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Chinese companies are standing at a historic crossroads. To achieve a qualitative shift from “exporting products” to “exporting capabilities,” and to become truly global enterprises—this is far from easy.
From a macro perspective, the Chinese economy still demonstrates strong resilience. Data released by China’s General Administration of Customs shows that China’s full-year trade surplus in 2025 reached USD 1.189 trillion, making it the first country in human history to have a trade surplus exceeding USD 1 trillion 1.
However, behind this growth curve, Chinese enterprises’ globalization process is entering “deep waters.” As companies rapidly expand their geographic footprint, management friction and complexity continue to rise. Many enterprises face typical dilemmas: “the product wins but the brand doesn’t; the scale grows but profits thin out; people are sent abroad but hearts aren’t kept.”
Therefore, going global for Chinese enterprises is not easy. Companies not only need to respond to rapidly changing international conditions, but also to confront internal capability shortfalls—these shortfalls have become the core bottlenecks restricting their global value upgrading. Although many Chinese enterprises have strong R&D capabilities, when moving onto the international stage, they often still lack the strategic calmness and brand confidence they should have.
Path dependency of “hard over soft”
To unravel the deep paradox between macro growth and micro difficulties, one must directly address its core root cause: for a long time, Chinese enterprises have shown a clear tendency toward “hard over soft” in the process of globalization. This imbalance is becoming an invisible shackle that prevents companies from achieving leapfrogging development.
In “hard power” dimensions such as infrastructure, resource building, and technology adoption, Chinese enterprises have demonstrated astonishing resource allocation efficiency and determination to drive change. Among China’s Top 500 Private Enterprises, R&D intensity per household reached 2.77%, already exceeding the OECD country average of 2. In addition, 53% of Chinese enterprises are connecting and integrating multiple processes through AI—far higher than the global average of 11%3.
By contrast, at the “soft power” level, Chinese enterprises still face severe challenges, including a disconnect between brand strength and product strength. In the BrandZ global top 100 brand value list, Chinese brands account for only 6% of total brand value, while US brands account for as much as 82%4. With a disconnect between digital core investment and vision, private enterprises’ average investment in the digital core is only 1.2% of revenue, far below the global multinational company average of 3.5%5.
This kind of investment deficit is evolving into a gap in global collaboration efficiency. Global-leading enterprises are more easily able to achieve real-time sensing of global data and integrated decision-making, evolving into an organic whole capable of “global sensing and rapid decision-making.” By contrast, under-investing Chinese enterprises are often trapped in “overseas information silos,” leading to perception lag between headquarters and global markets and decision-making time differences.
Chinese enterprises urgently need to move from “nomadic-style expansion” to “rooted operations.” This requires not only investment in building soft capabilities, but also a shift in thinking patterns, so as to truly transition from “going out” at the physical level to “going up” in the value dimension.
Build Four Pillars of Soft Capabilities
What truly drives enterprises to go through cycles and withstand fluctuations is not a single capability, but a deeply interactive, tightly interlinked “soft-capabilities ecosystem.” Enterprises need to find a dynamic balance in the globalization process: both preserving strategic focus and possessing the ability to adapt to changing contexts.
Only when the four pillars of soft capabilities form a combined force can Chinese enterprises stand steadier and go farther in complex and ever-changing international environments.
Pillar One: Narrative Transformation
In a complex international geopolitical environment, enterprises first face not market competition, but “identity recognition”—who defines you, and how you are understood. This directly affects whether a company can obtain the “implicit entry permission” needed for long-term development.
In this context, an altruism narrative becomes the highest-tier pass for companies to gain “local trust.” Real global enterprises’ strategic narratives often go beyond business itself, moving from product value to social value. For example, Microsoft upgraded from “put a computer in every home, on every desk” to “empower every person and every organization globally to achieve greatness”; Tesla advanced from “building high-performance electric vehicles” to “accelerating the world’s transition toward sustainable prosperity”6.
The key is that altruism is not an empty slogan, but a set of value expressions continuously validated through practice. It shows up in enterprises’ global missions, sustainable practices, employee wellbeing, and consumer value. Only when narrative aligns with action can a company truly build trust across cultures and institutions.
Pillar Two: Brand Transformation
A truly global brand is not simply the output of a unified image. Rather, it achieves a dynamic balance between global consistency and local flexibility. At the top level, it maintains a clear, stable brand core; at the bottom level, it adapts and reshapes according to local market contexts.
The essence of this capability is turning the brand from an identification symbol into a value carrier. Take TCL as an example. During its overseas expansion, it continuously strengthens a unified brand core. At the same time, through localized content and cultural resonance, it gradually sheds the label of a “value-for-money substitute,” evolving toward becoming a “creator of lifestyles.” During the Milan Winter Olympics, TCL’s “Snow Rong Wonderland” themed pavilion and “Global Team” layout strengthened the brand’s emotional connection and cultural7.
Behind this balancing capability lies the unification of technology, culture, and responsibility—technology provides hard power, culture builds resonance, and responsibility establishes long-term trust.
Pillar Three: Operational Transformation
When companies cross multiple markets, the real challenge is often not “whether they can enter,” but “whether they can manage well.” During globalization, if systemic operational capabilities are lacking, the larger the scale, the higher the risk of losing control. Therefore, whether a company establishes operational thinking for “one integrated global game plan” in the early stage directly determines the upper limit of its future expansion.
Practice has proven that shared services have become the infrastructure for multinational operations, whether in human resources, finance, procurement, or IT. Without shared services, there is no real global governance. At its core, it emphasizes the unification of standardized capability and scale efficiency.
Multinationals represented by Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft outsource parts of marketing and sales functions to improve organizational efficiency and concentrate resources on core capabilities such as products and innovation. This model of “bringing in the core internally, pushing non-core functions out externally” is, in essence, a reallocation of global resources.
Pillar Four: Technology Transformation
If the operations system is the skeleton, then the technology system is the nervous system. Its core is to build a resilient digital foundation that enables the company to achieve real-time sensing and rapid response across regions. With cloud-native, AI-native, and integrated databases and technology stacks, enterprises can weave dispersed business nodes into a network for real-time collaboration. This upgrades traditional labor-intensive operations into a new mode of human-machine collaboration.
Leaders have already begun to build differentiated advantages. For example, ByteDance not only relies on product innovation, but also constructs a technology architecture highly adapted to global markets by deeply embedding itself in global cloud services, data, and partner ecosystems. Anta Group has integrated CRM, payments, and shopping-guidance systems into a unified cloud database to enable integrated operations across multiple brands and regions, releasing significant “digital compounding”: the development cycle of the new system shortened by 50%, and database resource costs were reduced by about 30%8.
Emergence of a new paradigm: “Born global”
Besides those giant companies that can weather cycles, a group of emerging forces that are “born global” are accelerating their rise. Unlike the traditional incremental path of “first local, then overseas,” these enterprises set global markets as the default stage at the time of their founding. Their top-level design pre-builds globalization capabilities: products are defined for global demands; organizational structures are built around cross-regional collaboration; and talent and resource allocation are also oriented toward global best optimization.
Therefore, they often no longer experience a typical “overseas adaptation period.” Fundamentally, these companies are no longer extensions of “going out.” Instead, they are “born global” enterprises, inherently embedded in global industrial chains and digital ecosystems, growing organically as the trend unfolds.
But “born global” does not mean bypassing the complexities of globalization; quite the opposite. Because these companies start from a higher baseline and expand faster, they often expose themselves earlier to fluctuations in the external environment and limitations in internal capabilities. Therefore, their next phase of competition is shifting from “speed advantage” to “system capability.”
Whether it is narrative capability to continuously build trust across cultures, long-term operational capability to enhance brand premium, or organizational and digital foundations that support global expansion—these companies also need to return to the core transformation of the four pillars mentioned above: narrative transformation, brand transformation, operational transformation, and technology transformation. With continuous iteration from a higher starting point, they can turn first-mover advantages into long-term advantages.
China’s path to globalization for enterprises has no single template. Instead, it is a capability curve that evolves with different stages: in the early stage, the focus is on “entry,” breaking through market barriers and establishing brand presence; in the mid stage, the focus is on “expansion,” leveraging global networks to achieve scale benefits and governance efficiency; in the mature stage, the focus shifts to “lasting presence,” building sustainable business models and operational resilience that can weather cycles.
Real globalization confidence from Chinese enterprises does not rely on staff dispatch or single-point control. Instead, it comes from a replicable management core—achieving coordination through systems, improving efficiency through sharing, and reducing complexity through values. When enterprises shift their focus from obsessing over “being first” to answering “what value they create for different global users,” they truly complete the leap from “going overseas” to “entering the market.” This is not only an extension of space, but also an upgrade of cognition and capability.
Source of data
1?(2025 Statistical Monthly Report), General Administration of Customs of the People’s Republic of China, http://gdfs.customs.gov.cn/eportal/ui?pageId=6348926。
2 (Release report on 2025 China Private Enterprises 500), China Federation of Industry and Commerce, August 28, 2025, https://www.acfic.org.cn/qlyw/202508/t20250828_320008.html。
3 Comprehensive analysis of Accenture (2023-2025 Accenture Digital Transformation Index) and Accenture (2022 Globalization Research Report on Chinese Enterprises).
4 BrandZ brand value ranking.
5 All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (Research and analysis report on 2025 China Private Enterprises 500, emphasis research).
6 Microsoft and Tesla company annual reports and public speeches.
7 (From “product going overseas” to “value symbiosis”: decoding TCL Milan’s new paradigm for the globalization of Chinese brands), Cover News, February 24, 2026, https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20260224A05RTO00.
8 (Anta Group’s core business system connects to OB Cloud, unifying the management of global brand data foundation), China Daily Chinese website, September 17, 2025, https://caijing.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202509/17/WS68ca46a0a310f07257748e0c.html。
The author of this article
Chen Jidong: Managing Director of Industry and Enterprise Services Division, Accenture Greater China
Chen Shan: Managing Director of the AI and Data Business Division, Accenture Greater China
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