Making herbal cosmetics is nothing new for Link who is already supplying a range of products for hotels and spas here and overseas. The company now wants to enter the premium retail space, with caution.
“The cosmetics market is crowded, so we want to focus on bringing out the benefits of herbal personal care products,” says Achini Dharmasiriwardana, who heads Link’s personal care unit. The company wants to replicate the success of its herbal healthcare brands.
Link’s success over the years has been due to its ability to make Ayurvedic medicines and healthcare easily accessible to many people.
Extracting health benefits from herbs and medicinal plants is a challenge for most people because ingredients are hard to find, especially in urban areas. Also, preparation is complex and time consuming. Link Natural’s products, eliminating these challenges, makes over-the-counter, ready-to-use Ayurvedic medicines, and herbal healthcare and personal care products ranging from common cold remedy Samahan, toothpaste Sudantha and herbal teas to hair oils, body washes and moisturizers.
Link, a subsidiary of listed agriculture firm CIC Holdings PLC, employs nearly 700 people in its factory at Dompe, 30km west of Colombo. The factory’s extraction plant processes over 300 herbs to be used as raw materials for its products. The herbs are cultivated by over 350 rural out-grower farmers. The products go through a series of quality control tests at different stages of production from quarantine, manual selection, purification, extraction and blending according to old Ayurvedic recipes or new ones developed by Link scientists. Samahan contains extracts of 14 herbs and Sudantha toothpaste uses nine.
Samahan, launched in 1995, dominates the local market and meets stringent regulatory requirements in the US and Canada, to where it is exported. Samahan is also exported to India, Japan, the UAE, Russia, Latvia and a few other countries. The company’s herbal healthcare range is exported to 23 countries including Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. Essential oils from nutmeg, cloves and pepper are exported to flavour and fragrance companies.
The company’s average revenue grew 17% over the last five years. CIC does not disaggregate the revenue of firms that are part of the group. Link’s parent CIC’s revenue topped Rs26 billion in the year to March 2016, with the personal care segment (which includes Link) contributing Rs6 billion.