From “Going Global” to “Advancing Further”: Breakthroughs and Progress for China’s High-Quality Overseas Expansion in Advanced Manufacturing

By Cao Enhui

The logic of global manufacturing competition has undergone three major core shifts, carving out a new track for Chinese advanced manufacturers to go overseas.

Green compliance has become a hard threshold, and the “standards gap” created by mutual recognition of carbon data has become an important obstacle for Chinese companies expanding overseas; demand in emerging markets has shifted from single equipment delivery to comprehensive solutions of “turnkey projects + long-term maintenance”; and under extreme operating conditions, equipment reliability has become the primary consideration in international customers’ procurement decisions, with equipment availability and mean time between failures serving as core screening indicators.

Meanwhile, national strategy and corporate action are forming a deep resonance. On the one hand, central state-owned enterprises lead the entire industry chain in going overseas in their role as “chain leaders”; on the other hand, private enterprises, thanks to their flexibility, have become a solid force in overseas expansion.

Against the backdrop of the global industrial chain reshaping, 《21st Century Economic Herald》, together with a research team from a leading securities firm, carried out a special investigation, systematically sorting out the cutting-edge explorations by central state-owned enterprises and advanced private manufacturing firms in areas such as internationalization strategy, overseas maintenance and operations, technology upgrades, low-carbon practices, and cross-cultural coordination. During the investigation, it also specifically invited the Mobil Industrial Lubricants team under ExxonMobil as a global technology partner to participate in in-depth company interviews. Leveraging its extensive practical experience in serving global high-end manufacturing, the team provided professional insights from an industry collaboration perspective to support the research.

The jointly released 《2026 White Paper on High-Quality Overseas Expansion of China’s Advanced Manufacturing Industry》（hereinafter referred to as the “White Paper”） deeply dissects the era’s turning points, practical pathways, and core initiatives for Chinese advanced manufacturers going overseas. It points out that Chinese manufacturing is moving from “product going overseas” driven by scale expansion toward “ecosystem co-building” driven by value output, and that high-quality overseas expansion has become the core proposition for moving from a manufacturing giant to a manufacturing power.

Through typical enterprise practices, the 《White Paper》 extracts three major representative pathways for high-quality overseas expansion, whose core is centered on “long-term reliable operation” and “localized value creation.” Specifically, turnkey project-oriented overseas expansion represented by Goldwind Technology and Liugong involves transforming from equipment suppliers into providers of end-to-end solution services, bundling value through “turnkey projects + aftermarket ecosystem.” Resource-and-engineering coordinated overseas expansion such as Luoyang Molybdenum and Minmetals Resources goes beyond the role of resource acquirer; by co-building “mining cities” and building community symbiosis, it establishes a localized operations system. Globalization of manufacturing brands, represented by BYD and TCL Technology, achieves a leap from product exports to brand, ecosystem, and standards going overseas. In addition, sector champions such as Zoomlion and HanDe Precision, which integrate technical collaboration into global high-end industrial chains, serve as an important complement to overseas expansion.

It can be affirmed that high-quality overseas expansion is not a solo endeavor, but a system project requiring coordination among multiple parties. In this regard, the 《White Paper》 proposes the need to build an industrial community of “central and local coordination, industrial chain coordination, and localized symbiosis.” Central state-owned enterprises organize and integrate resources on the stage, while private enterprises provide specialized empowerment to fill in gaps, thereby removing the underlying barriers to coordination among technology, standards, and supply chains. The strategic value of “invisible systems” such as industrial lubricants is highlighted in particular. Global technology partners represented by Mobil Industrial Lubricants are, through global product standards frameworks and localized technical service networks, becoming a key link that connects and enables collaboration across the industrial chain.

As for making the leap from “going out” to “going up,” the 《White Paper》 indicates that the key lies in three major core initiatives: first, to include industrial consumables in the overseas standard system, creating a “trust pack” that combines compliance and reliability; second, to co-build a closed-loop reliability assurance system across the full life cycle with global technology partners, shifting from passive repairs to proactive assurance; and third, to deepen the construction of localized service capability, moving from “Made in China” to “Made locally,” to achieve deep symbiosis with host countries.

The high-quality overseas expansion path of China’s advanced manufacturing industry is, in essence, a systematic evolution of capabilities. Only by making green and low-carbon the underlying foundation, reliability the core, and localized symbiosis the root, can Chinese companies truly “stand firm and go far” in global competition.