Our blog: China’s technology, consumer and new retail insights

For luxury brands, KOL marketing in China now sits much closer to revenue strategy than brand visibility. At the start of 2025, China had 1.11 billion internet users and 1.08 billion social media user identities, underscoring the scale of a luxury audience already deeply integrated into platform-led discovery, evaluation, and influence behavior.  In other words, […]

The conversation around China’s digital ecosystem has shifted from fascination to a hard-nosed assessment of infrastructure. Global brands that once viewed China as a distinct market for adaptation now recognize it as the proving ground for a new commercial architecture.  In 2026, the country’s digital transformation has matured beyond consumer-facing apps into a deeply embedded […]

In recent years, China’s live commerce has progressed from an emerging trend to a dominant retail model. Across the country, hundreds of millions of viewers watch hosts demonstrate everything from lipstick to tractors in real time. This fusion of entertainment and shopping is projected to become a trillion-yuan industry by 2026.  Growth has been so […]

AI video is no longer a marketing experiment. In 2026, it’s becoming an operational layer — used for product education, e-commerce conversion, internal enablement, multilingual campaigns, and executive communication. What started as flashy generative demos is now embedding itself into workflows. And China is accelerating this shift faster than most Western markets. The reason isn’t […]

The conversation around influencer marketing in China has shifted. It is no longer about participation. It is about execution quality and speed. The old model of paying top-tier KOLs for reach has lost its reliability as outcomes have become harder to predict. R3’s 2026 data clearly shows the shift. KOL rate cards rose by 11.6%, […]

Qixi, often described as China’s traditional Valentine’s Day, has become a strategic moment for brands that want to connect with Chinese consumers through culture rather than pure promotion. The festival traces back to the legend of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, a story that symbolizes devotion and reunion after long separation. In recent years, […]

China’s FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) market is not just “big”; it is structurally optimized for social commerce experimentation at a national scale in a way few other markets can replicate quickly. In 2025, China’s online retail continued to expand. Official statistics report total online retail sales of approximately $2.2 trillion, with physical goods sales at […]

Chinese Millennials now operate inside the largest digitally connected consumer environment ever recorded. China counted more than 958 million digital consumers by mid 2025, representing 85.3 percent of all internet users, indicating that purchasing, research, and brand discovery occur primarily on digital platforms. At the same time, the broader young population, including those born in […]

If you think WeChat is “just messaging,” you’re already behind the curve. If you’re looking for tips to start selling on WeChat, you need to understand that the platform is no longer just messaging—it’s the core infrastructure of private-domain commerce in China. In 2025, WeChat had transformed far beyond a social app: it’s the central […]

ERNIE 4.5 AI is Baidu’s flagship foundation model for enterprise deployment inside China. Baidu ERNIE 4.5 is embedded across search, cloud, and industry platforms, giving it distribution strength and regulatory alignment advantages in the domestic market. Leaders evaluating ERNIE 4.5 AI should assess it as an integrated enterprise system rather than a standalone large language […]

DeepSeek Nvidia is not a news cycle topic. It is a capacity question that determines which Chinese AI labs can train frontier models in 2025 and which cannot. Compute access inside China now sits at the intersection of export controls, cloud allocation rules, and software lock-in. That intersection shapes architecture choices, training timelines, and unit […]

The China fashion report 2025 begins with a simple reality. China remains one of the most influential fashion markets in the world, yet the logic behind that market is changing rapidly. According to the China Fashion Consumption Development Report presented at the China Annual Trends Summit, the country’s fashion consumption market is expected to reach […]