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From the factory of the world to the global investor

With the increasing prosperity of domestic consumer goods track and the stabilization of China’s demographic dividend, more brands will naturally choose to enter the overseas market, and China will gradually change its identity from the original world processing plant to become the role of the world investor.

The annual BrandZ™ Ranking of the top 100 Most Valuable Chinese brands over the years is impressed by the strong presence of many technology companies, with Lenovo accounting for 72% of its overseas revenue, Huawei for 58% and ZTE for 47%.

The global perception of Chinese brands has begun to be enlightened, and this trend continues to grow as Chinese brands continue to expand in overseas markets through acquisitions and marketing campaigns.

Whether it is epidemic prevention supplies or DTC (Direct To Consumer marketing model) boutique sites, various operational methods emerge in an endless stream.

How will brands build their moats in the face of a vast overseas market in 2021? And what chips to seize the big blue ocean era of the brand?

Solid brand power — Huawei
When it comes to Chinese brands, Huawei, which has been on the cusp of the storm in recent years, has to be mentioned.

In the consumer market, the power of brand power is always about the choice of customers. Steve Jobs once said: Make it easy for your customers to remember who you are and how you can change their lives.

It points out the important value of brand construction. In the business war, the brand determines how far an enterprise can go.

As can be seen from Huawei’s strategic layout in recent years, Huawei has been forcing itself out of its comfort zone, independent of suppliers, breaking the logic of low-end production volume, and determined to make independent innovation and establish its own business. The brand is determined to hit the C-end market and make a comprehensive transformation towards the direction of “consumer-centered”.

After increasing research and development, we have launched the Mate series with large screen, long battery life, high performance and safety, advancing into the high-end mobile phone market all the way. This is the starting point of high-end huawei consumer business brand.

From now on, consumers will buy high-end phones in addition to Apple And Samsung, but also a Huawei.

Huawei has gradually recognized the international market, and its product line strategy has become clearer.

Mate is focused on high-end business, P series is focused on high-end young photographing route, nova is targeted at the young market, enjoying the main cost-effective, and each series has achieved great success.

Mate series and P series in the past two years, as long as the new release can arouse the fans of consumer electronics around the world climax, let the world marvel at the sophisticated level of Chinese mobile phone manufacturing.

Mate20 series, for example, won the “Best Smartphone” award at MWC 2019, the first Chinese mobile phone brand to win the award.

Product power directly determines the quality of brand power, product power is the basis of brand power.

Huawei consumer business can be in the ascendant in a few years, is closely related to the company’s heavy research and development, heavy technology genes. Huawei has established an international leading position in the communications industry, beating international giants to the top of the industry. That has led to the heavy blows of unilateralism and protectionism.

Entering the mobile phone business has created huawei’s innate technical advantages in signal, and re-research and development has become the essence of Huawei terminals.

This makes Huawei terminal from scratch, from have to strong.

At 20:00 on February 22, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business, unveiled the Mate X2, a new foldable phone. At the press conference, Yu said huawei survived multiple rounds of US sanctions, but with the support of consumers and partners around the world.

Under heavy pressure, Huawei actively expanded new businesses, involving in automobile, coal, breeding, transportation and many other fields. However, Ren Zhengfei repeatedly stressed that Huawei would not diversify its development, but expand all fields in the expansion of technology, mainly focusing on the application of electronic systems and software computing in different industries.

Look forward to Huawei such Chinese brands can be more and more brave, with super brand power through the cycle, always become a classic.

International transmission power — Sheln
Nowadays, more and more subdivision categories began to initiate the trend of global brands.

SheIn, a cross-border fast fashion e-commerce company, saw revenues of nearly $10 billion (65.3 billion yuan) in 2020, marking the company’s eighth consecutive year of more than 100% growth in receivables.

WPP, Kantar and Google, the world’s largest advertising and communication groups, have released the BrandZ™ China Top 50 Global Brands report 2020. Huawei, Lenovo, Ali, Bytedance, And Xiaomi are among the top brands, while a fashion enterprise on the list that 99% of Chinese people have never heard of is extremely popular in overseas markets.

SHEIN (No. 13), a cross-border fast fashion brand focusing on women’s wear, is based in Nanjing and has over 20 million active users worldwide. SheIn currently ranks far ahead of fast fashion brands such as H&M and Zara in terms of app downloads worldwide, and was valued at more than $15 billion in 2020. Its rise has reached its climax.

▲Sheln overseas official website

Sheln was founded in Nanjing in 2008 and initially relied on third-party platforms such as Amazon and ebay for shipping.

In 2011, Sheln began to focus on fast fashion women’s wear, and used KOL to promote the brand on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other international social platforms. Sheln’s traffic at that time came entirely from KOL drainage, with a return on investment of 300%.

As influencer traffic dried up, Sheln began experimenting with traditional advertising methods such as TV ads and Youtube splash pages. The focus of publicity has changed from selling goods at a discount to creating a new lifestyle, and the purpose of marketing has changed from promoting sales to building brands.

Once the brand began to be built, Sheln began to obtain financing one after another. Besides brand marketing, the team also started to build independent e-commerce sites.

Launched a Spanish website in 2010, targeting Zara’s stronghold. In 2012, it launched a French website, entered Russia in 2013, launched a website in Italy in 2014, and opened an online shop in Arabia in 2015. Under the continuous support of the capital, Sheln sales doubled.

Social media is the biggest strength of Sheln, a fast fashion company with Internet genes, using Internet celebrities to promote on international social platforms, and has set up official pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. At present, it has tens of millions of Facebook fans. And it has a very high level of fan engagement.

Sheln’s rapid grasp of mobile development, maintenance and promotion has made Sheln far ahead of its competitors in APP promotion.

ShelnAPP currently has 100 million downloads and 40 million active users. The number of users surpassed Wal-mart and eBay, ranking second in the U.S. market.

Sheln focuses on fast fashion and low price, makes full use of China’s supply chain advantages, and timely transforms into a brand direction of higher premium in the development process. Its excellent brand operation and communication ability is worth learning from.

Global innovation — Anker Innovation
Here to introduce a deep cultivation of international electronic consumption of the invisible champion – Anke innovation. The e-commerce company was founded in 2011 in Hunan province.

Mainly engaged in its own brand mobile device peripherals, intelligent hardware products and other electronic consumer goods. Through its mobile power products continue to go out of the circle, to capture the favor of overseas consumers.

The company’s brand industry has been ranked TOP 10 BrandZ™ Global Brands in China for consecutive years.

The company’s full line of products to achieve independent research and development, design and sales, now anke Innovation is a global electronic consumer brand.

Anke Innovation has been focusing on product innovation, and has outstanding innovative layout in charger series, silent audio series and intelligent heart piercing series products. The independent patented technology released by the company even leads the reform of the whole industry.

▲ Figure source Cinda Securities

Anke Innovation has also achieved global omni-channel sales from the earliest cross-border e-commerce sales on Amazon. Products continue to innovate, the company’s net profit in the third quarter of 2020 reached 267 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 30.44%, the company’s excellent performance is mainly due to the expansion of new product categories.

With the frequent occurrence of new products, the improvement of sales channels and the deepening of brand barriers, the global performance is expected to create new highs.

If consumer electronics is the sea, the deep sea market is mobile phone, PC, etc., and the shallow sea is the sketch category in which Anker works.

There are endless opportunities in the shallow waters.

Smart data insight — Bytedance
If ByteDance’s overseas presence is a tinderbox, TikTok is the strongest flashpoint.

According to App Annie’s data, TikTok’s average monthly usage time of American Android users in 2020 is the longest, reaching 21 hours, with a year-on-year growth of 66.67%.

Among them, Indonesia has the fastest growth, increasing from 2.9 hours in 2019 to 12.3 hours, a year-on-year growth of 324%, which is largely related to TikTok’s increased investment in Indonesia in 2020.

In terms of monthly active user growth, TikTok topped the charts of top social apps in 14 countries out of 16 compiled by App Annie.

It ranks first in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, China, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Whether Mr. Bean or Thai primary school students are popular all over the world on TikTok, they prove with their own experience that entertainment itself has a strong commonality.

Cultural differences will affect content creation, but human nature is always connected. Physical humor is a common way of humor all over the world, song and dance show is a cultural carrier with cross-border properties, and even the “desire” at the bottom of human nature is “global attraction”.

TikTok’s strength lies in its technology, style of play and business model. Going “tech out” is key to TikTok’s global push. From the product dimension, the technology takes algorithm recommendation as the core, gathers a large number of creators and provides material incentives.

Throughout bytedance’s overseas journey in recent years, it has always adhered to the general direction of “product line going overseas”. Based on this, Bytedance has exported technology, capital and business model to the outside world, forming an overseas strategy different from other companies.

As Zhang yiming said, Bytedance’s globalization strategy is to “go overseas with technology and operate locally.”

conclusion
No matter in the field of deep sea or shallow sea, brands going abroad need to build their own strong brand power, and at the same time polish a set of their own international environmental communication rules, focus on innovation and change, coupled with strong data insight and data analysis ability.

I believe that more Chinese brands are still on the road, steady basic skills, deep sea, shallow sea are not afraid.