Women to Watch Greater China 2022: Christy Iu, Treasury Wine Estates

Christy Iu

Marketing director, Penfolds Greater China
Treasury Wine Estates
Shanghai 

From 2012 to 2021, Christy Iu, marketing director of Penfolds Greater China, helped Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) reach a leading position in the Chinese imported wine market. Penfolds, its leading brand, ranked No. 1 in the imported wine category on the JD and Tmall’s lists for ecommerce brand value and imported brand sales. 

Back in 2015, when Penfolds was in ninth place in the Chinese imported wine ranking, Iu moved from Hong Kong to Shanghai and was promoted to North Asia marketing director of TWE. With her integrated marketing strategies and innovations, Rawson's Retreat, a sub-brand of Penfolds, recorded triple-digit growth in brand awareness between 2015 and 2019. Widely popular among the millennial generation, the sales volume grew from 30,000 cases to 700,000 cases in four years. 

Leading the marketing communications team, Iu sets an example of inclusive leadership, fulfilling diversity and inclusion and caring about the physical and mental well-being of the team. She also sets up incentives for staff to have sustainable and healthy career paths. She grew the group's marketing section from two people in 2015 to a multi-functional team of 50 in 2019, covering the gamut of functions: branding, PR, strategy and consumer insights, channel marketing, consumer education and social-media operations. 

In a male-dominated industry, Iu was the only Asian female executive in the Australian listed group until 2018. She was nominated by the group managing director of Asia Pacific and won the Mary Penfolds Award Global Top 5, an internal women leadership award, in 2019. She became the jury adviser of WINWA (Women in Wine & Spirit Award) in 2020. That same year Penfolds was ranked No. 1 in the wine category, with a brand value of  40.10 billion RMB (US$6.3 billion), in the 2020 Global Top 100 Wines List released by China Association for Liquor & Spirits Circulation and China Brand Strategy Research Institute. 

In addition, Iu is practising sustainable development strategies. For the production chain of growing and winemaking, she advocates the long-term goal of sustainable development and promotes the implementation of projects about environmentally friendly packaging, the production of sustainable wines and the cultivation of healthy and inclusive communities.

Iu began her advertising and PR career in Hong Kong and worked with global wine and spirits brands, including Pernod Ricard and Edrington.