The Globalisation of Chinese Companies, China’s Next Era

Dear 48 Group members,

I have just arrived back from a three-week trip to China. It has been three weeks of meetings with business leaders, government leaders, chairpersons, entrepreneurs, and old friends, with days that started at seven in the morning and often ended at eleven at night. When I go to China, I ask my team to book meetings back-to-back throughout the day, with no days off. That is not by accident. It is because this is serious for me.

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Going to China is about understanding. Understanding where China is today. Understanding what they are doing. Understanding what they are looking to do. Understanding how they are doing it, and ultimately what I think that means for the next decade or two. And most importantly, how The 48 Group can help ensure that UK businesses, and indeed Western businesses more broadly, to not fall behind in this next era of global growth. I do not go to tick a box. I go to listen, to watch, and to try to connect the dots.

On every trip I meet many different people. I sit in boardrooms and visit factories, in government offices and in coffee shops. I listen to discussions across different areas and sectors of business. I try to understand what this means for China’s economy, for UK businesses, for European businesses, for the global economy, and for Western economies. I do this because that is what my role demands. When I took up the role as Chairman of The 48 Group, it was not a new chapter, it was a continuation. I have been part of this relationship since I was a boy, and I have been working full time in the China space since 2002. Before that, China was already part of my life because my family has had business relationships with China for more than seventy years.

Across those seventy years, each generation has seen a very different China. My grandfather’s China was rebuilding, industrialising, and reopening to the world. My father’s China was reforming, modernising, and learning from global partnerships. The China I work with today is innovating, globalising, and beginning to lead the next phase of industrial technology. Throughout these stages, our family has tried to help Western businesses understand what China is doing and why it matters.

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The internet and global connectivity over the past twenty to twenty-five years have changed access dramatically. Many companies now feel they can access China more easily, so they think that understanding China is simply a matter of information. It is not. The world is complex and so is China. To build a meaningful business relationship with China, you have to understand not only how to reach it, but how it thinks, what it values, where it is strong, and where it is weak.

On this trip, and over my last three years as Chairman of The 48 Group, I have reached a point where I feel I should share more of my personal view of where I see China focusing, and what my insight is on the next decade or two.

The tariffs and the turning point nobody saw properly

When America began to speak about de-risking and decoupling from China, many people asked, “What will China do now?” For a period, especially over the last two years, I looked at this through a commercial lens. It felt like America was trying to put a stop to China’s supply chains around the world, to break links and reduce China’s reach. The question everyone asked was how China would react.

To understand what is happening now, we have to look at what China and America had before. For decades, the relationship between China and America was pragmatic. In the 1970s, there was a reset. Over time, the two countries built a partnership that, at its best, worked for both sides. America used China’s manufacturing capabilities, its cheaper labour, its scale, and its increasing quality. China used America’s consumer demand and commodity base. America could deliver cheaper goods to its own citizens and sell higher value products into a growing Chinese market. It worked.

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China became stronger, climbed the value chain, and became a central presence in the global economy. It is now one of the leading powers in the modern world. There were two ways to respond to this. One was to embrace and shape it as a shared success. The other was to try to resist it.

Instead of treating that relationship as an asset, America chose to treat it as a threat. Words like de-risking and decoupling became fashionable. Technology, data, and security became the language, but the underlying goal seemed to be to slow China’s acceleration, to blunt its capabilities, and to create doubt rather than confidence.

When President Donald Trump took office, tariffs became the tool. Tariffs worth tens of billions were applied quickly. At the time, it was presented as a tactic to win money back for America, to correct what was described as an imbalance. In my view, what those tariffs actually did was something far more strategic, and far more long term. They removed America’s greatest advantage.

China, as a culture and a system, prefers to stay in relationships long term. If there are problems, the instinct is to find solutions. If there are difficulties, the instinct is to solve them. If there are positives, the instinct is to make them stronger. Chinese companies, like Chinese people, tend to think about relationships in decades, not in quarters. Once they commit, they stay.

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The tariffs changed this dynamic. They made the relationship unstable and unpredictable. They introduced uncertainty into something that had been, up to that point, a long-term arrangement. This forced China to diversify its risk, to diversify its relationships, and to diversify its focus. It forced serious conversations with other parts of the world about long-term trade.

China began to look more closely at Europe, at the global south, at Southeast Asia, at Africa, at the Middle East. It did not abandon America overnight, but it started to build new roads. New trading lines. New relationships. These were not temporary reactions; they were strategic moves. When China builds a road, it expects to use it for a long time.

This is why I often say in private that tariffs may have been the biggest long-term gift America could have given China. If China had gone out to build these new relationships on its own, without pressure, Western media would have been full of comments saying that China was trying to control the world, trying to be everywhere at once. But because the trigger was tariffs and de-risking language from America, it was framed as a reaction, not an ambition. The effect, however, is the same. China now has more routes into the world than ever before, and it will not simply walk away from them.

From bringing technology in to taking innovation out

This brings me to where I see China going over the next few decades. China’s focus is no longer only on bringing foreign technology and know-how into China. That was essential for many years. It is no longer the main story. The story now is how China takes its own innovation outwards.

For a long time, China’s weakness was not in making or inventing, but in globalising its own companies. It was a manufacturing engine for the world, but often without controlling the final brand, the story, or the customer relationship. That is changing.

Today, China has created innovation in technology to a level that rivals other major powers and in certain areas is ahead. There is now a race in fields such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and sustainability. The previous era of the global economy was built on cement, real estate, banking, and consumption. The era we are entering is built on energy, quantum, AI, and automation. It is a very different world and it creates a very different future.

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China has been investing in this new world for some time. It is not just building factories; it is building industrial systems. It is not just increasing output; it is increasing capability.

The area where China has been relatively weaker historically is turning its many strong companies into global companies. Not just made in China, but created, cultivated, and sold by China, into other markets, under Chinese names, on Chinese terms, as global brands.

That is what is now changing. China is putting time, capital, and policy behind building the roads for its companies to move outward. It is investing in infrastructure abroad. It is building capability in distribution, branding, and customer service in other countries.

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Inside China, provinces and cities are creating hubs to help Chinese companies understand the outside world. These hubs teach how to set up in France and Germany, how to structure partnerships in the United Kingdom, how to navigate markets in the Middle East and Africa. They are teaching culture, regulation, finance, and law. They are teaching how to talk to international banks, how to work with global investors, how to sit across the table from companies whose customers think in a different language, at a different time of day, with different habits.

For many years, the conversation was about foreign companies understanding China. Now the conversation is about Chinese companies understanding the world. That is an important shift. If Chinese innovation is to be truly global, it must travel on roads that are built with an understanding of local culture, local expectations, and local needs.

De-risking, d-coupling and the real shift across industries

The current language around de-risking and de-coupling often misses the real industrial shift that is already underway. While the West speaks about moving away from dependence on China, China has already begun moving away from the low-end segments that once defined its role.

China is no longer focusing on making T-shirts, pens, and sneakers. Those activities are being relocated into other countries that now play the role China once played. China has invested in those places. While others try to take production out of China, China has already taken low-value production out of itself.

China’s focus is now high-end manufacturing and high-end machinery, reducing labour intensity and increasing technological substance. It is not using cheap labour to make cheap goods. It is using advanced machinery to make high quality goods with far less labour at all.

You can see this clearly in the electric vehicle sector. Fifteen years ago, Chinese teams were in Germany, studying the EV industry. They saw that the technology was sound and that the only real barrier was infrastructure. Europe understood the potential, but did not have the speed or scale to change. China did.

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Today, China has an EV industry that is ten to fifteen years ahead in some aspects. It has built charging networks at a speed that is difficult to match. It has integrated EV production into its wider industrial planning. This did not happen by accident. It came from long term observation, study, and execution.

At the same time, China has focused heavily on automation, robotics, and technology. In factory after factory, I have walked through the door expecting to see hundreds of workers and instead seen machines operating with almost no staff on the floor. You talk to the person at reception, but behind them the factory is being run by robotics.

China is an opportunity. For UK businesses and Western businesses, de risking and decoupling may feel like short term positioning, but in the long term a lack of constructive engagement means losing relevance, losing capability, and losing decades of growth in the age of technology.

This is best demonstrated by my visit to a leading research institute in Beijing. The chief scientist told me that they ordered machines essential for their research from the United Kingdom. The order was stopped by the government citing national security concerns. The chief scientist then told me that the old mindset in China had always been “renting is better than buying, buying is better than making”. That philosophy shaped China for decades. But de-risking and de-coupling forced a dramatic change. Within three years, they produced their own machines, at a level equal to the UK supplier. The UK company did not only lose millions of pounds of business in this one trade. It lost an industry and a market that will never return.

I have also sat with the chairpersons of many companies and listened carefully to how they see the future. What has happened. What is happening. And, more importantly, what is going to happen next.

In the next recession, in my view, the adoption of automation will change the way we live and work. Companies will have to make choices. When revenues fall, labour is always one of the biggest costs. In previous cycles, jobs were cut and later restored. In the next cycle, many jobs will be cut and replaced permanently by automation. Companies will buy machines once, instead of paying salaries every month for years.

This will not only affect China. It will affect the West. It opens up the possibility for factories and manufacturing plants to be built again in Western countries, designed from the ground up with automation and renewable energy, creating the long-needed growth that the West has lacked. They will be no longer built on the assumption of large numbers of manual workers, but built on machines, software, and clean power.

That has enormous implications for supply chains, for industrial policy, and for the role of China in the global economy.

What this means for our members and for the next chapter

For me, these three weeks in China are part of a much longer journey. The three weeks are recent. The three years as Chairman of The 48 Group, and indeed the many years before that, have been about listening, learning, and trying to help UK and Western businesses access and understand China in a way that is real, not superficial.

Each trip, I meet with hundreds of companies. I meet with chairpersons and founders, with startup entrepreneurs and state-owned giants. I bring with me relationships that go back more than seventy years, built by my grandfather and my father, and I try to add to that in my own way.

We are, at the end of the day, business people. But we are business people who think in terms of long-term strategic planning, problem solving, the future of my country, the United Kingdom, and a beneficial relationship for the better of the world. Our focus has been China because we believe China is one of the most important and most complex countries in the world, and its pace of change is unmatched.

No country does everything well. No company does everything well. No person does everything well. What matters is that we strive to improve, that we keep thinking, that we keep learning, and that we keep working hard. That is what I try to do, and it is what The 48 Group has tried to do through three generations.

On 6 February 2026, we will hold our Chinese New Year Icebreakers Dinner in London. It sold out in forty-eight hours. It remains one of the most significant dinners of the year, every year. The 48 Group continues to help companies navigate their relationship with China. We have stood beside British companies and global companies for many years and will continue to do so.

I look forward to sharing more detailed thoughts on specific sectors, specific opportunities, and specific challenges in the months ahead. For now, I hope this gives you some insight into how I see the current chapter and the chapters that are coming.

I look forward to seeing many of you at the Icebreakers Dinner, if not before.

Best regards,

Jack Perry

Chairman, The 48 Group, The Icebreakers