What an HKUST MBA alum has learned from helping 500 Chinese companies build lives overseas.

For forty years, the traffic ran one way. Buyers flew into Guangzhou for the Canton Fair, filled their order books and went home to sell under their own names. That traffic now runs the other way. Chinese companies are heading out to sell to the world, and many are finding that the strengths that made them formidable at home, price, supply chain and product, don't carry them far on their own.

In China they call it chuhai 出海, going overseas, and it has become the business word of the decade. Few people know it better than Chris Pereira, an HKUST MBA alum who has spent more than twenty years in China. A former senior director at Huawei, he now runs iMpact, the firm he founded to help Chinese companies build businesses abroad. It has worked with more than 500 of them. He distils that experience in his new book, 信任 Trust: The Golden Key to Chinese Enterprises' Globalization, co-published with Shenzhen Press Group. His first piece of advice to those companies may surprise them: stop saying chuhai.
 

When you call yourself a chuhai 出海 company, you're positioning yourself as a foreign company.

He told fellow HKUST alumni at a recent session. "You need to be a German company from China. A British company from China. I'm Canadian. If I go to the US, I'm an American company from Canada. I'm not going to call myself a chuhai company from Canada."

The change of vocabulary points to a bigger argument. Chris believes Chinese business abroad is entering its third chapter, and that the companies that succeed will be the ones that stop behaving like visitors.

A history that explains the present

Chris has watched this story from the inside for most of his adult life. He moved from Canada to mainland China at nineteen to study Chinese language, literature and history in Henan. After graduating, he started a company in Suzhou that helped Western brands buy products from Chinese factories. It was the height of what he calls the first wave. From the start of reform and opening up in 1978 until around 2015, foreign buyers came to China, bought a product, put their own name on it and sold it at home, often for ten times the price.

In that world, the Chinese factory owner needed to understand one person, the buyer, and very little else. "They just needed to make sure their client had fun, enjoyed the time in China, trusted them and could buy their product," Chris recalled. His own company in Suzhou played the host. "Our goal was to bring them to China, have them eat Chinese food, go see the Great Wall, drink some baijiu, and then go home."

This history explains a complaint you often hear today: that Chinese companies abroad struggle to tell their story, that their brands feel thin and their websites clumsy. Chris doesn't see a cultural shortcoming in that. He sees an inheritance. For almost forty years there was no reason to learn those skills, because the buyer handled the story, the brand and the customer.

The second wave began around 2015, when Amazon sellers, then Shein, Temu and TikTok, let Chinese companies reach overseas customers directly. They learned to work with influencers, build websites and speak to foreign audiences in their own voice. But most still ran everything from home and flew out only for trade shows like CES in Las Vegas or IFA in Berlin.

The third wave, which Chris expects to build through late 2026 and into 2027, asks for something the first two never did. The first wave needed a buyer. The second needed an audience. The third needs neighbours. He predicts large numbers of Chinese companies hiring local teams, acquiring overseas brands and building businesses that belong where they operate. "We're going to be local for local," he said.

Chris grew up near Toronto, where a friend's father worked at the local Honda plant, and never thought of the brand as foreign. He expects the same for a generation whose parents work at BYD and whose neighbours bring them bubble tea from HeyTea. "They won't necessarily care about China," he said, "but they will like the things from China, and the people who work there, because it's them."

Trust is built by others

The heart of Chris's talk, and of the book, is a simple idea that's hard to put into practice. Trust is something a company can't create by talking about itself. The more loudly you tell people to trust you, the less likely they are to do it.

Trust, in his telling, comes from two sources. The first is entirely in your hands: do what you promised, obey the rules and deliver what you said you would. The second is not in your hands at all: other people telling your story for you. That means journalists, professors, industry associations, officials and satisfied customers. Each kind word from each of them adds up, and the total is the trust a company carries in a market.

This matters because Chinese companies often already have the best product in the room. DJI and Insta360 now dominate the action camera market that GoPro once owned. In the book, Chris describes trust as a multiplier that sits underneath product and price. But products alone don't earn a place in a community. 

If you have a great product but people don't like you, eventually you will be cut out of that business.

The five friends every business needs

After working with more than 500 companies, Chris and his team found that overseas relationships fall into five groups. He believes this applies to any business, even one that never leaves Hong Kong.

The first is clients and business partners, the people who buy from you or sell for you. The second is investors, people who may one day back you financially. The third is industry groups, associations and charities, the institutions that hold a community together. The fourth is local talent, the people you will need to hire. The fifth is government, the officials who regulate your industry and shape the environment you work in.

Some of these can look unnecessary. A founder who isn't raising money may wonder why one should meet investors at all. Chris's answer is that every person in these five groups is a door to many others. 

Each person you meet could introduce you to 100, 200, even 1,000 other people, and some of those will be your clients.

That's why he gives networking advice that sounds almost backwards:

A good salesperson never sells.

When someone overseas asks how they can help, he suggests replying: "I don't need any help. I'm just really glad to meet you. Maybe we can have another coffee sometime."

Sixty burgers

One example he shared involves a Chinese fast-food chain, Bingz Crispy Burger, known for roujiamo, often called the Chinese hamburger. When iMpact helped Bingz open its first North American store in Toronto, many companies in its position would have reached for influencers. Chris estimates a promotion reaching a million people that way would cost at least US$10,000.

Instead, over the holiday season, Bingz donated sixty burgers to a local charity. Everything together cost about 500 Canadian dollars.

What followed was a chain of trust, each link earned by the one before. The charity thanked Bingz publicly and mentioned the gesture to a journalist it knew. The journalist wrote a story for a major Canadian outlet. The city government read the story and asked whether one of its councillors could spend two hours working behind the counter, with every dollar taken in during those hours going to the charity. That produced a second wave of attention, and the neighbourhood noticed all of it.

"One level of trust after another," Chris said. Bingz now has more than twenty stores across North America, by his count. 

Once you have a friendship, they don't care as much about the money side of things. They'll support you because they think you're worth supporting.

"The most important title I have"

Chris has no shortage of titles. When he introduced himself to the audience, he chose a different one. 

The most important title I have, is that I'm an alumnus of HKUST.

He did his MBA while working at Huawei in Shenzhen, and he saw it through when COVID and an overseas posting during some of the company's most difficult years stretched it longer than planned. A business needs a good product and a good story, he told the audience. 

There's a third thing that you absolutely need to have in business, and this is why people do an MBA or EMBA at HKUST. It's to build relationships.

HKUST was there at the start of his company too. When he left Huawei to found iMpact, his first office was at the HKUST accelerator in Clearwater Bay. Today the firm has more than 120 people in eight cities, from New York to Shenzhen. "If you're starting a company," he said, "go through HKUST."
He still calls HKUST his favourite place to be. "The energy is always the most positive," he said, "and most possibilities happen here."

The end of going overseas

So what does success look like for a Chinese company abroad? Follow Chris's argument to its end, and success is the day nobody describes it that way anymore. Its staff are locals, its partners are neighbours and its reputation comes from people who have never been to China. It becomes simply one of the companies in town.

That's why Chris wants to retire the word chuhai. The companies that go overseas best will be the ones that eventually stop being seen as having arrived from anywhere.