SEOUL, August 17 (AJP) - The South Korean conglomerate behind bibigo dumplings, Olive Young beauty stores and the KCON music festival is rebuilding its American operations, betting that people who watch Korean shows will keep buying Korean food and cosmetics.
CJ Group has put a number on it, aiming for 12 trillion won ($8.49 billion )in North American revenue in 2028, about a 50 percent increase from more than 8 trillion won it took in there last year.
Last year's figure was already more than 10 times the roughly 800 billion won the group recorded in 2017, growth that averaged about 33 percent a year.
The plan came out at a briefing on Aug. 15 (local time) at the Hilton Los Angeles North Glendale, where executives from the food, entertainment and beauty businesses described how the three will be linked so that cultural interest converts into repeat purchases.
Heo Min-hoe, chief executive of CJ Corp., the group's holding company, said the pieces have been more than three decades in the making.
"We will build an ecosystem that carries the popularity of the K-wave into K-lifestyle experience, and accelerate our advance into the North American market," he said.
CJ invested in the American film studio DreamWorks in 1995 and staged the first U.S. edition of KCON, a festival pairing K-pop concerts with Korean food and cosmetics, in 2012. The acquisitions came later, among them the Minnesota frozen food company Schwan's in 2019 and the content studio Fifth Season in 2021, bringing cumulative investment in North America to 9.7 trillion won as of the first half of this year.
Schwan's changed the arithmetic more than any other purchase, because its plants and its shelf space carried bibigo, CJ CheilJedang's Korean food brand, into roughly 80,000 American stores including Walmart, Kroger and Costco. CJ CheilJedang now runs 20 production sites across the United States and booked 4.91 trillion won in American sales last year.
Kim Jin-sik, a co-chief executive of CJ America, described the sequence the group is counting on.
"We will extend American consumers' interest in K-content into habitual, repeated consumption of K-food and beauty, and that will lead back into offline cultural experience, creating a virtuous cycle," he said.
Food carries the largest share of the target. CJ CheilJedang plans to widen local production and distribution, and to move the advantage it built in frozen food into shelf-stable products, the category that needs no freezer space at home or in the store.
Federico Arreola, president of the Asian cuisine business unit at CJ Schwan's, said the lineup will broaden well past the dumplings that opened the door.
"Beyond dumplings, we will actively grow global strategic products such as Hetbahn rice, chicken, seaweed snacks, kimchi and K-sauces, and raise bibigo into a global brand enjoyed at any table in the world," he said.
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