Shanghai Jahwa Accelerates Management Change and Upgrades to Lead China's Cosmetics Industry to A New Era

On March 17, Shanghai Jahwa United Co.,Ltd. (Shanghai Jahwa) held its 2023 Strategic Conference entitled “To Beauty To Youth” to share the company's development strategy, ESG management and industry trends. Entering its 125th year, Shanghai Jahwa has created several legends in the Chinese cosmetics industry. As the Deputy General Manager, CFO and Board Secretary of the company, MinHan promoted the management change of the company, making Shanghai Jahwa the first beauty company to introduce ESG management model, and led the digital transformation of the company to achieve the integration of industry and finance, empowering business innovation and development.

Green development and harmonious coexistence have become the consensus for more and more international companies. In 2021, MinHan, as the executive of Shanghai Jahwa, promoted the company to introduce the leading ESG management concept in the international capital market and released the "Mid to Long-term Sustainable Development Outline" to accelerate the achievement of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals and lead the sustainable development of the company and the consumer industry. ESG requires companies to make more investments in environment, society and governance, such as using biodegradable materials and full-chain recycling along the whole chain, which will inevitably affect the company's profit in the short to medium term. Min Han led a team to studygreen and low-carbon, social investment and corporate governance, starting from the company's long-term development strategic plan. And the ESG project received full support from the board of directors in 2021 after nearly two years of repeated demonstration and adequate communication with the board members, and added a medium and long-term performance consideration dimension for the management, so that the implementation of ESG on the ground can be guaranteed. The company takes green environmental protection and carbon neutral as important issues into its daily management, and promoted upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry chain to join the low-carbon ecosystem. Meanwhile, according to the company's online development and digital transformation needs, issues such as consumer privacy protection and data security are included in the ESG issues, so that the company can enhance data security management awareness while using technology empowering (e.g. AI Face project, CRM database). As of 2022, Shanghai Jahwa has jumped to BBB status in the rating of the internationally renowned indexing company MSCI ESG, and is at the top echelon of the Chinese cosmetics industry.

With the wide application of new technologies such as AI, Block chain, Clouds and Big Data, it is also imperative for enterprise management to embrace digitalization, which will help enterprises make more efficient and accurate decisions. Min Han mentioned in a previous interview that finance is the first step in corporate reform. As CFO, Min Han advocates accelerating the construction of financial dimensional thinking, business-financial integration and digital management transformation within the company. She proposed that "with value creation as the goal, the digital transformation of finance will be accomplished by means of quantifiable, visualized and optimized data". Specifically, Shanghai Jahwa takes the opportunity of deep integration of digital technology and financial management to build a digital financial system featuring automated transaction processing, unmanned monthly closing, real-time risk insight, and modeled decision-making. The company has introduced a digital employee "RPA Finance Robot", which can intelligently review 50% of financial documents and improve human efficiency. In addition, nearly 90% of business documents are intelligently booked and accounting vouchers are generated in 60 seconds, and the issuance of the monthly reports of subsidiaries is significantly shortened from 20 days in 2016 to 5 working days in 2022. The company's financial system is interconnected with the business system without forming any data silos, and finally the data resources of the whole group are integrated and managed and deeply mined through the data center, creating an informationized and digitalized platform management ecology and enabling the efficient development of the company's business. In recognition of Min Han's holistic and forward-looking contributions to the digital transformation of Shanghai Jahwa and his leadership in the reform of management accounting in China, Min Han was awarded the honorary title of "IMA Honorary Management Accounting Leader" certified by IMA.

Within the new context of digital transformation, financial work, as one of the central work of enterprise management, is no longer limited to accounting and supervision, but requires business insight, extending its work to the whole business process, understanding the real needs of front-end business, providing business analysis and decision support for business departments, and realizing the integration of business and finance. Take the company's Herborist brand for an example, the first Chinese herbal skin care brand rooted in the concept of yin-yang balance, which continued to lose market share from 2014-2019. Min Hanled the finance team to work with the business unit to examine the brand's product matrix, new product recruitment rate, repurchase rate, cost analysis of core individual products, brand marketing delivery efficiency, CRM customer retention, POS system single store transaction data, and impact on financial statement revenue and earnings, so that the brand has continued to improve over the past three years and has been awarded $22.5 million in 2021 from a special government program to support its medium to long-term growth.

The reason that Shanghai Jahwa can lead the industry in every stage of its 125 years of development cannot be separated from its advanced, open and inclusive corporate management philosophy and its genetically-rooted Shanghai-style characteristics. ESG management, digital transformation and integration of business and finance outline a beautiful blueprint for Shanghai Jahwa's development in the medium to long term. Grasping the pulse of the times and integrating the century-old craftsmanship culture, we believe that in the near future, Shanghai Jahwa will bring Chinese beauty to the world.