Strengths:Under the direction of Owen Jones and his strong American management style, L'Oreal has gone through a transformation from a European-based cosmetics company to a global leader in the cosmetics industry . L'Oreal's particular skill is to buy local cosmetics brands, renovate them and export them around the world. Their good brand management is about reaching the right audience with the right product, through a very carefully crafted portfolio. Each brand is positioned exactly to fill a certain market or product niche. The name L'Oreal will always be linked to Parisian sophistication, but now the more modern L'Oreal is only French when it wants to be, and the company is eager to do so. represent all nationalities. L'Oreal is aware that in the global market you need to be diversified and flexible, especially in advertising campaigns, a danger for many cosmetic companies in the global market is trying to "impose a type of Western beauty on the world", says Owen Jones. This attitude is reflected in many L'Oreal advertisements. L'Oreal has made concentrated efforts to create new markets through its African hair care line Soft-Sheen/Carson. They formed a strategic alliance with Japan's Shu Uemura in an attempt to gain a foothold in the rapidly expanding Asian market. Another of L'Oreal's biggest strengths is that they are a "science-based" beauty company, spending 3% of their revenue on research, compared to the industry standard of less than 2%. They are always looking for niche markets, as demonstrated by the opening of a research laboratory in Chicago to study the properties of African hair. They are quite aware in today's economy that even with small technological improvements you need to get it to market to sell it, and the easiest way to own a market is to be the sole source for a new product. Weaknesses: Thanks to L'Oreal In global expansion, even if business declines in one area, they can still expect revenue from another. The company's biggest weakness at the moment is the impending retirement of CEO Owen Jones in 2006: Many investors see Owen Jones as "at the heart of L'Oreal's current valuation," says Sandhya Raju, cosmetics industry analyst at Merrill Lynch in London. had some difficulty expanding into the Japanese market; in an effort to find products better suited to the Asian psyche, they purchased a 35% stake in Shu Uemura. They are considering a friendly takeover in the near future.