XIAMEN, Sept. 7 — The “2026 Gulangyu Forum: World Business Leaders Roundtable for Global Investment” was held on Monday at the Xiamen International Expo Center. A key side event of the 26th China International Fair for Investment and Trade (CIFIT), the roundtable took “managing non-commercial risks for companies going global” as its theme and brought together more than 400 guests from governments, foreign missions in China, chambers of commerce, professional services firms and leading enterprises. Its aim was to help companies read the new trends in international expansion, open up safe and efficient investment paths, and build a platform and consensus for cooperation and investment between multinationals and Chinese companies.

Sun Chanthol, Deputy Prime Minister of Cambodia and First Vice Chairman of the Council for the Development of Cambodia; Wang Xun, Vice President of the World Trade Centers Association; and Lin Ruiliang, Vice Governor of Fujian Province, attended and delivered remarks. The opening session was chaired by Zhuang Rongliang, member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Xiamen Municipal Committee and Vice Mayor of Xiamen.

In the keynote session, Wu Yonghua, Executive Director and Co-CEO of ANTA Group, spoke on behalf of the leading enterprises of the sportswear sector. Under the banner of “global thinking, local operations”, he traced ANTA’s path from “running international brands well in China” to “taking ANTA to the world”, and distilled it into three reflections.

“Globalization is not an optional question. It is one we must answer. We cannot expand into new markets on inertia; we must coordinate top-level global planning with fine-grained local operations.” — Wu Yonghua

The following is an edited transcript of his remarks.

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed open development during his inspection visits to enterprises, guiding companies to draw on both domestic and international markets and resources for innovation-driven growth, to raise manufacturing standards and expand exports, and encouraging them to brave the vast ocean of the world market and achieve better development through higher-standard opening up.

For companies, and for the sporting goods industry in particular, globalization is not optional; it is a must. Proactively building a presence in global markets is both the sports industry’s own response to the national strategy of opening up and the inevitable path toward building China into a leading sporting nation.

ANTA Group set its core strategy of “Single-Focus, Multi-Brand, Globalization” in 2021. In the first half of 2026, group revenue reached 43.51 billion yuan, up 12.9 percent year on year, keeping ANTA first in the Chinese market for a fifth consecutive year and among the top three worldwide. Together with Amer Sports, first-half revenue totaled 67.98 billion yuan. Drawing on this experience, let me share three reflections.

ANTA Group has mapped out a three-step globalization strategy.

Step one: run international brands well in China. In 2009 ANTA acquired the operating rights for FILA in Greater China. After more than a decade of careful cultivation by the team, FILA’s revenue climbed from less than 100 million yuan to nearly 30 billion yuan, and Descente grew into the group’s third brand with revenue above 10 billion yuan. The multi-brand operating experience and the distinctive “brand plus retail” business model accumulated in those years became the foundation for everything that followed.

Step two: go abroad and run global brands. In 2019 ANTA, together with several partners, acquired Amer Sports. It kept the overseas brands’ identities and local teams while exporting China’s mature operating systems, and took Amer Sports to a listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024.

Step three: take the ANTA brand itself global. Southeast Asia is the bridgehead. ANTA is using the combined strength of its multi-brand portfolio to open the Southeast Asian market step by step, and is progressively expanding into the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and North America.

Each step builds on the last, laying the foundations of globalization with a long-term mindset.

Globalization is not a simple transplant of the China model. New markets cannot be opened on inertia; top-level global planning must be coordinated with fine-grained local operations. At group level, ANTA has built unified shared platforms for global supply chain, digitalization, logistics and financial management to ensure the overall strategy is delivered. At regional level, every market runs on a fully localized operating mechanism.

Take Southeast Asia. More than 90 percent of staff there are local hires, and it is these local teams that read consumer demand accurately. Products are planned around each country’s sporting culture: in Indonesia, where badminton is a national passion, ANTA has focused on a full range of badminton equipment. This “global thinking, local operations” model has delivered clear results. ANTA’s plan for Southeast Asia is to reach 1,000 ANTA-brand retail outlets by 2028.

As they go global, Chinese companies face increasingly strict environmental regulations and green trade barriers in overseas markets. ANTA’s answer is to turn sustainability into hard competitive strength. The group has set out a “1+3+5” sustainability blueprint with the goal of group-wide carbon neutrality by 2050, and is embedding sustainability across the whole business chain, building a system of shared value for consumers, employees, partners, society and the environment. ANTA also actively takes on global social responsibility: it has entered a global partnership with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), demonstrating on the international stage the sense of responsibility of Chinese enterprises.

ANTA works with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) on global humanitarian initiatives.

ANTA Group’s vision is to become a world-leading multi-brand sporting goods group. The road of globalization is long, and it cannot be walked without partners from every field. ANTA is a company with a dream. In 2005, founder Ding Shizhong declared that ANTA should “become the world’s ANTA”. We have always believed that China’s leading companies will one day become the world’s leading companies. ANTA Group will keep delivering high-quality, diverse sports products to consumers around the world, show the appeal of Chinese sports brands, build bridges between China and the world through excellent products, and step by step become “the world’s ANTA”.

Source: ANTA Group official WeChat account, Sept. 7, 2026, “2026 Gulangyu Forum | Wu Yonghua: Three reflections on ANTA Group’s ‘global thinking, local operations’.”