On June 1st and 2nd, the EqualOcean Summit for Globalization 2023(ESG 2023) was successfully held in Shenzhen, China. Over 2,500 people registered for the event, with over 2,000 attendees present over the course of the two-day summit. More than 60% of the attendees held positions as directors or higher. In addition to the top entrepreneurs, investors, and scholars in the global direction of overseas expansion present at the summit.
During the roundtable discussion on the theme "The Strategy, Branding, and Organization of Going Global to the US" held on June 2nd. Four distinguished guests, Mr. Chen Weijia, Manager of Global Marketing and Strategy of NARWAL(云鲸智能）, Mr. Lei Jianhua, Executive Vice President and CTO of PowerOak(德兰明海）, Mr. Li Yan, CEO of Niu Technologies(小牛电动） and Mr. Zhuang Hua, Founder and CEO of CGL Group, delivered insightful presentations. Ms. Yang Quan, Founder of Sanxiu Consulting（三秀咨询）served as the moderator for this session. The following is a summary of the roundtable discussion (with some omissions):
Yang Quan: Good morning, and welcome all the guests and friends who have come to the US Forum today. I'd like to take the opportunity today to discuss with you the topic of going global to the US.
I'd like to introduce myself first. My name is Yang Quan(Crystal). My company, Sanxiu Consulting, focuses on helping Chinese brands create and build their brand presence. I've always been interested in the topic of going global and spent a lot of time in the US last year. I am looking forward to sharing my experiences with all of you who are interested in the US market today. So please welcome the guests to briefly introduce your company and the area you are interested in.
Chen Weijia: Thank you, Crystal. I'm Chen Weijia (VJ) and I'm responsible for global marketing, sales, and the company's strategy and tactics at NARWAL. I used to be an investor in NARWAL and joined the company last year. Our company started to expand overseas last year, relatively late for going global. We have made some achievements so far. We are already among the top three in our category in three key countries, with a growth rate of about 300% this year.
Lei Jianhua: Good morning. The company I work for, PowerOak, focuses on customer-side energy storage products, and the US market is our largest oversea market, accounting for over 60% of our company's revenue last year. Our company's user-side energy storage, especially portable energy storage, has a certain user base and brand awareness in the US. I am here mainly with an attitude of learning. In the face of the current situation in the United States, I hope to take this platform to learn and discuss with the other senior guests here today. Of course, I hope that my speech here today can also bring new ideas and gains.
Li Yan: Hello everyone, thank you very much for this opportunity. I am Yan Li, CEO of NIU Technologies. Our main products are intelligent lithium-ion electric vehicles. We went global relatively early in 2016, but in the US market we are still beginners, and our main overseas revenues are from Europe.
We expanded the US market in 2017, and last year we launched two new categories - electric scooters and E-bikes. We attached more and more importance to the US market and the market growth was also fast. But we also encountered various problems, like logistics issues, some concerns about tariffs, how to do well in the US with ToC brands, etc. I know NARWAL and PoweOak have good performances, so I hope to gain some experience in our discussion.
Zhuang Hua: I am a big fan of NIU. I have two NIU bikes and one I just bought this year.
I'm Zhuang Hua. I come from the head-hunting industry and specialize in providing talent solutions for entrepreneurs. I founded CGL Group, which is now one of the top headhunters in China, with more than 720 employees and 100 partners. The companies we support are actually very clear: the first group is innovative start-ups, and the second group is enterprises in transition, which can also be called specialized and new companies. Our clients have set an important strategic goal for going global for a long time. We have helped JD (京东）set up its North American lab and expand into overseas markets, including Mexico and Brazil.
We have seen that many companies have had some successes and potholes in their attempts to go global in terms of talent and organization. This is why we spend a lot of time working with our customers to solve problems in people and organizations, products, technology, R&D, and marketing for Chinese companies going global. I am obviously the oldest of the guests, and I think that nowadays, old people are underprivileged, so I treasure this opportunity to learn from young entrepreneurs.
Yang Quan: Thank you all. Since many of our audience are interested in the US market, I would like to ask you all when your companies decided to go global. Did the macro changes in the US market in the past two years affect your business in the US? What advice and observations do you have for going global to the US?
Chen Weijia: We can say that we started relatively early or relatively late to go global. We did a crowdfunding campaign on a global platform before our first product was officially launched. So when we officially went global, we were surprised to find that there were seed users in many oversea markets, who sent us emails, and signed up to be moderators in community groups. It was quite interesting.
However, we officially went global in the first half of 2022. We set the foundation for going global in 2022. We currently release the robot vacuum products in overseas market positioning high-end, with a customer unit price of around USD $1,000 or more. Our users attach great importance to the complete experience. Last year, we spent a lot of time improving our overseas fulfillment system and service system, including company qualifications and product qualifications. As our products are categorized as home appliances or AI products, there involve a lot of certifications, and last year we solved all these problems. At the same time, we also accomplished a very important mission, which was to get closer to overseas users and understand their needs more deeply. NARWAL is a company that attaches more importance to users' experiences, and we are committed to bringing a free and beautiful smart life to every family through product innovation and scientific breakthroughs.
We may have been a little reluctant to go global last year, but it was an inevitable process. The first thing we did was to put a Chinese product into some key overseas markets, and we got a lot of first-hand feedback from users. This year we will develop products that are more tailored to the needs of local users in overseas markets. Of course, "overseas" is a rather general concept, consisting of a variety of countries. To make it simple, our core idea is to look for opportunities and commonalities: find markets and people with opportunities, and capture the biggest common needs and common differences. Because we are just starting out, we will focus more on efficiency and also spend a lot of time on marketing, which we can explain later.
As for the industry insight I just mentioned, let's talk a little bit about the development of the robot vacuum category in the US. As mentioned in the EqualOcean report earlier, cleanliness and intelligence are key trends in the US market, and the robot vacuum is experiencing very high growth from 2019 to 2021. The robot vacuum can be understood as an appliance that can move, position, navigate, and complete certain cleaning tasks at home. The robot vacuum industry is still in a very early stage globally, with relatively low penetration rates, perhaps reaching a dozen points in developed countries and less than 10% in China.
We tended to make local products with local services, so we missed the high growth period of previous years. 2022 saw the robot vacuum market under pressure in a changing macro context, but then there was a big change in late 2022 to early 2023. We saw the market is recovering and facing an important structural change. Products priced below USD 400 are falling, which is typical for Amazon products, while the market for products priced above USD 400 or USD 500, and high-end appliances even priced at USD 1,599, are growing at a high rate. More high-end products, including robot vacuums, are growing in prices at a 100 percent rate, which is a very interesting change.
Another change is in user perceptions and demand. In the past, overseas users had a very simple understanding of the product. The price range for our domestic products is around CNY 3,000-5,000 and Chinese users can decide within a week whether to buy the product or not. Whereas overseas users may have to go through eight or nine different media to get enough information and have to look at three or four shops before they know about the product.
Let's give an example. If we sell apples, Chinese users know very well what kind of apple they want to buy, a red apple, a green apple, or a golden apple, whereas American users might be wondering do we have a golden apple. They didn't know until they saw some new brand that a robot vacuum could mop the floor and integrate multiple functions. And today we find that the amount of time users are willing to spend on this consumer decision, and the information they can understand, has changed qualitatively over the last few years. When we introduce a product to new users, they are willing to know and buy new products.
Yang Quan: Thank you. NARWAL is my company's customer and we have provided services for NARWAL for 4 years. I think NARWAL has always been a dark horse in the industry.
Lei Jianhua: Let me first give a brief introduction to our company, as many of our friends may not know much about us. PowerOak is engaged in the R&D and sales of user-side energy storage products. It involves portable energy storage, home energy storage, and small-scale commercial and industrial energy storage, which is a rising industry nowadays. On May 24-26 this year, SNEC (International Solar Photovoltaic and Intelligent Energy Exhibition) was held in Shanghai, where we could see that lots of companies are doing home energy storage, and this industry has formed a situation of competition.
With this background, I would like to say a few words about going global. PowerOak started to lay out the US market in 2018 or 2019. In the early days, we adopted more of an OEM and ODM model, which was relatively rough and low-margin. Most of the profits were taken up by the channels and brands, and we just got hard-earned fees. After many years of exploration, we feel that we must have our own brand when we go global, so in 2020 we started to develop our own brand.
But the difficulty is beyond imagination for a new industry, a domestic startup, to build its own brand to go global. Any brand has to have its connotation, its spirit, and its genes. PowerOak has incorporated technological innovation and advantages of the supply chain. In 2020, based on more than a decade of technical development, we released a brand new product that had no competitor in the market at the time, a 2kW.2kWh portable energy storage product.
The product became the industry benchmark at the time and was on the market for a year and a half with no competitors. At the same time, when the product was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, it was - the fastest product to raise over USD one million, the highest crowdfunding amount for the year in the energy storage category, the largest number of followers, and the highest ranking in the category. There were no energy storage products in the top 10 of the platform before our product entered the ranking. So crowdfunding helped our brand BLUETTI to be recognized and known by the consumers, which is the first step for our own brand. With the support of our own brand, we have been able to gain more profit margins for our products, and with more profit margins, we can invest more in R&D.
Last year we launched another top-notch product for the portable energy storage industry, which set the best-ever Indiegogo crowdfunding result for a Chinese team - USD 12.19 million. This also means that the BLUETTI brand has truly reached out to US consumers and established its position as the Top 3 in the portable energy storage segment. Last year we achieved sales of over CNY 1.5 billion in the US market.
After going global, facing the current situation, how can we continue to maintain stable competitiveness? As the relationship between China and the United States may get worse and worse, we may also get sanctions by the US government in this field, so one of our next very important tasks is the substitution of domestication.
When the brand goes global if made in China does not work in the US, we will consider laying out manufacturing bases abroad: R&D in Shenzhen, supply chain at home, and manufacturing bases overseas, such as Southeast Asia and the Americas. If you want to continue to deepen your brand abroad and maintain your market share, you must have the technology and the brand. Holding these two in your own hands is equivalent to having a ticket to the United States. This is my simple experience and thoughts and I hope it will be helpful to you.
Yang Quan: Thank you. It's very impressive. I spent the first 10 years of my career bringing overseas brands in, but after I started my own business, I mainly focused on getting Chinese brands out. In the past, everyone thought that China was the manufacturing center of the supply chain and the world's factory. One thing that particularly impressed me about what Mr. Lei just shared was that they had decided early on to be an independent brand. When I told him that it was a hard road, he said I knew, and just now he said very sadly that we would be sanctioned sooner or later. I find that young people today have a greater sense of pride and glory in Chinese brands. We have come so far that we can already achieve Chinese brands going global. I was particularly moved by what Mr. Lei said, and thank you again for the impressive speech.
Li Yan: Our company has always been deeply involved in the mobility industry, especially in two-wheeled electric vehicles. The first place we went globally was Europe, and we entered the European market with electric motorbikes, and we also laid some motorbikes in the U.S., and then we had electric scooters and E-bikes, and I have a few feelings that are very similar to what the two of you just shared.
When we first went global, we had no choice but to make our own brand. We encountered several problems at that time, one of which was how to make the product fit the local application scenario. We found that each country had different road conditions, laws and regulations, habits, and riding postures, so it was not feasible to take a Chinese product directly to Europe or the US to sell it. But when a company is just starting out, it is difficult to make customized products for each country, so we avoided a lot of potholes and developed customised products for Europe and the US and even a customised operating model.
We were concerned that the market for electric motorbikes in the US was not that big, but the shared operation model in Manhattan, Chicago and a few other cities was more promising, so we supported a shared operator, providing strong support for hardware and software, with up to about 6,000 electric motorbikes, and our cars were all spread out in Washington DC for shared operation.
The second challenge we encountered was building the brand. In the vehicle sector, the understanding of brands rises to the level of value. Why do users choose a certain product? Is it because NIU's motorbikes reflect that I am particularly environmentally conscious, or is it because I like the value of freedom of travel on two wheels? Is this a unified set of brand values across the world, or is it adapted to the local situation in each country? We spent a lot of time figuring it out.
We believe that a brand is not the same as a trademark or a logo. When a brand goes global, it must be accompanied by a deeper recognition of the values of the product. As a two-wheeled vehicle, especially lithium-ion electric, our products are in line with mainstream values, especially in the global environment of ESG, carbon reduction, and carbon neutrality initiatives, many users choose us in response to green travel and environmental protection. We have continued this value promotion in the US market and have received some recognition.
The third issue is organizational capability. We realized early on that for a product to be localized and for a brand to be in line with local values, a local Chinese team alone is not enough. You can't do brand operations and values without a local team and a deep understanding of them. For example, when it comes to film promotion, in the United States, it is necessary to meet the standards of diversity. All races and body types must be reflected. If it only favors a single aesthetic, it is not in line with mainstream values.
I think this is also quite difficult if you don't have a local team to run it on. How to build up the organizational capacity of the overseas team so that the local team has sufficient decision-making power locally and can provide timely feedback and adjustments based on market information is the third difficulty we encounter.
Yang Quan: That's quite good, thanks. The biggest feeling we all have about American values is not only the clash of cultural values between China and the US but also many conflicts and many changes within the US. When I went to CES earlier this year, my biggest impression was that many overseas brands put a lot of emphasis on ESG, they don't treat ESG as a window-dressing job, they treat it as a must, without ESG stories you can't stand on the stage. But one of the great things about Chinese companies is that we still learn what we want to learn very quickly. We have clients who have set up local-led teams overseas and they tell me that although the Chinese are still the "bosses behind the scenes", they have to understand the local area. I think this also gives Mr. Zhuang a good opportunity to talk about it.
Zhuang Hua: Yes, Mr. Li made a very good point. As a supplier of talent deployment, we follow the pace of our clients. We see more and more companies starting to lay out overseas. We serve about 700 to 800 clients every year, and 13% or 14% of them already have overseas operations, and of course, they come with some industry-specific qualities.
In recent years, despite the negative impact of the epidemic, we have seen a dramatic rise in the number of companies that are preparing to go global. We recently did a statistic and found that more than 70% of the companies are ready to go overseas in the next 1-3 years. This figure is quite surprising to me, because only a few percent of companies have already laid out their plans to go to sea, but the number of companies that are starting to prepare to do so is very large.
Mr. Li mentioned a very interesting issue that Chinese companies face various challenges when they go global, including the organizational level. I think Chinese companies are actually still thinking in a pragmatic way when it comes to talent and organization. If we summarise what we see in these companies going global, the first thing they set up is global sales, and after the sales team is ready, they may start to lay out the functional team slowly. If the business volume reaches a certain scale, a country manager will be set up. Nowadays, country managers are still mainly Chinese people, and there are still relatively few local ones. Even at the middle management level, the Chinese still make up the majority of the staff, with maybe one or two local people, and the next level down is mainly local employees. So I think that in this process, Chinese companies need to learn over time, from an organizational perspective, about what kind of employer brand we should build.
ESG is the hottest topic right now, and I often wonder if Chinese companies going global still strongly carry some of the traits of Chinese companies. And this will hinder the long-term goal of Chinese companies to really become an international organization, an international employer. I think that when our entrepreneurs make their overall overseas layout, although they do not necessarily put organization and talent as the most important solution, perhaps the most important solutions are products, technology, and markets, but the design and development of the whole organization is a long-term task and a very important, long-term goal.
Yang Quan: Thank you. We can talk to Mr. Zhuang more about the international organization. Just now I asked him, there were big layoffs in Silicon Valley, right? Should I go there to collect a team? So every time we talk about various changes and crises, it actually means some opportunities and inspiration for the business world as well.
Next, back to NARWAL, can VJ tell us a little bit more about the differences between China and the US market, just like you said about the track of robot vacuums and smart homes. You can share a little bit more about the layout of the company afterward, as well as some advice to your peers in the consumer electronics category here.
Chen Weijia: The main focus today is the United States, so I will talk about some of our humble opinions and previous experiences about US markets. (Yang Quan: Experience and pits are fine, sometimes pits are a little more valuable.) Just now we all talked about branding and ESG, which we all feel is very important. We are doing brand planning, but of course, it's not just about the brand, it's also about our operations and marketing approach. Mr. Li also mentioned that NIU has a clear brand direction in overseas, especially when it comes to different countries. I feel very strongly that branding is, in a sense, a service for products and sales, and how to make trade-offs when there are differences between different countries.
Our current planning is divided into three phases. In the first phase, the whole branding is focused on the functionality and experience of the product, and we want to create a positioning of pioneer innovation from a product perspective. This is both a noun and a verb, we hope to lead innovation to meet or even exceed the needs of our customers. There are actually several connotations behind this. The first is very simple and universal: we believe that in today's market, while there are new opportunities, competition is also very fierce. The reason why consumers choose us at such a price is definitely because our products are superior, and product innovation is one of our core competencies.
Mr. Lei has mentioned that PowerOak has no competitors at the overseas market for once. Our products also created a sort of "industry vacuum" for two to three years or a 2 to 3-fold increase in the penetration rate of each segment. For this reason, we have also set up a longer-term internal innovation system. We believe that product competitiveness is our core competence, so in the first phase, we wanted to build a functional brand concept based on the product itself.
Currently, we are moving towards the second phase. We want to add some value to the experience dimension, hoping to make people perceive NARWAL as a brand that can bring experience value. We are promoting some localized value-added services, not just in the traditional sense of after-sales service or maintenance, but we are also experimenting with other user services, including building some localized operation teams. In addition, we are also doing some work on the level of user communities and core user maintenance.
In the next stage, our focus will be on the spiritual level, which means that what we are currently doing in China, we will probably focus on overseas markets in two to three years. What kind of spiritual values does the NARWAL represent, what kind of life attitude, consumption style, and consumption philosophy does it represent? These are some of our initial ideas for going global.
Yang Quan: We have talked a lot about branding today, including what they said earlier, that branding is not just a logo, but also the settings and characteristics behind it. Just now Mr. Chen also mentioned that it is the same as each of us has our own persona. When something from China goes global, it's not just the product, there's a lot of connotation behind it. I think once a Chinese company takes something seriously, it will definitely do well. Mr. Lei, since PowerOak's brands have set records on crowdfunding platforms many times, I would like to ask you to also tell your peers here about your experience or pitfalls in the US market.
Lei Jianhua: I always agree with the idea that a brand is not just a logo. The last three alphabets "TTI" of our brand BLUETTI stand for Tomorrow, Technology, and Innovation. Why do I keep talking about technology? Because we must develop a second advantage based on its supply chain advantage to go global to the US. Since the supply chain advantage is replicable and can be mastered by domestic companies, only the technological advantage can form the core barrier.
As you have just mentioned, both localization and technology leadership are required. We have two important guidelines for developing our products. One is to explore demand and the other is to lead technology.
Exploring demand means using local talent and digging deeper into information, not just our domestic R&D engineers sitting in R&D buildings thinking about what to do. We have organized several communities, including US-based professional users, opinion leaders, distributors, and developers. We interact with them more to transform their needs into R&D directions so that we can meet the local needs of the US. Some of our products have been put out in China before and people say, why is this thing so heavy? In fact, Americans can pick it up with one hand, so this kind of product is more suitable for American strong men. Making it too light is an insult to their strength and is disrespectful. They need to be masculine, so our products must reflect local needs.
Secondly, it is also important not to listen to overseas consumers all the time. We should make use of our technological advantages to guide the market. Not only can our products meet the demand, but we can also guide the market by upgrading our technology to go the extra mile. This is a two-way interaction that will not only meet current needs but also create a technological barrier for the next one to two years or more. It is in this way that product competitiveness can be developed. Only with this advantage do we dare to say that we are our own brand and that we are an industry with a "tomorrow". Equipped with both technology and innovation, can we give our brand connotation value and dare to go global, otherwise I worry that we will be kicked back sooner or later.
VJ and I are both alumni of Tsinghua University, so we can't bring disgrace to Tsinghua when we go out. In the past, we used to joke that the school was strong and we are weak. When we go out of school, we can't disgrace the school. The same goes for branding. We must have the ability to go out of the country. When we go out, we can't be kicked back, so we have been cultivated in the fields of energy storage, branding and technology.
Yang Quan: Thank you, very vivid expression. So I think the most direct and fastest way to be a brand in the US market is to go and live there for a while and really live their lives, how they drink coffee in the morning and how they live, in order to understand their needs.
Li Yan: Let me share an example. We had some misconceptions when we were doing two-wheeled vehicles. I just mentioned that part of the brand values is environmental protection. But in fact, there are certain misconceptions. For example, the penetration rate of Tesla in the United States is also very high now. Users can drive an electric car to travel to be environmentally friendly. Why should we choose a two-wheeled vehicle? How to narrate your environmental story?
We found out later that it wasn't right. Even though battery technology is now so advanced that an electric car can travel about 7 or 8 kilometers on one degree of electricity, a two-wheeled vehicle can drive 60 kilometers on one degree of electricity, so it is 10 times more efficient than a car. Even if they are all electric, I still save more electricity than you. From this perspective, electric two-wheelers are still environmentally friendly. We tried to work in this direction, but later found that it was still not the same.
There is actually a very important demand in the two-wheeled travel scene. Consumers want it to be environmentally friendly, but at the same time, because it is used in the outdoor scene, it also has to be cool, so that the user should feel different and not stigmatized using two-wheeled travel. Choosing a scooter or an E-bike is not because I can't afford it but a different style, a different idea. Therefore our whole direction shifted to lifestyle. Our slogan is "Make life electric", which not only means more to make life more exciting. The choice to travel on two wheels is not only energy efficient and environmentally friendly, but also a way to make a difference.
But the choice of brand or the choice of values, I think, is also related to the genes of the company itself. Our products are good-looking, and to a large extent, the public feels that we are not a technology company but more like a design company. People always think we have good design, but forget that we're also very good at technology. Every time we come out with a new product, we win global awards and people think highly of the design. When every company goes global, they think about what they can and can't do, and we have a clear advantage in this area. It just so happens that we are in the travel industry again, and we believe that when everyone chooses a means of travel, they want to choose a trendy car, and this is something that we have hit the point.
Yang Quan: Thanks. Two-wheeled travel is a creative way of life.
Zhuang Hua: If we were to find a benchmark for the whole process of Chinese companies going global, that is the process of multinational companies entering China. From the beginning when they flocked to China, till now some are in good operation while others have failed in China. So I think that successful companies must be able to provide local people with opportunities to grow and develop in the workplace, either as a brand, a product, a technology, or as an employer.
At the same time, the company is able to make timely adjustments throughout the development process to create differentiation. Mr. Li just talked about different models and has been considering whether there is differentiation in different countries, and we are the same in this regard. We are particularly nervous when we serve companies to conduct recruitment interviews in the US. According to US law and some values, many questions can not be asked, such as age and current salary. The current salary does not provide a reference value. Therefore, each market and consumer group needs to be differentiated and adjusted by our company.
Yang Quan: Thank you, Mr. Zhuang. We will leave a little time for answering the audiences' questions.
Audience 1: Thank you very much. We are in the business of overseas employment, and we belong to the same industry chain as Mr. Zhuang, but many of our customers are not only encountering talent problems but also the challenge of tariffs and local trade protection. The biggest problem now is that people have gone over, products have gone over, but taxes and local policies are stuck. Do you have any measures to cope with this problem?
Li Yan: I will share first. Our response is passive now. The tax has gone up, and our product price has gone up. This is actually not right. We are considering whether we should move our supply chain to Southeast Asia. But moving to Southeast Asia or Mexico also needs to meet localization requirements. Although we talk about globalization, the development trend now must be localization. Perhaps a lot of fragmentation has led to the final production process being laid out on several continents, rather than making China a unified global factory. (Yang Quan: Ultimately, it's localization.)
Lei Jianhua: To add to this, since overseas business involves taxation now, it is true that raw material procurement costs must reach a certain percentage locally in order to enjoy local taxation policies, otherwise it is useless for people and products to go over there. When we look at each region, we will study the local regulations, which are specific to a certain category of products and require a certain percentage of local procurement in order to enjoy preferential policies. We would do an analysis and then break down the results to see which materials had to be sourced locally and which had to be shipped to the local area. If we don't do this work, it won't work to copy it directly, so it's more of a detailed dismantling of policies and categories upfront.
Audience 2: Good morning. I would like to ask a specific question. How do you lay out the TikTok platform? Thank you.
Lei Jianhua: TikTok has a very large user base in the US, which helps us save a lot of time in getting our brand out to users. Without this platform, we would have had to use public and private platforms to advertise, market, and drive traffic. TikTok has played a big role in our branding and has made a big contribution to us in terms of attracting traffic.
TikTok has a very large user base in the US, which helps us cut out a lot of the work involved in getting our brand out to our users. Without this platform, we would have had to use public and private platforms to advertise, market and drive traffic. Now our TikTok official account has over 10 million followers. TikTok has at least played a big role in our branding and has made a big contribution to us in terms of attracting traffic.
Audience 3: I'm in the overseas after-sales business, I am curious about what are your plans or thoughts on localizing your after-sales services overseas. Thank you. (Yang Quan: This is also a very specific issue.)
Chen Weijia: We now have two thoughts on overseas after-sales. Firstly, because our products are very complex, we have spent a lot of time working with various overseas partners to develop the whole damage determination and repair program. In the past, we did bulk repairs at the factory in China.
Secondly, the qualities we look for in a partner. We have a relatively low demand for our partners to cover the whole territory because cross-border management involves a lot of difficulties, so we basically require our partners to operate in a single country or a specific region, but we have relatively high requirements for data return, supply landing, and quality inspection at any time during the cooperation process.
Yang Quan: Due to the time limit, I would like to ask each guest to conclude with one sentence on the survival of a global company, starting with Mr. Zhuang.
Zhuang Hua: The final goal I hope all Chinese companies can achieve is to go from being a Chinese company to an international company.
Li Yan: My feeling is very direct. Globalization is localization.
Lei Jianhua: Branding cultivation, technological innovation, and quality orientation.
Chen Weijia: My feelings are very close to Li's. From Chineseness to globalization, from globalization to localization.
Yang Quan: That's it for today's roundtable discussion. Let's give some applause to our guests, thanks.
EqualOcean and the EqualOcean Summit for Globalization
Established in November 2018, EqualOcean is a business information platform and think tank that focuses on serving Chinese brands' globalization efforts and helping overseas companies or institutions seize opportunities in China's development. For clients aiming to expand into the global market from China, EqualOcean provides macroeconomic and political analysis, overseas market and industry research, international branding guidance, and assistance in building overseas resources.
EqualOcean operates Chinese and English websites, making it one of the few domestic institutions with the capability to provide in-depth English reporting and research. The English content produced by EqualOcean is authorized for publication on platforms such as Bloomberg Terminal, Refinitiv, SeekingAlpha, and Nasdaq. EqualOcean's business analysts are frequently interviewed by renowned media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Financial Times, and SCMP.
The EqualOcean Summit for Globalization (ESG) is the top industry summit organized by EqualOcean, focusing on the direction of global expansion. It takes place in early June each year and invites top entrepreneurs, investors, scholars, and diplomats from China and abroad to participate. In the background of "de-globalization," the "new globalization" led by China is accelerating. Globalization brands and talents originating from China are increasingly taking center stage on the world platform.
During the EqualOcean Summit for Globalization (ESG), a series of reports and rankings are released, including the "EqualOcean Globalization Youth 30," "EqualOcean Global Expansion Investment 30," and "EqualOcean Globalization Rising Stars 50," which receive significant attention and acclaim.
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