Coty Inc has officially signed the Global Travel Retail Joint Business Partnership with Ant Group to enhance the cooperation in digitalization. The agreement means that Coty will be the first beauty company to reach the strategic partnership in travel retail to support digital platforms like Alipay and other digital payment methods at a global level through Alipay+, a suite of global cross-border mobile payments and marketing solutions tech operated by Ant Group.
What are the terms of the partnership?
Based on the partnership, Coty will continue expanding the travel retail business through the digital operation powered by Alipay+, by creating comprehensive and diversified brand campaigns via Alipay and other payment platforms, and offering more customized consumer experience with higher quality and efficiency. This partnership will be extending all the way from China to a wider area of the Asia-Pacific, and further to Coty’s global travel retail market.
In the past year, Coty’s travel retail business saw an outstanding performance. The traffic and sales of brick and mortar retail stores in Hainan saw strong growth with the help of digital operation, and the duty-free business in China also achieved a triple-digit growth in a year.
What does the Alipay+ mean for retail customers?
Digital operation is a clear strategic focus for Coty Travel Retail to innovate online and offline shopping experiences with a traveler-centric approach. Alipay is a valuable partner of Coty in co-creating the future of beauty by innovative marketing capabilities and digital payment solutions. Coty has partnered with Alipay together on a series of travel retail activations, fragrance annual award and had “Travel Around World” campaign debut in June of this year.
“The cooperation with Ant Group in digitalization will help us serve our customers better,” Caroline Andreotti, Executive Vice President of Coty’s Global Travel Retail Business, remarked at the signing ceremony. “In the future, Coty and Ant will continue to work together to explore more possibilities of digital channels to improve consumer & employee experience.”
“We will also aim to deliver better services and products to more consumers around the world on their travel journey, and let them enjoy a better, more convenient and sustainable future.”
With the signing of this agreement, Coty will go forward hand in hand with Ant Group to boost the development of digital service as well as those of the travel retail business, & will continue to develop more in-depth cooperation in an all-round way, across precision marketing, omni channel activations & more digital payment & marketing solution tech.
What does the integration mean for Coty?
Coty’s travel retail department is bringing the global iconic brands and tourists’ most favorable regional brands to travel retail channels, covering prestige and consumer brands, to build a matrix that has three product categories – fragrance, makeup products, & skincare products.
At the present, the brands that Coty’s travel retail department is operating in Asia Pacific market include: 2-axis beauty brands (covering makeup and fragrance) Gucci beauty and Burberry beauty, the fragrance category Chloe, Tiffany, Miu Miu, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein & the skincare category is a representative among the iconic high-end skincare brands.
The skincare category in particular, has grown exponentially in Asia and represents a huge growth opportunity for Coty Travel Retail industry. By launching Lancaster with an Asia-focused product line-up, Coty targets to become an even stronger global player in the skincare.
It features new merchandise designs and offers the Asian consumers effective, sophisticated, safe and sustainable personal care products designed for regional needs. The key markets for this product line-up are China, Korea, Thailand and India focusing on the these for this category in the travel retail industry and a strategic vector of growth for the company.
Lancaster has set up four brick & mortar retail stores in Hainan and launched an official mini program on the Alipay platform, boosting the skincare business expansion of Coty in APAC.
With innovative solutions and tech, Alipay+ eases capturing digital-first customers and makes it convenient for merchants to serve millions of users of digital payment service providers. Through a one-stop integration and technical adaption, merchants can access all existing and later-onboarded digital payment methods by Alipay+. Alipay+ can help merchants further extend the reach of potential users through its rich marketing campaign solutions technology.
Facing the impact of COVID-19, Alipay+ has been working with brands since 2020, to find a way out for the travel retail industry in the post-pandemic era. With the comprehensive understanding of brand business, Alipay+ is making efforts to empower digital transformation of business partners, & to improve the shopping experience with its payment solutions.
