Future of Global Retail : Learning from China's Retail Revolution

China’s new retail revolution will completely transform how the world thinks about retail and digital innovation. But is the world ready yet? In this book, the authors share an insider’s perspective on what is happening in China to reveal the future for global retail, and a clear framework to help you prepare.

The book presents a number of real-world cases, based on interviews and first-hand consumer experience, to decode China’s retail revolution so that you can understand what is happening and why, and what it means for the rest of the world. Crucially, the book identifies five critical stages in the development of new retail that global retail executives need to grasp now: lifestyle commerce, Online-Merge-Offline retail, social retail, livestream retail and invisible retail. To help the industry get ready for this new, China-inspired paradigm in retail, the authors present a practical and simple framework – a ten-year strategic roadmap for global retail executives, which we call the “Beyond” the Value Chain Model.

China’s new retail is not just about fashion, cosmetics, snacks, data-driven convenient stores and commercial live streaming. At a time when the world of retail is being upended, it offers inspirational lessons in innovation, purpose and agility for global executives across the entire retail spectrum.

Winter Nie is a Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at IMD Business School. She is the co-author of Made in China―Secrets of China’s Dynamic Entrepreneurs (2009) and In the Shadow of the Dragon―The Global Expansion of Chinese Companies (2012). She started this research project in 2016.

Mark J. Greeven is a Chinese-speaking Dutch professor of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School in Switzerland and former faculty at China’s leading innovation institute at Zhejiang University. He is the author of Pioneers, Hidden Champions, Changemakers, and Underdogs (MIT Press, 2019) and Business Ecosystems in China (Routledge, 2017).

Yunfei Feng is a researcher at IMD and had many in-depth interviews and discussions with the Chinese executives. She has kept up with the most cutting-edge development in China’s e-commerce and digital space. She had her own entrepreneurial venture in online business education.

James Wang is an economist and a Professor of Finance at City University of Hong Kong. His commentaries, written for hedge fund managers, on topics such as Sino-American relations, style and substance of the 5th-generation leaders of China, prospects of SOE reforms and other contemporary topics, were collected in the book Early Innings of A Long Game.