| Simply translating domestic product detail pages into English word for word is the first mistake we make when expanding overseas.

Not long ago, nearly 30 employees from a home appliance company joined us on a 5-day field trip. They split into three teams to travel across Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, before reuniting in Singapore.

This was no superficial business tour. We set out with one core question: why do manufacturers with years of solid experience in China need to relearn the art of sales when entering Southeast Asian markets?

The answers can be found in local households in Jakarta, Indonesia, meeting rooms at Lazada’s headquarters in Thailand, and among the store shelves around Bukit Bintang in Malaysia.

Without further ado, let’s look at three key mindset shifts we gained from this Southeast Asia market exploration.

01.

Consumers in Southeast Asia are not just low-income counterparts of Chinese shoppers.

Before the trip, many tended to judge Southeast Asian markets merely by per capita GDP. Yet stepping into local residents' homes, we found the reality is far different.

In southern Jakarta, we were guided by local expert Iwan Murty, who has spent 27 years conducting consumer research in Indonesia and served clients including Unilever, Samsung and Philips. He divided our group into two teams to visit an upscale household and a mid-income family respectively.

He told us not to ask "Which brand do you prefer?" but instead "What did you do the last time your home appliance broke down?"

The hostess of the mid-income family pointed to her 8-year-old air conditioner and said, "I don’t need mobile app control. What I need is a reliable unit. If it breaks, I hope a repairman can come the next day with reasonable service fees."

Indonesia has an unstable power supply, and electricity bills account for a much larger share of household spending than in China. When shopping for air conditioners, local consumers value energy efficiency far more than smart connectivity features. The same goes for Thailand. Local buyers prioritize fast cooling and low noise. Since many homes have combined living rooms and bedrooms and the country has a tropical climate, air conditioners run almost all day long.

Such field visits are extremely worthwhile and rewarding. When expanding into Southeast Asia, products do not need excessive smart features. Instead, manufacturers should first perfect core performance: energy efficiency, durability and easy maintenance. Fancy gimmicks popular back home fail to win over local consumers.

We made another eye-opening discovery in Kuala Lumpur.

In one afternoon, we toured four shopping malls around Bukit Bintang. Though located close to one another, they cater to entirely different customer groups.

Pavilion is home to international luxury brands. Shoppers here prioritize brand image and design, and are willing to pay a premium for aesthetics and status. A short walk away is Fahrenheit 88, bustling with young people who favor Japanese and Korean styles and products shareable on social media. Further on lies Sungei Wang Plaza, a popular spot for local bargain hunters. A fan priced 20 Malaysian Ringgit lower than elsewhere easily stands out. Klang Parade in the suburbs mainly serves family shoppers, who care most about the monthly installment amount.

Within one city and for the same product category, there exist four entirely different business strategies.

This clearly shows that the era of adopting a single product lineup, pricing strategy and sales channel for all markets is gone. You need to tailor product ranges, display solutions and sales pitches for high-end stores, neighborhood shops and online channels respectively.

We also noticed an interesting detail.

In the mid-income Indonesian household, certificates of merit for the children and prayer schedules of the mosque were pasted next to the refrigerator. The hostess told us that her husband, mother and even a neighbor came along when she bought the fridge. She chose the brand simply because they all praised its long warranty period.

In Indonesia and Malaysia, purchasing home appliances is often a family decision. Opinions from neighbors and local religious communities also carry great weight. While online reviews play a part, in-person trials and recommendations from sales staff matter far more.

Executives from Hypermart, one of Indonesia's largest supermarket chains holding a 26% market share, confirmed this trend. They said Indonesian consumers still prefer buying mobile phones and home appliances offline, as they want to check products in person, consult sales representatives and learn about after-sales services.

We must abandon narrow-minded thinking. Overseas expansion cannot rely solely on online sales. For high-value goods, it is essential to develop physical channels to build trust and deliver tangible shopping experiences. Instead of just listing technical specifications, sales staff should focus on practical benefits, such as how much electricity the product can save for the family and how quickly repair services can be arranged.

02.

Localization is far more than just translating product pages — it means restructuring the entire value chain.

Simply translating domestic product descriptions into English or Thai is not localization — it only results in awkward literal translation.

In Bangkok, the Marketing Director of Lazada shared three pieces of advice with the entrepreneurs, and the top one was to pursue in-depth localization and reject direct copying.

He pointed out that Southeast Asian countries vary greatly from one another. It is unwise to copy products and promotional content from China. Instead, enterprises need to redesign product details, packaging and visuals based on local customs, religious beliefs, climate and usage scenarios.

For instance, air conditioners with a clearly marked high-power dehumidification mode stand out as a top seller in Thailand, due to the extremely humid rainy season. In Indonesia, many families place washing machines on semi-open balconies outdoors, so the equipment must feature rust-proof casings and water & dust resistant control panels. Such details can never be figured out by product managers working back at headquarters.

It is worth emphasizing that headquarters should no longer hold sole sway over product positioning for overseas markets. Companies need to set up local product research teams or work closely with local experts to define product specifications based on real-life usage scenarios.

A Chinese mobile brand shared a set of impressive figures during the exchange in Indonesia: it has deployed 20,000 full-time sales promoters across the country, and offers agents a profit margin of 90 yuan per unit, well above the industry average.

This is not a sheer cost, but a strategic investment. The logic is straightforward: only when local channel partners reap decent profits will they wholeheartedly promote your brand. In Indonesia where offline channels dominate the market, benefit sharing works better than any advertising campaign.

J&T Express offers another enlightening perspective on localization. Founded in Indonesia in 2015, J&T initially derived 80% of its order volume from Shopee. It rapidly expanded its network by leveraging OPPO’s dealer network and differentiated itself with 24/7, 365-day customer service, becoming Indonesia’s top courier within a year. Later, as TikTok e-commerce boomed, it quickly pivoted to capture the new platform’s traffic dividends.

This demonstrates that going global is not a solo journey. Companies must learn to leverage local strengths—partner networks, platform traffic, and the credibility of key clients. Agility is also critical to seize emerging channel opportunities.

When it comes to organizational localization, the approach of a Chinese automaker in Thailand is exemplary.

With over 800 employees in Thailand, only about 19 are Chinese core staff. The Chinese team focuses on R&D, regulatory compliance, and project management—the "brain" functions. All other roles are localized. Additionally, the company actively achieved a localization rate of 45%–50%, meeting Thai regulatory requirements and creating a buffer against exchange rate volatility.

The key takeaway:

The Chinese team acts as the brain (setting strategy, controlling risks, building systems).

The local team acts as the hands and feet (executing operations, expanding channels, understanding culture).

Managing locals with locals is the only solution to reduce management costs and communication friction. Proactively increasing local procurement and production is not just for compliance—it’s a strategic hedge against currency and policy risks.

03.

The next battlefield for overseas expansion is shifting from selling products to building ecosystems

Selling ten thousand air conditioners is merely doing business. Building brand recognition, distribution networks and service systems in a market, and even participating in local infrastructure development, is what creates genuine moats.

We visited Google's Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore, where a senior solution architect delivered a sharing on how AI empowers enterprises and boosts internal efficiency. Instead of elaborating on cutting-edge large language models, he cited practical use cases in manufacturing.

AI Agents connect production, inventory and logistics to break down data silos. Machine vision replaces manual visual inspection for quality control, lifting the accuracy rate from 92% to 99.6%. AI-powered inventory forecasting helps businesses across Southeast Asia's island nations and numerous warehouses cut excess stock.

One participant jotted down a note that was widely shared afterward: "AI is not just a productivity tool, but an engine for business growth. Fancy technology means nothing without solid implementation."

We came to realize that AI is not about adding a screen to a refrigerator. In Southeast Asia, it can be applied to intelligent inventory forecasting to improve logistics across scattered islands, multilingual AI customer service robots to handle after-sales issues, and remote energy management to help users save power. Technology accelerates progress, while sound governance steers the right direction.

At the URA Gallery in Singapore, we reviewed every version of the country's master plans dating back to the 1960s. Thanks to five decades of consistent long-term planning, this small nation has secured strong global competitiveness despite limited resources.

Professor Yang, a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore, shared an eye-opening insight during his lecture: “Singapore does not adhere to any ideology — it only does what is right. Resources are limited, yet rules are boundless. We leverage rules to reduce internal friction and long-term planning to counteract uncertainties.”

The aforementioned Chinese automaker further validates this philosophy. While most competitors remained focused on gasoline vehicles, the company rolled out its first overseas battery factory and built over 14,000 public fast-charging stations, opening the facilities to the entire industry.

Such investments yield no short-term returns, yet they serve as pivotal moves to secure a dominant position in the future new energy ecosystem.

The key takeaway is clear: overseas expansion should never be measured merely by sales volume in the next quarter. Enterprises need to build long-term local presence by investing in infrastructure such as after-sales networks and spare parts warehouses, cultivating local talent, and participating in the formulation of industry standards. Trees planted today will bear fruit in three to five years.

I’d like to share one final takeaway.

A Chinese mobile brand operating in Indonesia launched initiatives that seem irrelevant to direct sales: it organized factory tours and campus events for college students. Its underlying logic is simple: today’s young people represent tomorrow’s purchasing power, and brands need to nurture user recognition well in advance.

The Chinese automaker established joint ventures with local giants in Thailand, successfully making local consumers perceive the brand as their own rather than a foreign outsider. For J&T Express in Indonesia, over 99% of its workforce are local employees with a highly localized management team, integrating the brand deeply into Indonesia’s daily logistics landscape.

True cross-border success is achieved only when locals recognize your brand as one of their own. This requires time, patience and sincere localized investment, which can never be achieved simply by hiring a few local brand ambassadors.

Over 5 days across 4 countries, nearly 30 entrepreneurs attended dozens of visits and exchanges.

The true value of this study tour lies not in the number of enterprises and chambers of commerce we visited, but in the fact that Southeast Asia has become a concrete, sophisticated and authentic market in every participant’s eyes.

The era of merely hearing about Southeast Asia is over. The journey to truly understand this region has just begun.

Moving forward, we will also delve into Japan, Germany, the Middle East and beyond. Yet our mission remains unchanged, no matter where we go:

We do not just take you to see the world, but help you understand it — and turn those insights into a growth engine for your business.

In 2026, we will lead more Chinese entrepreneurs to explore on the ground and uncover the underlying logic behind successful operations of companies expanding into Southeast Asia. What we build is far more than an ordinary study tour. It is an overseas classroom where you come with questions and leave with actionable solutions.