Ahava (company)

Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories, Limited

Type	Private
Industry	Cosmetics
Founded	1988; 29 years ago (1988)
Headquarters	Holon, Israel
Products	Skin care
Revenue	$150 million
Owner	Fosun International
Number of employees	200
Website	http://www.ahava.com/

Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories, Limited (Hebrew: אהבה‎‎, Love) is an Israeli cosmetics company with headquarters in Lod that manufactures skin care products made of mud and mineral-based compounds from the Dead Sea. The company has flagship stores in Israel, Germany, Hungary, South Korea, the Philippines and Singapore. As of 2015^[update], Ahava income was more than US$150 million a year. Ahava products have caused controversy, as critics say the company uses natural resources of occupied Palestinian territory, and that the products are incorrectly labeled as made in Israel. In 2015 the Chinese investment firm Fosun International agreed to purchase a controlling share of the company, which has been valuated to ca. NIS 300 million ($77 million USD).

The company's administrative headquarters are currently located in Holon, while the main manufacturing plant and showroom are in Mitzpe Shalem, an Israeli settlement and kibbutz located on the Dead Sea in the West Bank. However, as of 2016, they are vacating their Mitzpe Shalem factory in the West Bank and building a new factory on land leased by Kibbutz Ein Gedi.

Ziva Gilad, a spa technician, came up with the idea of marketing Dead Sea mud after watching women tourists scooping up the mud to take home. Ahava was founded in 1988 as a single stand selling bottles of body scrub to tourists, generating $1 million that year.

As of 2010, Ahava is the only cosmetics company licensed by the Israeli government to mine raw materials at the Dead Sea. On the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, there are approximately fifty small companies producing cosmetics, but only 15 have a global presence. Israel has imported raw materials for its Dead Sea mud cosmetics from Jordan since 1994.