At the Critical Juncture of Global Supply Chain Restructuring: Localization Practices and Challenges for Enterprises Expanding Overseas | Super Ke Hall

For many Chinese enterprises expanding overseas, 2026 can be regarded as the year when their global layout shifts from horizontal expansion to in-depth vertical advancement.

Over the past few years, the logic of Chinese enterprises' overseas expansion has undergone profound changes. In the early stage of "product export", enterprises focused on how to sell products through various channels, and solved problems such as offline traffic acquisition, offline logistics fulfillment, and payment and settlement.

But by 2026, the continuous escalation of tariffs has forced "capacity export" to become a new trend. From the electronic manufacturing clusters in Vietnam, home appliance production bases in Thailand, and auto parts industrial belts in Mexico to the emerging industrial zones in the Middle East, Chinese enterprises are increasingly present in emerging markets.

As the pace of capacity relocation of overseas enterprises accelerates, challenges also escalate. After completing the first step of settling down overseas, enterprises begin to face the new proposition of truly taking root in local markets — challenges such as tariff fluctuations, regional market differences, and cross-regional collaboration force overseas enterprises to further review their original global operation models.

The ability to coordinate the entire supply chain globalization layout and build a global operation system that enables effective collaboration across multiple markets is an essential capability that determines whether overseas enterprises can truly gain a firm foothold in foreign markets.

Factories are easy to move abroad, but management is hard to keep up

Many enterprises find after going overseas that it is not difficult to move production lines abroad, but the difficulty lies in how to reconstruct the operation and management systems of overseas factories.

Although many mature large enterprises have built complete management systems in China, they often encounter a large number of practical obstacles when trying to migrate these systems overseas. For example, due to the underdeveloped local network infrastructure, the manufacturing execution system runs with lag; local technicians are not accustomed to the operation logic and report formats of domestic automated equipment, leading to high enterprise training costs and long cycles; some enterprises even translate the interface language of domestic systems into local languages, but due to inaccurate and unidiomatic expressions, local employees have difficulty understanding, which reduces work efficiency instead.

At the management level, as the information communication and decision-making links are extended, the headquarters' control over overseas factories cannot reach the level of domestic plants. Whether the inventory level is reasonable, whether the production schedule is normal, whether the quality data meets the standards... These issues can be checked in real time through the system at any time in China. But overseas, as communication is forced to return to methods such as Excel reports and emails, these problems are not only difficult to solve in a timely manner, but also new troubles such as data lag and inconsistent statistical calibers will arise.

Of course, some pioneers have already worked out solutions. For example, the Thailand factory of a home appliance enterprise has applied AI to cover multiple core business scenarios, which has greatly improved the qualified rate of finished products and order processing efficiency. Some enterprises have built a "cloud-edge-end" collaborative digital architecture in overseas factories, and realized the improvement of equipment efficiency through an intelligent production scheduling system.

However, behind these successful practices are a large number of trial and error, investment and time costs. For most small and medium-sized overseas enterprises, it is still difficult to find an overseas factory management model that suits their own development stage under limited resources.

Another practical problem is industrial chain collaboration. Although the "group overseas expansion" of industrial chain clusters has become the industry consensus, there is no standard answer to questions such as how to design the benefit mechanism and ensure the collaboration efficiency after "going out". If core suppliers do not follow, enterprises have to reconstruct the overseas supply chain locally from scratch, which further increases the difficulty.

Localized operation: More than just physical space relocation

Although overseas enterprises are generally aware of the importance of localized operation, they tend to prioritize building factories, recruiting employees and expanding channels first, while ignoring the localization at the digital level.

As the business scale expands, the difficulty of managing digital assets also increases simultaneously. Different from tangible assets such as factories and products, when enterprises carry out business in multiple countries, there are inevitably differences in the use, storage and flow of digital assets such as brand names, backend data and supply systems. A slight negligence may lead to huge losses.

More and more overseas enterprises have realized the importance of digital brand asset management and implementation in the localized operation system. How to build a clear framework to coordinate the global operation of digital brand assets and ensure that brand identities can be effectively protected and managed in every key market has become a fundamental task that overseas enterprises cannot ignore.

On August 19, 2026, 36Kr will co-host the "Deep Water Rules" · Overseas Series Super Kr Hall offline event with VeriSign in Shenzhen. We have specially invited senior director of VeriSign Customer Management Department Zhang Zhi and other infrastructure service providers deeply rooted in emerging markets, as well as practical operators with rich overseas expansion experience.

The guests will focus on the two core topics of "localized operation" and "supply chain reconstruction", share their practical experience and trend insights on key issues such as capacity transfer decision-making, overseas factory digitalization, and digital brand asset protection, and conduct multi-dimensional discussions with participating enterprises.

Founders, CEOs of overseas enterprises, and heads of supply chain, operation and overseas business are welcome to sign up for the event, and explore practical paths for Chinese enterprises to achieve global breakthroughs together.