Chinese consumer companies have a 'disproportionate' advantage over Asian peers in winning the global market

BEIJING — Chinese brands turning to global markets for growth have a major advantage over the first wave of Asian businesses that went global: a large ethnic Chinese diaspora.

That's according to a study published Thursday by U.S. consulting firm Bain and Company. Their analysis looked mostly at data through the year 2023 for 150 Asia-Pacific headquartered consumer goods companies that are publicly traded.

"The ethnic Chinese population overseas is so large in many markets that I think there's a disproportionate opportunity for Chinese companies to target ethnic Chinese populations in other markets," David Zehner, senior partner at Bain, told CNBC.

Now with growth slowing domestically, Chinese companies are "seeing some of the success stories that have been possible, particularly in Japan and Korea, and they're looking to emulate that success," he said. Zehner noted many of the companies have started their global expansion by focusing on Asia before expanding to Europe and North America.

About 60 million ethnic Chinese live outside mainland China, according to the United Nations.

Despite being a minority in the U.S., there were about 5.2 million people of Chinese descent living in the country as of 2023, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. And in the Asian nation of Singapore, population 5.92 million, ethnic Chinese accounted for 74% of the total, according to a government report as of end-June 2023.

"There are many of these Chinese companies that have really ambitious global mindsets and are able to take the sort of entrepreneurial, fast-innovation capability that they built domestically and use that to create new positions overseas," said Zehner, who leads Bain's consumer practice in the Asia-Pacific region from