In 2013, a wave of Chinese acquisitions of Italian brands made headlines across European business media. Pirelli, Ferretti yachts, a stake in Valentino, and a string of smaller fashion and food companies all attracted Chinese capital. At the time, the story was framed as a threat to European industrial heritage. Thirteen years later, the picture is more interesting than that first reaction suggested, and it is not the picture most people expect.
I’ve watched this story unfold from Shanghai since 2012, advising European brands, several of them Italian, on how to read the Chinese market without either panic or wishful thinking. What follows is what the data actually shows in 2026, not what made headlines back in 2013.
Why Chinese Companies Were Buying Italian Brands
The motivations behind Chinese acquisitions of Italian brands in 2013-2016 were not hard to understand. Chinese companies were sitting on capital that needed to be deployed, and Italian brands, particularly in fashion, food, and industrial manufacturing, carried the “Made in Italy” label that Chinese consumers were willing to pay a premium for. Acquiring an Italian brand gave a Chinese company immediate access to that premium positioning, to distribution networks in Europe, and often to manufacturing know-how that would have taken a decade to build from scratch.
From the Italian side, many of the brands being acquired were family businesses facing succession problems, or needing capital to compete at a scale their existing ownership structure could not support. Chinese investment offered a way out: capital, access to the Chinese market, and in most cases continuity of management and production in Italy.
Ferretti Group, the luxury yacht manufacturer, is a good example. Acquired by the Chinese conglomerate Weichai in 2012, Ferretti kept its Italian design and production teams while gaining access to Chinese capital and distribution. The brand grew in its traditional markets while building a new customer base among wealthy Chinese buyers. That combination, Italian production plus Chinese capital, is still the model that works best. Not full absorption. Partnership with production kept in place.
What Has Changed by 2026
The wave of Chinese acquisitions of European brands slowed sharply after 2016-2017, and it has not come back. Three things explain why.
Chinese outbound investment rules got a lot more formal. On July 1, 2026, China’s State Council brought its first dedicated administrative regulation on outbound investment into force, the Regulation on Outbound Investment (approved by the State Council on April 17, 2026). It sets up a security review for any outbound deal judged to affect, or potentially affect, national security, and it folds rules that used to sit separately at the NDRC and MOFCOM into one regime with full lifecycle supervision. China Briefing’s breakdown of the new rules is worth reading if you are on either side of a China-related deal in 2026. Buying a fashion label or a food company from Italy is no longer a quick administrative exercise for a Chinese buyer. It is a filing, a review, and a timeline.
Europe stopped waving deals through, and the scrutiny didn’t stop at the acquisition date. Italy introduced its “golden power” screening rules back in 2012, giving the government authority to intervene in deals touching defense, energy, telecoms, and other sectors it considers strategic. What surprises people is that this power gets used on companies acquired years earlier, not just on new bids. In 2023, the Italian government intervened directly in Pirelli’s governance, restricting the Chinese shareholder’s access rights over technology tied to the tyre maker’s “Cyber Tyre” sensor system, on national security grounds. Pirelli was bought by a Chinese consortium back in 2015. The lesson for any Chinese-Italian ownership structure: strategic-sector scrutiny does not expire.
Chinese brands stopped needing to borrow Italian heritage. One of the original motivations for buying Italian and European brands was to leapfrog the slow, expensive work of building a premium brand. By 2026, a new generation of Chinese brands, in fashion, cosmetics, food, and consumer electronics, has shown it is possible to build genuine premium positioning domestically. The urgency to acquire a foreign name has faded. What replaced it is smarter, not less ambitious: partnership, licensing, and distribution deals that don’t require full ownership.
Where the Luxury Money Is Actually Going in 2026
China’s luxury spending has not collapsed, but it has changed character, and Italian brands need to understand the shift before they plan a China strategy around 2013-era assumptions. Kearney’s 2026 global luxury outlook, reported by Forbes China, puts global personal luxury growth at 2% to 4% for the year, with China stabilizing after a rough 2024 rather than returning to double-digit growth. The categories matter more than the headline number: jewelry and experiential luxury are leading, with brand performance up 6% to 14%, while apparel and footwear sales fell 5% to 7% over the same period.
Consumer sentiment backs this up. According to AlixPartners’ 2026 Global Consumer Outlook, 40% of Chinese consumers said they plan to spend less on luxury this year, and 35% plan to keep spending roughly flat. That’s three-quarters of the luxury consumer base pulling back or holding steady, not chasing growth for its own sake, which is a very different buyer than the one Italian brands were selling to in 2013.
One more number worth knowing: mainland China’s secondhand luxury market grew 15% to 20% in 2025 alone, still under 10% of total luxury sales but the fastest-growing segment by far, driven by younger buyers who want the category without the full-price commitment, according to Jing Daily’s reporting on the trend. If your brand sits in apparel or accessories rather than jewelry or experience-led categories, this is the buyer you are actually competing for now: value-conscious, research-heavy, and comfortable buying secondhand if the new price doesn’t justify itself.
The Italian Brand Premium in China Today
“Made in Italy” still carries real weight with Chinese consumers in 2026. The association with quality craftsmanship, design, and a certain lifestyle aesthetic remains strong, particularly in fashion, food, furniture, and industrial goods. This is not declining. If anything, the segment of Chinese consumers who value authentic origin stories and genuine craftsmanship has grown as incomes rose and tastes became more discerning.
What changed is how that premium gets earned. Reputation risk is real too: a brand that mishandles a cultural misstep in China, as several luxury names have discovered the hard way, can lose years of goodwill in days. We’ve covered how quickly a luxury brand’s reputation can unravel in China and what recovery actually requires. The premium has to be defended, not just claimed.
How Chinese Buyers Verify “Made in Italy” Now
In 2013, an Italian name and Italian-looking packaging were usually enough. In 2026, Chinese consumers check. Xiaohongshu, where product research is detailed and peer reviews carry more weight than brand advertising, is where most of that checking happens, and the platform’s fashion category is busier than ever: commercial fashion notes on Xiaohongshu saw collections up more than 60% and engagement up more than 52% year over year in the first half of 2026, with a notable shift toward everyday, wearable pieces rather than showpiece luxury. Buyers there will look into whether a brand genuinely manufactures in Italy, whether materials are actually sourced there, and whether the heritage story holds up to scrutiny. We wrote a longer breakdown of how Xiaohongshu now functions as a search engine, not just a feed, and it applies directly here.
Tmall Global gave this instinct a formal mechanism in 2026. Its “Global Origin Tracing Program,” launched on May 28, requires participating brands to submit three pieces of proof before earning a certification badge on their product pages: a certificate of origin from an official body in the export country, a certificate of free circulation or market approval showing the product meets local safety standards, and video or photo proof of the product actually circulating overseas, whether that’s footage from a shop shelf abroad or sales records from an overseas platform. By July 1, 2026, 243 import brands from 34 countries had signed up, backed by more than 100 overseas content creators documenting real-world use. For an Italian brand, this is not a hurdle. It’s an opportunity: proof that used to live in a brand’s own marketing now lives on a platform Chinese shoppers already trust.
A video of an Italian craftsman working in a Tuscan or Veneto workshop, with specific, checkable details, will outperform a polished brand advertisement every time. Specificity is the whole game now.
Getting Found on DeepSeek and Doubao, Not Just Baidu
A growing share of product research for higher-ticket purchases, furniture, jewelry, appliances, doesn’t start with a search engine results page anymore. It starts inside an AI assistant. Doubao, ByteDance’s assistant, counts roughly 315 million monthly active users. DeepSeek is smaller, around 130 million, but its users tend to convert at a notably higher rate for considered, higher-value purchases than traditional search referrals do.
The mechanism matters more than the numbers. DeepSeek retrieves answers from an indexed knowledge base using retrieval-augmented generation, and it favors content that reads as structured and verifiable, what SEO people call E-E-A-T. Doubao leans on ByteDance’s own content network, so it favors brands with an active Toutiao or Douyin presence. Industry estimates suggest more than 70% of brand information Chinese researchers would want simply hasn’t been indexed into DeepSeek’s knowledge base at all, which means most Italian brands are currently invisible the moment a buyer asks an AI assistant instead of typing into Baidu. Getting indexed means publishing the kind of specific, dated, structured content that AI systems can crawl and cite: factory details, sourcing specifics, press mentions with dates attached, FAQ content that answers real questions instead of marketing copy. We go deeper into this in our breakdown of WeChat’s DeepSeek integration, which is reshaping how brand content gets surfaced across WeChat, Baidu, and AI search together, not just inside one app.
What One Slovenian Brand Manager Learned the Hard Way
Luka manages China expansion for a small, family-run Italian lighting and furniture label based in the Veneto region. He’s Slovenian, close enough to the border that he grew up crossing it for family visits, and he took the job in 2023 because he spoke both Italian and enough Mandarin to be useful.
For two years, the brand worked through a Hong Kong trading company that placed the products in a handful of Shanghai showrooms during furniture fair season. It generated about 40 wholesale orders total and almost no repeat business. Revenue from China grew roughly 3% a year, far below the 15-20% the founders had budgeted for when they signed the distribution deal. The assumption had been simple: the “Made in Italy” name plus a decent showroom presence would carry the brand. It didn’t.
Design buyers in China, especially the interior designers and architects who specify furniture for new apartments, were researching before they walked into a showroom, and there was nothing for them to find. No Xiaohongshu presence. No way to verify the manufacturing claims. No proof, just a name.
In early 2026, Luka’s team applied for Tmall Global’s Global Origin Tracing certification and built a modest Xiaohongshu account: monthly videos from the workshop, short interviews with the two artisans who still do the hand-finishing on the metalwork, and specifics on where the glass and brass actually come from. Nothing polished. Nothing scripted like an ad. It worked because it answered the exact question Chinese designers were already asking privately, whether the “Made in Italy” story was actually true, with proof instead of a slogan. Within eight months, qualified inquiries through the Tmall Global storefront and WeChat grew from about 15 to 60 a month, and the rate at which quotes turned into closed orders on the higher-end pieces improved by roughly a third. Not explosive growth. Real growth, from removing the one thing that was blocking it: doubt.
What This Means for Italian Brands Considering China
For Italian brands not yet in China, or still building their presence, the lessons from 2013 to 2026 are practical, not theoretical.
The “Made in Italy” premium is real and worth communicating, but it has to be backed by verifiable story content: where the product is made, how, by whom, with proof a skeptical buyer can check. Distribution has also gotten more forgiving. In 2013, entering China meant signing a distributor and committing to physical retail. In 2026, a brand can start with Tmall Global for cross-border e-commerce, test demand, and decide later whether physical retail makes sense, the same lower-risk path Luka’s brand eventually found. It’s also worth showing up where Chinese buyers already gather in person: trade events like the China International Import Expo put foreign brands directly in front of import buyers and distributors without requiring a full market entry first. And where you spend your platform budget matters: we’ve tracked why some brands are shifting spend from Tmall toward Douyin in 2026, though for a heritage, story-driven brand like an Italian furniture or fashion label, Tmall Global’s trust infrastructure is often still the better starting point.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do we need a licensed Chinese company to sell on Tmall Global?
No. Tmall Global is built for cross-border e-commerce specifically so foreign brands can sell into China without a local entity, local licenses, or a bonded warehouse of their own. You still need a registered business in your home country, a Chinese-language storefront, and increasingly, as of 2026, the origin documentation that programs like the Global Origin Tracing Program require. A local entity becomes worth considering later, once volume justifies it.
How long before a niche Italian brand sees real traction on Xiaohongshu?
Plan on four to six months of consistent posting before you see meaningful inbound interest, longer for a higher-ticket category like furniture or fine jewelry than for fashion or beauty. The brands that move faster are the ones posting specific, checkable content, factory footage, artisan interviews, sourcing details, rather than polished lifestyle imagery that could belong to any brand.
Does Italy’s tighter screening on Chinese investment affect brands that already have Chinese shareholders?
It can, and the Pirelli case in 2023 is the clearest example: the intervention came a decade after the original acquisition, not at the time of the deal. If your Italian company has Chinese ownership and operates in a sector Italy considers strategic, defense, energy, telecoms, certain technology, that ownership structure stays under review indefinitely, not just at signing.
Is a physical store still necessary before selling in China?
Not anymore, and for most mid-sized Italian brands it’s the wrong first step. Cross-border e-commerce through Tmall Global lets you test which products resonate, at what price, with which buyer, before committing capital to a showroom or a domestic entity. Physical retail still matters for luxury and for categories where buyers need to touch the product, but it works better as a second step than a first one.
Bringing an Italian brand to China? GMA (Gentlemen Marketing Agency) has helped dozens of European brands, Italian fashion, furniture, and food labels among them, build verifiable, research-ready presences on Xiaohongshu and Tmall Global instead of relying on the name alone. We handle origin certification support, GEO content for DeepSeek and Doubao, and the platform strategy that fits your category, not a generic template. Contact us to talk through your China entry plan.
