China’s Biggest Beauty Firm Lays Out Strategy to Rival L’Oréal

Proya Cosmetics Co.’s gleaming headquarters in Hangzhou, in Zhejiang province, is just steps downhill from the offices of Alibaba’s wildly successful fintech arm. “We bought facilities on the same site, and theirs are just slightly higher in elevation,” says Juncheng Hou, Proya’s billionaire co-founder and chairman. “In China, we say that when water flows from higher ground, it carries prosperity. So all of Alibaba’s ‘prosperous water’ flows down to Proya.”

That proximity…