Over the past year, uncertainty has become the new normal, with geopolitical fluctuations, adjustments in tariff policies, and unprecedented complexity in compliance and legal risks presenting particularly intensive challenges for Chinese companies expanding overseas. However, under such stress tests, Chinese enterprises have demonstrated remarkable adaptability and resilience. "Every time there is external volatility, the traffic on our platform actually increases," said Li Lijie, Vice President of Focus Technology, to the reporter. The latest data from the General Administration of Customs shows that in 2025, China's total foreign trade import and export value reached 45.47 trillion yuan, achieving a relatively rapid growth of 3.8%, marking the ninth consecutive year of growth. Within this, exports amounted to 26.99 trillion yuan, growing by 6.1%. This resilience is reflected in structural shifts across three levels: market strategy diversifying from concentration, competitive models shifting from low price to branding, and operational methods moving from labor-intensive to intelligence-driven. Companies are no longer passively responding to risks but are proactively building anti-risk capabilities.
The effectiveness of this transformation is also evident in the data. Amazon.com data indicates that in 2025, the number of Chinese sellers with sales exceeding $2 million, $5 million, and $8 million all grew by more than 20%, while the number of sellers with sales exceeding $10 million saw an increase of nearly 30%. The fluctuations in the external environment throughout 2025 have profoundly reshaped the trade landscape; rather than crippling Chinese companies going global, these challenges have accelerated the emergence of a more resilient and diverse new ecosystem for globalization.
The narrative of "going global" in 2026 is no longer centered on a single market. The relative importance of the traditional core market, the United States, has declined, with industry attention shifting more towards incremental opportunities outside the US. This change is driven by multiple factors: increased instability in the external environment, the gradual maturation of emerging markets, and companies' urgent need for risk diversification. Since April 2025, US tariff policies towards China have fluctuated frequently, at one point pushing rates as high as 125%, and also eliminating the duty-free treatment for packages valued under $800. These changes have had a significant impact on Chinese companies that primarily rely on cost-effectiveness and the US market. "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" has become an industry consensus. A survey by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade in April showed that nearly 50% of enterprises plan to reduce their business with the US, while 75.3% intend to expand into emerging markets to compensate for the reduced share of exports to the US.
Behind this shifting market share is the adaptability and evolutionary instinct displayed by China's foreign trade under pressure. According to customs statistics, China's imports and exports with the US in 2025 amounted to 4.01 trillion yuan, accounting for only 8.8% of China's total import and export value. Meanwhile, markets outside the US developed rapidly, effectively cushioning the impact of volatility in traditional markets. "In 2025, more and more clients chose Europe as a key breakthrough," Zhang Xing, Chief Growth Officer of SparkXGlobal, told the reporter. "Some clients shifted to Europe passively in response to the trade war in April 2025; but there are also clients who are 'born global,' setting Europe as a key market from the start, and the performance of these enterprises is more stable." Customs statistics show that in 2025, China's imports and exports with the European Union reached 5.93 trillion yuan, an increase of 6%, accounting for 13% of China's total import and export value and contributing 0.8 percentage points to the growth of China's foreign trade.
Emerging markets are also attracting significant attention. China's imports and exports with countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative reached 23.6 trillion yuan, growing by 6.3%, accounting for over half of the total import and export value. Exports to these countries grew by 11.2%, contributing 5.4 percentage points to export growth. ASEAN has been China's largest export market for three consecutive years, while export growth to emerging markets like Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa all outpaced the overall average. "In business-to-consumer sectors, some retail clients tend to focus their market布局 on regions like Latin America or Southeast Asia, which have large population bases, providing broad market potential and a consumer foundation for related business development," said Wang Yijia, Head of Financial Services Business for North Asia at TMF Group, to the reporter.
E-commerce platforms are also actively guiding this shift. In early 2025, Alibaba International Station announced it would double its investment targeting core European markets, with European orders surging 57% year-on-year. Amazon.com also recently issued a fee adjustment notice for its European stations in 2026, with commission reductions for some categories reaching up to 10 percentage points. TikTok Shop has also accelerated its entry into emerging markets, adding multiple sites in Europe, Latin America, and Asia in 2025. In the new year, the growth performance in emerging markets will also be a key focus for platforms.
Amid the tariff "shockwave" in the first half of 2025, some companies chose to adjust their pricing strategies to cope with rising export costs. Price increases became a key strategy for many enterprises dealing with external volatility in 2025, but this also tested their market bargaining power and brand competitiveness. "When prices rise, you find that: if your product has a brand, you have bargaining power, and customers are willing to pay," said Deng Hui, Vice President of Sales for Large Customer Department, Google China, to the reporter. Several branded companies also revealed to the reporter that after the external environment changed, they largely maintained their established business rhythms, and even with some price increases, they still had stable and loyal customer bases. This has also prompted many companies that were previously hesitant about branding to accelerate their transformation.
Currently, coastal provinces like Zhejiang and Guangdong, leveraging mature industrial clusters, have formed integrated "production-research-sales" supply chain systems. Chinese manufacturing is transitioning from pure original equipment manufacturing to original design manufacturing and original brand manufacturing. Amazon.com data shows that in 2025, sales from brand sellers already accounted for over 90% of the total sales of Chinese sellers on mature marketplaces. Wu Yulin, Senior Business Development Director for China at The Trade Desk, told the reporter that there is a clear sense that more and more overseas-bound enterprises recognize the importance of branding, increasing investment in brand building, emphasizing deep communication with consumers, and making the accumulation of brand equity a strategic priority for development.
Strategic adjustments on the platform side are even more pronounced. The "Four Little Dragons" of overseas expansion, which previously swept the globe with their ultra-low prices through managed models, have rarely emphasized "low price" over the past year. The most prominent performer, Pinduoduo's Temu, stated at its annual shareholders' meeting in December 2025 that it is promoting a comprehensive upgrade of its operational model, with high quality and branding as the core direction; the relatively low-profile AliExpress heavily emphasized branding in 2025, launching a "Super Brand Going Global Plan," and saw an 80% year-on-year increase in the number of brands with million-dollar sales during overseas Singles' Day and Black Friday. "Our brand's product assortment and high-average-order-value goods are gradually surpassing some mid-to-low average-order-value items in terms of transaction volume," Yan Zhi, Head of Brand Overseas Business at AliExpress, told the reporter. "The brand-oriented product assortment has become the growth engine for AliExpress." Meanwhile, in overseas markets, numerous high-average-order-value, technologically advanced, and value-added brands have emerged in recent years. The BrandZ 2025 Top Chinese Global Brands list and insights report show that the brand value of the Top 50 Chinese global brands achieved a compound annual growth rate of 13% between 2023 and 2025. At the recently concluded CES, the number of exhibiting companies from China exceeded a thousand, spanning robotics, consumer electronics, AI chips, entire vehicle manufacturing, smart driving, and core components.
From an industry perspective, the product competitiveness of Chinese enterprises has formed a superposition of multiple advantages. On one hand, Chinese companies have a complete supply chain system and capacity distribution, which provides sufficient confidence when competing with international brands. On the other hand, based on years of R&D investment and manufacturing experience, Chinese companies have accumulated sufficient technology and product expertise, possess strong innovation awareness, and demonstrate very fast iteration speeds. "Only by building a brand can one transcend economic cycles, break away from low-end production models, and shift towards creating solutions that generate more consumer demand and higher profits," Yan Zhi told the reporter. "I believe that in the next decade, a group of new quality Chinese brands will emerge."
In this new era with new opportunities, the most obvious enabler is technology. In 2025, AI technology entered the stage of large-scale application, becoming a key variable for overseas-bound enterprises to build differentiated advantages. Whether traditional manufacturing enterprises or emerging cross-border e-commerce sellers, all are actively embracing AI tools to build differentiated advantages in global competition. Based on current applications, the most mature scenarios where AI empowers overseas expansion are主要集中在 content creation and operational optimization. "Nowadays, almost no merchant hasn't used AI, it's just a matter of the extent of usage," said Zheng Yanqin, COO of Xiaoman Technology, to the reporter. In terms of practical application, enterprises have now moved beyond the initial barriers of awareness and cost and are entering a deeper stage of business integration and value realization.
Platforms are important drivers in this process. Over the past year, leading e-commerce platforms have been frequently active in the AI field: eBay deepened its cooperation with OpenAI, launching a full-stack AI tool matrix covering product selection, listing, marketing, and customer service; Amazon.com recently released groundbreaking Agentic AI innovations and full-process AI tools; Alibaba International Station launched four AI Agents for sellers covering reception, product listing, operations, and conversion, embedding inquiry response, information collection, product generation, and data analysis into daily business processes. An Amazon.com survey showed that nearly two-thirds of respondent Chinese sellers have used the big data and generative AI tools and services provided by Amazon. Since its launch in December 2024, the Amazon Brand Name Generator had attracted nearly 1 million global visits by November 2025. These AI tools help enterprises rapidly improve operational efficiency even before a full reserve of professional talent is established, technically mitigating challenges posed by talent shortages, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises where cost reduction and efficiency gains are immediate.
"AI is changing the organizational structure and operational models of cross-border e-commerce. Traditional cross-border e-commerce teams required a dozen people to collaborate with division of labor, but the application of AI technology is restructuring this human efficiency relationship. We have already seen Chinese sellers on Amazon achieving an 'one-person company' operational model through deep application of AI tools," stated Amazon Global Selling to the reporter. Beyond optimizations in surface-level tools like marketing, customer service, or translation, the deeper impact of AI lies in its deep integration with supply chain capabilities, thereby reconstructing the underlying logic of the entire cross-border business and its global expansion methods, shifting overseas expansion from being "resource-driven" to "intelligence-driven."
It is worth noting that the application of AI is not about replacing human labor but rather an upgrade towards human-machine collaboration. Currently, the deep application of AI technology still faces challenges. The "hallucination" problem of large models and the technical difficulties in integrating with vertical businesses require continuous debugging and optimization. However, the evolution speed of AI is extremely fast. In this process, whether a company benefits depends more on its ability to break cognitive boundaries and adjust organizational capabilities, thereby finding its new position in the rapidly changing ecosystem. Overall, AI is becoming a key driver for enterprises to "go global" efficiently, agilely, and safely. As AI technology penetrates deeply, industry views suggest that Chinese brands are facing a strategic window of opportunity, potentially achieving a "corner overtaking" in the global market.
Returning to the present in 2026, volatility has not ceased, but the response of overseas-bound enterprises has shifted from short-term adaptation to long-term capability building. "The external environment in 2025 was complex and volatile, but Chinese sellers' businesses were still able to maintain healthy and sound growth, indicating that enterprises have significantly improved their anti-risk capabilities," Lin Wenkui, General Manager of Greater China for eBay's International Cross-Border Trade Division, previously told the reporter. Whether it's supply chain resilience, brand沉淀, or technology penetration, all point towards a healthier and more sustainable phase of globalization. In this process, the endogenous strength of Chinese companies going global is also continuously growing, and this is perhaps the most fundamental source of their resilience.
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