Friends of Momentum Works might already be familiar with the book Seeing the unseen: behind Chinese tech giants’ global venturing. The book, co-authored by Prof Guoli Chen, Chair of Strategy Area of INSEAD, and Jianggan Li, CEO of Momentum Works, examined the global expansion of the top Chinese internet companies from Alibaba to TikTok.

In December 2024, the Chinese version of the book, named 外卷：中国互联网巨头的全球征途 was published in China. The new book contains not only the translation of the English version, but a lot of notes and updates in the last two years.

Momentum Works has planned a series of face to face exchanges on the topics of the book in 2025 across major cities in China. The first event took place at Alibaba Campus in Hangzhou on 8 January 2025, co-hosted by Alibaba Cloud.

The event, “外卷：趋势、机会和踩过的坑” (Waijuan: trends, chances and pitfalls) drew more than 60 business owners, entrepreneurs and investors.The event centred around the topic of global expansion, and what it takes for a tech company to succeed internationally. We have extracted some highlights from the event, here are the takeaways:

  1. No event of any theme could escape the topic of AI. However, what exactly can AI do for the topic of globalisation of Chinese tech companies? Benjamin Zeng, International Solution Lead of Alibaba Cloud, shared his perspectives and experiences.
  2. Marketing content creation is an easy use case that everyone could think about.. However, that is not everything generative AI can do for ecommerce – a far more interesting, and ambitious initiative is to get platforms in any country access the vast supply chain in China, and vice versa. Benjamin demonstrated a few cases where local ecommerce platforms in Europe and Africa leveraged Alibaba Cloud to access the vast selection of products from the Chinese supply chain, to increase competitiveness in the age of SHEIN and Temu.
  3. Benjamin also cautioned that with the buzz of AI, it is very easy for organisations to invest in the wrong areas or capabilities. “You should already remember that the first word of AI is ‘artificial’”, he said, after giving a few exam
  4. The other guest speaker at the event was Denny Deng,  partner and head of data of Tabcut, a tech startup specializing in analytics of TikTok Shop data. Momentum Works and Tabcut have just released a new report “TikTok Shop in the U.S. 2024: Trends, insights & the road ahead” that analyses key trends and insights of TikTok Shop in the US market.
  5. Denny shared the key insights in this upcoming joint report: in 2024, TikTok Shop’s global GMV reached about US$32.6 billion, whereas the US market alone achieved US$9 billion (and became the biggest market for the platform). More than 398 thousand stores and 11 million influencers created 17 million videos and 4 million live stream sessions.
  6. Denny Deng also shared about the digital human live streaming and AI video generation products of Topview AI, which are trained on the Tabcut’s vast array of video data. For brands, the return on investment (ROI) of digital humans during off-peak hours can be up to 1.5 times that of real hosts, as empirical data in Topview deployments in Southeast Asia showed.
  7. Jianggan Li, CEO of Momentum Works, concluded the event with his sharing titled “Waijuan: trends, chances and pitfalls”. He shared that many Chinese companies he has spoken to often feel lost when expanding outside the country because of the lack of reliable sources of data or information, especially in emerging markets. Without leaders spending sufficient time to understand the local environment, these companies struggle to make informed decisions.
  8. Across Southeast Asia, markets are highly fragmented, with significant differences in population distribution, GDP per capita, and cultural familiarity with China. For instance, Vietnamese consumers are more familiar with Chinese cultural content, such as TV shows – many grew up watching the CCTV version of Journey to the West (dubbed in Vietnamese) and are familiar with the stories and themes in the shows.
  9. This familiarity allows Chinese brands to leverage existing marketing content from China when entering Vietnam, but more importantly, enables Vietnamese live streamers and influencers to easily copy and adapt the Chinese playbook. For countries including Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, players have to figure out their own distinct playbook;
  10. He also emphasised the importance of infrastructure in supporting e-commerce growth. In China, well-developed infrastructure connecting cities was already in place before the rise of ecommerce, allowing the industry to flourish. This fact is often overlooked by Chinese companies expanding to other countries, expecting the same level of infrastructure and quite often disappointed when things do not move as fast as they do in China. Having the right understanding of all the factors contributing to the their success in China would allow them to make a better assessment of other markets they would like to expand into;
  11. Jianggan also shared some of the case studies in the book, including those of famous Chinese tech companies Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance and Lalamove. He also shared the experiences learnt in the early days of tech’s global expansion, spearheaded by Rocket Internet and Prosus, which Chinese practitioners were not familiar with. As an earlier MD of Rocket Internet companies, he had plenty of personal stories to share.
  12. “Globalisation has always been an extremely difficult undertaking”, Jianggan encouraged the audience to reflect about their organisational capabilities and people, while planning and implementing expansion strategies.

In the coming months, we will hold more events in the same series across major cities in China, Southeast Asia and beyond. Stay tuned!

Oh, and also if you are leading teams with both Chinese and English-speaking senior members, you can purchase the book bundle (in both languages) to gain a well-rounded understanding of the strategies behind Chinese tech companies’ global expansion.