companies in the country to pursue synthetic biology. We had six pilot lines in Jinan, and even that wasn’t enough,” she said. “Now, with AI and biotech moving so fast, if you don’t have pilot platforms, you can’t scale strains into production. This is the biggest gap in the industry right now.”
Since 2018, Bloomage has invested RMB 3 billion to build a large-scale pilot facility in Binhai, Tianjin. The facility spans fermentation, purification, and refinement modules at multiple scales, allowing several projects to run in parallel. Beyond accelerating Bloomage’s own material development, its modular “drawer-like” design lets external partners use it for pilot validation.
Parts of the facility are already online, supporting cosmetics, food, and pharmaceutical-grade materials. For startups, Bloomage offers not just equipment but also experienced engineers and data models to anticipate challenges, optimize processes, and shorten development cycles. Confidentiality protections mirror practices in the contract research sector, aiming to foster trust and collaboration.
In China, private companies have often driven technological and commercial innovation. Bloomage’s Tianjin pilot plant could serve as the missing link between strain design and industrial-scale fermentation, becoming infrastructure that accelerates the entire sector.
As Zhao put it, Bloomage’s ambition is to stay young:
“Today, Bloomage is not a perfect company, nor do we want to be described as a mature one. In biology, maturity means aging, which means fewer possibilities. We want to remain a youthful company full of possibilities and entrepreneurial spirit. When the bubbles fade, the solid shoreline of science will reappear.”
KrASIA Connection features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Xiao Xi for 36Kr.