Czech Pharmacies Now Stock 500 K-Beauty Products
Dr. Max runs a Korean-cosmetics category in its Czech and Slovak pharmacies carrying around 500 products, and about 100 in Italy. Beauty of Joseon sits in roughly 600 of Drogasil's 2,000 Brazilian stores. Apotek Hjärtat in Sweden and Life Pharmacy in the UAE run Korean skincare categories on their online stores. None of these is a beauty retailer. The second overseas shelf K-beauty has opened this cycle is staffed by pharmacists, and it does not buy on trend.
Which pharmacy chains are carrying Korean cosmetics?
The pattern spans four continents and does not run through a single Korean company. In Czechia, Dr. Max carries a Korean-cosmetics category of around 500 products including COSRX, Anua, SKIN1004 and Dr. Jart+. Its Slovak operation runs a category of similar size and its Italian operation about 100 products. In Sweden, Apotek Hjärtat operates a Korean skincare category online carrying COSRX, Anua and TIRTIR. In the UAE, Life Pharmacy runs a Korean beauty category online that includes APR's beauty devices alongside Beauty of Joseon, SKIN1004 and COSRX. In Brazil, Beauty of Joseon entered roughly 600 Drogasil stores. In Georgia, the same brand entered PSP Pharma in October 2026 with around 20 products, among them a rice sunscreen, a ginseng serum and a face cream.
Two clarifications are worth making early, because the figures circulate in garbled form. The 500 in Czechia counts products, not pharmacies. The 600 in Brazil counts stores, not products. These counts were reported in October 2026 and the chains have not published them individually.
How large are these networks?
Dr. Max Group states that it operates more than 3,300 pharmacies as it entered the second half of 2026, with a joint-venture interest in a further 580 or so, across six core markets: Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Poland, Italy and Serbia. It reports 2025 revenue of €6.3 billion, up 14.7%, says it expects to exceed €7 billion in 2026, and employs more than 22,000 people. The company also describes itself as Europe's largest pharmacy chain by number of pharmacies; that is the group's own characterisation of its position.
Drogasil reached 2,000 pharmacies in operation in Brazil during 2025. It is one of two banners operated by RD Saúde, which reports more than 3,300 stores across Drogasil and Raia combined and a presence in every Brazilian state.
Scale is the first reason this channel is not a curiosity. A category decision taken once at a chain of this size reaches more doors than most brands assemble through specialty retail in several years, and it reaches them without a local entity, a flagship or a marketing budget per market.
Why does a pharmacy abroad sell skincare at all?
This is where Korean intuition misleads, and it is the reason the development has been under-read from Seoul. A Korean pharmacy is typically a small independent business built around dispensing and over-the-counter medicines, with cosmetics a negligible share of the floor. The word carries that image.
The overseas chains in question are large-format retail. They carry medicines alongside skincare, suncare, personal care and household goods, with the buying function, private-label programmes and category management of a retail group. Dr. Max's €6.3 billion of 2025 revenue is not a dispensary number. When these businesses create a Korean-cosmetics category, they are making the same kind of decision a drugstore chain makes, not the kind a chemist makes.
So the phrase pharmacy channel means something different in Seoul than it does in Prague or São Paulo, and the gap in meaning is roughly the size of the opportunity.
What is the pharmacy shelf actually selling?
Goodai Global's account of why the channel matters is that pharmacies abroad are understood as places selling products a pharmacist has vetted, so a listing signals that the product was accepted by the distribution network local consumers trust most. That is the company's framing of its own entry, and it is the correct description of the mechanism even allowing for the source.
The distinction from a beauty retailer is not about prestige. It is about what the buyer is underwriting. A beauty retailer underwrites interest: the question is whether the product will sell this season, and the curator's own authority is what the shopper is responding to. A pharmacy underwrites suitability: the question is whether the product holds up, because a pharmacist who recommends it is lending professional standing to the recommendation.
That changes the shape of the risk. A beauty listing can end after one soft quarter or one change of editorial direction. A pharmacy category, once established and once the staff are comfortable recommending from it, turns slowly in both directions. It is harder to enter and harder to be removed from.
What demand is this channel answering?
The pharmacy shelf did not invent a category; it grew into one that was already expanding. Euromonitor puts the global dermocosmetics market at about US$20.82 billion in 2020 and about US$36.94 billion in 2025, a rise of 77.4%.
The behaviour underneath that number is consumers comparing named actives and claimed effects rather than brands — ceramides, cica, PDRN — which is a mode of shopping a pharmacy is organised to serve and a beauty hall is not. Korean formulations arrived at that conversation with an ingredient-led vocabulary already built, which is why the category found them rather than the other way round.
Which Korean companies are inside this channel?
The named brands cluster more than the geography suggests. COSRX appears in Dr. Max in Czechia, in Apotek Hjärtat and in Life Pharmacy. Anua appears in the first two. SKIN1004 appears in Dr. Max and Life Pharmacy. Beauty of Joseon is in Life Pharmacy, Drogasil and now PSP Pharma. TIRTIR is in Apotek Hjärtat. APR sits in Life Pharmacy with devices rather than skincare, and Dr. Jart+, owned by Estée Lauder, appears in Dr. Max.
Several of those listings share an owner. Goodai Global holds Beauty of Joseon, TIRTIR and SKIN1004 among its brands, so a channel that looks like a broad industry movement is in part one house of brands appearing repeatedly under different names. That is a meaningful qualification to any reading of the channel's breadth.
Can the channel's contribution be sized from what is public?
No, and the gap is worth stating plainly rather than filling with estimates.
What is on the record about Goodai Global is mostly capital, not trading. The company raised 800 billion won — US$601 million at the 16 October 2026 Seoul rate of 1,331.4 won to the dollar, which is the rate used throughout this article — from IMM Private Equity, JKL Partners, Premier Partners, Kiwoom Private Equity and Company K Partners, reported in December 2025 at a valuation put at US$3.1 billion. The company said in early February 2026 that it had acquired Hansung USA, a distributor of Korean beauty brands to American offline retailers; the price of about 100 billion won (US$75 million) and the controlling stake were attributed to investment-banking sources rather than to a filing, and the reporting did not state whether the transaction had closed. Hansung USA's revenue was reported at about 170 billion won (US$128 million) for 2025 against about 80 billion won (US$60 million) for 2024, with no source named for either figure.
The listing picture is looser still. Goodai was reported to have sent a request for proposal to around 14 securities firms late in 2025 and to have shortlisted five domestic and six foreign houses. Financial investors have been reported as targeting more than 10 trillion won — US$7.5 billion — in an eventual listing, a figure sitting several times above the valuation reported ten months earlier and supported by no filing. Company statements have put the intention at a listing within three years; press accounts have placed it variously in 2026 and as late as 2028.
Against that, the pharmacy entries carry no disclosed revenue at all — not a figure per chain, not a share of sales, not a growth rate. The channel is visible in store counts and product counts and invisible in financials. Anyone sizing its contribution right now is estimating.
What does a pharmacy buyer require that a beauty buyer does not?
A dossier, principally. Claim substantiation that survives a pharmacist being asked a direct question across a counter, ingredient documentation that matches the regulatory file in that specific market, and supply stability, because a pharmacy category that runs out teaches staff to stop recommending from it.
Those requirements fall unevenly across the industry. They favour companies whose manufacturing partners already hold the certifications and assemble the documentation — which in Korean practice usually means the large ODMs — and they penalise brands whose proposition is packaging, a creator partnership or speed to a trend. The channel is open to K-beauty generally and to a narrower set of Korean companies specifically.
Where does this leave the industry?
For manufacturers, the dossier is becoming the product. A channel that buys on substantiation shifts value toward whoever can produce and maintain the evidence file per market, and that capability sits with the contract manufacturer more often than with the brand.
For brands and buyers, a second shelf has opened with a different failure mode from the first. The beauty retailer shelf is faster to win and faster to lose; the pharmacy shelf is slower at both ends. Treating them as interchangeable distribution is a planning error, because the inventory, documentation and support commitments behind them are not the same commitments.
For regulators and investors, the channel is currently unmeasurable. Store counts and product counts exist, revenue does not, and a company reported to be approaching a listing at a valuation several times what it carried ten months earlier has not disclosed what any of this sells. The pharmacy shelf is real. Its contribution is not yet a number.
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