Global Expansion Driven by Brand: How Can Overseas Companies Protect Their Digital Assets?
Global Expansion Driven by Brands: How Can Overseas Companies Safeguard Their “Digital Assets”? | Super Conference.
Content Summary
“Deep Water Rules” overseas series Super Conference Kexiang Hall explores new pathways for brand globalization assets going abroad. In 2026, Chinese brand globalization is shifting from “scale overseas” to “asset overseas.” The volume of overseas expansion continues to grow, but brand premium capability, channels
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“Deep Water Rules” overseas series Super Conference Hall, jointly exploring new pathways for brand globalization and asset expansion abroad. |
2026In 2026, Chinese brands’ globalization is shifting from “scale‑based expansion” to “asset‑based expansion.” The volume of overseas expansion continues to grow, but brand premium capability, channel influence, and the ownership status of trademarks and domain names still lag behind the overall scale. Tariff adjustments, tighter platform rules, and increasingly detailed local compliance requirements also make the order‑ and cost‑centric expansion model unsustainable.
Against this backdrop, overseas enterprises are reallocating resources in three directions: first, a geographic reshuffling of production capacity, moving manufacturing bases to regions closer to customers and with more stable trade rules; second, data-driven market decision-making, shifting budgets from experience-based judgments to verifiable evidence; third, assetization of brand identifiers, with domains, trademarks and other first points of contact for overseas customers incorporated into a unified asset ledger.
2026 year 10 month 29 day, 36 Kr hosted the third “Deep Water Rules” overseas expansion series super‑conference in Beijing. The event, themed “Global Expansion Driven by Brand and Digital Asset Protection,” featured guests such as Ge Jianfeng, Industry Cooperation Director at Peti Co., Wu Ze, Business Director at Guangda, and Wang Xiao, Senior Product Specialist for SMB Applications at Alibaba Cloud. They discussed topics including overseas capacity layout, AI‑driven overseas advertising, and full‑stack global branding capabilities, engaging in in‑depth discussions with representatives of attending overseas expansion companies.
From Vietnam to Cambodia: The “Site‑Selection Economics” of Overseas Capacity Deployment
In the Super View segment, Ge Jianfeng, Director of Industry Cooperation at Petty Co., shared a talk titled “Decision Logic and Experience Sharing of Petty’s Overseas Production Base Layout.” He introduced that Petty Co. was founded in 1992, listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2017, becoming the first listed company in China’s pet industry. Its main business is pet snacks, with products primarily exported to the United States. Currently, the company has production bases in Wenzhou, Zhejiang; Taizhou, Jiangsu; as well as Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, and New Zealand.
2011, Peti first entered Uzbekistan, attracted by the local upstream raw material price advantage;2013, it moved into Vietnam, mainly because of lower labor and land costs, zero tariffs on exports to the US, a stable political environment, and a border with China.
Ge Jianfeng admitted that the company faced many challenges when entering Vietnam, including the absence of a pet industry category locally and the need for repeated communications with the Ministry of Commerce and customs to establish standards; when switching from hourly to piece-rate pay, they encountered union strikes and nearly half the staff quit. The situation was gradually turned around through on‑site efficiency demonstrations by experienced Chinese staff, production competitions, and incentive mechanisms. Currently, the Vietnamese factory’s efficiency has reached 80% of that in China.
Currently, the overseas factories of Petty account for 85% of exports. Ge Jianfeng concluded by emphasizing to the attendees that overseas site selection must focus on thorough pre‑compliance operations, securing a stable labor supply, establishing good government relations, and simultaneously addressing basic infrastructure such as water, electricity, and sewage treatment.
Data OverviewAIGoing Overseas: Who Invests, What They Invest In, How Much
Senior Business Director Wu Ze shared a talk titled “Data‑Driven AI Expansion: Who is Investing, What They Invest In, and How Much,” discussing the decision basis for overseas advertising, and sharing competitor ad analysis with overseas companies.
Introduced by Wu Ze, our extensive business covers the globe 70 countries, 80 channels of advertising data, updating daily with over 100 thousand creative assets. In Q3 2026, overseas AI‑driven advertisers will number about 2.3 ten thousand; the number of advertisers grows modestly, but the volume of creatives increases 4.5 fold. From January 2025 to September 2026, the amount of creatives grew nearly 10 times, marking a “win by creative volume” stage for overseas campaigns. Regionally, North American and European advertisers together account for half of the market, while Southeast Asian and South American advertisers have relatively low individual creative volumes and milder competition, making them suitable for new advertisers to test the waters.
He specifically noted that AI short dramas are a rapidly growing track in recent months, 2026 July to September new drama growth will increase 25 times. The “playstyles” in the three major overseas regions also differ:North America prefers integrating AI into workflows, with strong user willingness to pay (monthly subscriptions 10 to 30 USD); Southeast Asia focuses on e‑commerce applications, with local minor languages as a core barrier; the Middle East is driven by government vision, with strong per‑user paying power, and Arabic language and right‑to‑left reading habits form a barrier, AI companion products perform prominently.
Wu Ze also dissected the material strategies of several industry blockbuster cases on site, and summarized the path to building competitiveness: identify industry competitor blockbuster materials, use AI to improve material production efficiency, continuously test, optimize and iterate, and implement scientific placement to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
How to Build Full‑Stack Capabilities for a Global Brand
Fromcapacity planningtodeployment decisions, enterprises musttruly enterthe overseaslocal marketto operate, and also face more specific compliance and delivery requirements, such aswhere data is stored, whether service response can meet local standards, and whether payment and after‑sales chains are integrated.In other words,under the façade a truly operational technology and service system is needed.
Wang Xiao, senior product specialist for SMB applications at Alibaba Cloud, said in his keynote “Beyond the Facade: The Full‑Stack Capabilities Needed to Build a Global Brand” that localized domain names are a low‑cost way to gain local trust.AI era domain names not only help people find the brand, but also bear the responsibility of letting AI Agent find the brand.
Alibaba Cloud has 3000 acceleration nodes worldwide, obtaining 150 compliance certifications, and can provide a complete solution set ranging from cloud resources and full‑stack AI to brand websites. Wang Xiao introduced that Alibaba Cloud’s domestic and international sites offer domain registration services for nearly 400 different suffixes, with a consistent experience and unified service team across both sites, and will launch a one‑stop domain management tool. In the website‑building stage, Wan Xiaozhi AI website‑building product uses a “pay‑after‑launch” business model, adapting to localized styles such as the relaxed whitespace of Europe and America, the high‑information density of Japan, the vivid colors of the Middle East, and RTL typography, and solves real‑time translation for minor languages via plugins. Wan Xiaozhi 3.0 further provides growth services such as SEO/GEO monitoring, content generation and distribution, and customer information handover.
In the first year of going overseas, where does brand spending go?
In the super discussion session, focusing on “the first year overseas, where did brands spend their money”, several company representatives shared their firsthand experiences combined with their own corporate practices.
According to Jiang Yue from Beijing Panjiayuan Shuwen Company, as a state‑owned enterprise, its first year overseas required significant time and cost investment in regulatory compliance, “This is also a real challenge that state‑owned enterprises face when going abroad.”
Zhao Yafeng of Tianke Hengchuang said, he is a seller of 3C video game consoles and has restructured the Little霸王 gaming console product. He emphasized the importance of an official website: “If you want to deeply cultivate your product and keep moving upward, you must have your own website, that’s a must, 100%.”
Guotai Technology Zhēnzhēn said, the company produces titanium consumer goods, covering barware, waterware, and kitchenware, with the domestic market focusing on cultural and creative development. The company has not yet gone overseas, and is planning to expand into e‑commerce platforms and other overseas channels, and also intends to market its own brand. The purpose of participating in this event is to learn from experience and prepare for the next step of going abroad.
AIrewrites customer acquisition rules, how can brand strategy keep up with market rules?
On another topic—AI is rewriting the rules of brand acquisition, how can brand strategy keep up with market rules while being seen by “in‑platformAI” and “out‑of‑platformAI,”as introduced by Fang Wenjing of China Enterprise Dynamics. The company was founded in1999, headquartered in Beijing’s Yizhuang district, and has partnered with over230leading and top‑100 enterprises, frequently communicating business with overseas clients through online interpretation.
She said that Zhongqi Power is dedicated to helping corporate websites undergo a “rebirth.” Specifically, “more and more users are getting used to searching for information via AI, so a website is not only an online façade but also an AI source of truth. A Zhongqi Power AI‑friendly website is not only a space for brand presentation, but also consciously enables search engines and social media to ‘see’ and ‘understand’ the brand, thereby increasing the likelihood that generated results will cite the website’s information and help companies establish a trustworthy digital identity.”
She explained that the tools within the ZJEDU platform mainly include the AI intelligent customer service on the website front‑end, the AI operations assistant on the back‑end, supporting SEO and GEO generated AI friendly adaptation technology; outside the platform, the focus is on Google SEO and SEM promotion, and it has independently developed a low‑cost, AI‑driven social media acquisition system “AIMI” that runs alongside and manages overseas social media, meeting the needs of more outbound clients. Based on the characteristics of different industries such as law firms and manufacturing, ZJEDU also launched a series of industry solutions, including intelligent product selection, digital trade cards, QR‑code applications, etc., to help enterprises solve specific scenario challenges during their overseas expansion.
Watch the entire guest sharing and interactive discussion, from capacity layout to investment decisions, from digital identity to localized delivery. Though they appear to belong to different functions, they actually point to the same question: when order‑ and cost‑driven overseas expansion becomes unsustainable, what allows a company to stay long‑term abroad “stand firm”.
The answer is not a single breakthrough, but whether a closed loop can be formed—capacity layout solves delivery, data‑driven decisions solve efficiency, digital identity solves trust, and the technology foundation solves execution. For overseas companies at different stages, priorities may vary, but they all ultimately return to the same thing: turning every investment into a holdable, reusable, defensible asset, helping brands in overseas markets move from“standing firm” to “going far”.
The above is the36Kr Super Conference Kr Hall “Global Expansion Driven by Brand and Digital Asset Protection” highlights.
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