This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 5, 2025 - May 11, 2025

AS one of Malaysia’s earliest established pharmacy chains, Guardian Malaysia now finds itself racing to keep pace in a fiercely competitive market. The emergence of new pharmacy players over recent decades has heightened competition, making market share retention a growing challenge.

Guardian Malaysia, including its distribution centres and 554 stores, has a total workforce of about 4,000. Of the 554 stores, about 100 have a pharmacist.

“[Our] 554 stores puts us as the second-largest health and beauty retailer in the right place, the right way, so that we are really serving the community, and our approach has to give us a sustainable future. What we do now has to bear fruit over the next five to 10 years, and perhaps even 57 years to come because of our interest in growing with the country,” its managing director Priscilla Wu tells The Edge in an interview at its headquarters in Petaling Jaya.

Guardian Malaysia’s journey began nearly 58 years ago in 1967, when it was set up to cater for the community’s need for pharmaceutical and quality personal care products. Over the decades, the company has expanded its offerings to include health and beauty products.

Wu explains that personal care products have always been part and parcel of what a pharmacy retailer carries. However, the company has included a wider range of health and beauty products to offer more refined solutions in keeping with the evolution of consumer demands.

“When consumers look for total beauty or health solutions, they look for ingestibles such as supplements as well as topicals, and this is where our over-the-counter range comes into play. As for the beauty range, it is not illogical for a pharmacy player to carry beauty products because skin is the biggest organ. Naturally, as people get more sophisticated, they do look for a more total solution and that naturally extends into appearance and aesthetics,” she explains.

While Wu does not provide a breakdown of the subsegments’ contribution to the company’s revenue, she notes: “For Malaysia, which has a demographic and age profile that’s [well] spread, our products are quite evenly distributed between healthcare, personal care and beauty care. Preventive as well as pharmaceutical, referring to corrective measures, are a part of healthcare,” she says.

“In markets like Singapore and Hong Kong, in which sophistication has reached ‘a certain state’, the revenue tends to be more ‘health-centric’, whereas Indonesia and Vietnam tend to lean more towards beauty-centric due to the younger demographic,” she adds.

Guardian Malaysia, whose stores are owned by Guardian Health And Beauty Sdn Bhd, is part of Hong Kong-based DFI Retail Group Holdings Ltd, a major retailer with revenue of US$25 billion in 2024, with an underlying profit of US$201 million. DFI is a member of British multinational conglomerate Jardine Matheson Group.

According to DFI’s 2024 annual report, the retail group operates its health and beauty business via the Guardian and Mannings brands in more than 1,500 stores across the region. The group also operates convenience chain 7-Eleven in Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong and Singapore; home furnishing brand Ikea in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Indonesia; and restaurants as well as multiformat retailers in the region.

In February 2023, DFI announced the divestment of GCH Retail Group — the operator of Cold Storage, Giant and Mercato in Malaysia — to Malaysian retail group Macrovalue Sdn Bhd, which is co-owned by local businessmen and entrepreneurs Datuk Andrew Lim Tatt Keong and Datuk Gary Yap Keng Fatt. In March 2025, Macrovalue agreed to buy 48 Cold Storage stores and 41 Giant supermarkets in Singapore from DFI for an indicative price of US$125 million in a deal that is expected to be completed in the second half of this year.

Data in DFI’s 2024 annual report shows that the retail group’s food segment brings in the lion’s share of revenue (35.2%), followed by health and beauty (27.6%), convenience (26.7%) and home furnishing (7.9%).

According to Wu, Guardian Malaysia commands a market share of about 24% of the nation’s health and beauty channel.

“The way that market share is measured needs to be modernised. First, it still does not capture online sales. And second, it only captures a handful of retailers,” she remarks.

Company search data shows that Guardian Malaysia turned the corner after recording a net loss of RM258 million for the financial year ended Dec 31, 2018, to make a net profit of RM25.94 million in the subsequent year on 9.6% higher revenue of RM1.34 billion (FY2019) from RM1.2 billion in the preceding year. The company went on to post a net profit of RM31.28 million on revenue of RM1.58 billion in FY2022, giving it a net profit margin of 1.98% in that year.

“We’re still growing,” Wu says of Guardian Malaysia’s top line in subsequent years. “We need to be able to grow faster than [the rate of] inflation. Therefore, [our growth] has to be 2% to 3% above it, so we can reinvest in the business.

“We created some ‘noise’ last year with our brand relaunch [which included] the store restorative programme [in which the company refreshed the look of its stores]. If we don’t do it now, we may no longer be relevant. In the next two to three years, we will have to reinvest to pay for the debt that [the company] created under the previous legacy.”

She says Guardian Malaysia will be among DFI’s key investments and priorities for future growth and that the capital expenditure, which she declines to spell out, will go to the opening of new stores.

Guardian Malaysia underwent a rationalisation exercise late last year, closing about 36 outlets in November and December. Wu explains that many of the stores opened during the Covid-19 period proved unproductive, prompting the closures. “It’s not wrong to be aggressive, but it must be grounded in reality and actual sales performance,” she notes.

“Just because we closed a number of stores does not mean that we stop growing. Rationalisation of the store network is only natural,” says Wu.

“In addition, we will roll out a new store design. We are going to take about 4½ years to change the entire network into a consistent look and feel. There are two pilot stores ready — in Shah Alam and Bandar Kinrara.

“In the current state of Malaysia’s economy, Guardian should be opening 20 stores a year. That has been the target for the last 10 to 15 years.”

A low hanging fruit on which Guardian Malaysia will capitalise is its loyalty programme, which was launched in March.

“Guardian was one of the very few retail players that didn’t have a loyalty programme. We will be using it to understand our customers’ offline and online behaviour better. With AI helping with the data analytics, [we] can help to curate the best offers that we think will benefit them,” says Wu.

On navigating the ongoing global trade war and its potential impact on the group’s supply chain, she says Guardian Malaysia will carry on with its strategy of supporting more local products.

“To rebalance our portfolio range to support more local products, we are creating an incubation platform for local businesses to test consumer demand on their products. We have listed a large number of local products and the goal is to get to 30 brands [for now, as part of having a credible range to show],” she says.

“We have more than 15 brands now,” she adds, naming home-grown names such as skincare brands The Raw, Dododots and Lumi Beauty. “This initiative has become quite timely [amid] the US tariff situation and helps to confirm that this is the direction we want to continue in.”

Wu explains that the group’s network gives local entrepreneurs a gateway to expand regionally.

“Dododots is a very successful case. We enlisted them exclusively, and now we have managed to get them to start selling in Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong. One of the goals is to have the local community serve a wider market through us,” she says. 

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