[New book] Seeing the Unseen: Behind Chinese tech giants’ global venturing

Over the years, many of you in Momentum Works’ community have asked us a lot of questions about the big Chinese tech companies: Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance / TikTok, Meituan, Didi, J&T, SHEIN… the list goes on. 

Some of these companies are making their presence felt outside China too – and increasingly, global venturing has become a key priority for many of them. But who are these “Chinese tech companies”? How do they make decisions? Can they succeed in their global venturing? Should we be welcoming, or worried? 

I have worked together with Guoli Chen, Professor of Strategy at INSEAD, to decipher Chinese tech companies and their global expansion. We interviewed current and ex-executives of more than 20 key companies who participated in the decision making and implementation of many of such ventures. 

We are putting these insights, stories and analyses in our new book: “Seeing the Unseen – behind Chinese tech giants’ global venturing”, published by Wiley in the United States.

We think to understand the leaders of these companies, we need to go all the way back to Chairman Mao Zedong, and how he led the Chinese Communist Party through all the hardships and adversities to succeed in the revolution. Ideology aside, his strategic and tactical wisdom is widely read, interpreted and adopted in the way many Chinese tech leaders make their own decisions.  

Through stories, we will share insights and connect the dots to how the Chinese companies came to be, and where they will be going next. Interestingly, of all the factors impacting success, or failure, of their global venturing, we think product localization is probably the least important.  

Seeing the Unseen – behind Chinese tech giants’ global venturing will start to ship from Amazon warehouses on 21st of September. But we would like to release some snippets of the book to you, friends in the Momentum Works community and readers of our reports/TLD, before the launch. 

From next week onwards, every week, we will share some insights and stories about the book through this Momentum Works/Momentum Academy joint newsletter “Seeing the Unseen”.

And if you want to be the first to get your hands on the book, you can pre-order here.

Thank you for being part of the community all this while, and I look forward to sharing more with you over the coming weeks. 

Please do share your thoughts, feedback and perspectives with us. 

Happy Friday!

Jianggan Li

CEO, Momentum Works