(Author’s Note: Transportation, lodging, meals, and local travel associated with TWICE’s visit to China were provided by Global Connect Show and affiliated organizations. TWICE retained full editorial control over its coverage.)
Psst! Hey, you want to see some cool Chinese tech?
That’s essentially the pitch behind Global Connect Show (GCS), a London-based networking and tabletop exhibition organizer that recently brought together 47 Chinese technology brands and approximately 80 largely Western journalists, analysts, and content creators for its largest event to date.
Unlike media-focused tabletop showcases such as Pepcom and ShowStoppers, GCS seeks to connect Chinese innovators and entrepreneurs with a broader Western audience – the media, retailers, distributors, investors, and business partners – who can help those companies expand internationally, and to help the West see China as more than just a manufacturing center.
The idea for Global Connect emerged from a challenge that its founder and CEO, Chris Pereira, saw repeatedly among Chinese technology companies.
“The technology is above average in Shenzhen,” Pereira observed. “The branding and ability to tell stories is below average. We’re filling that gap.”
That gap between innovation and visibility is central to Global Connect’s mission. While many Chinese companies have become increasingly adept at developing new products and technologies, they often remain less familiar to Western retailers, media outlets, investors, and consumers than their technical capabilities and imaginations.
More Than Another Tabletop Show
Global Connect grew out of Pereira’s London-based company, iMpact. Pereira, a Canadian who has spent more than two decades in China and speaks fluent Mandarin and is now based in Singapore, founded iMpact in 2020 to help Chinese brands expand internationally after a career that included senior roles at Huawei.
Rather than creating just another traditional tabletop trade show, Pereira’s goal for GCS is to build the leading networking platform connecting Chinese innovators with Western partners.
“We wouldn’t compete with CES or an exhibition-type event,” Pereira notes. “We want to be the place to meet people while you’re at CES, while you’re at IFA, while you’re at Web Summit. We want to be part of the ecosystem rather than competitive.”
That emphasis on China-West connections reflects a broader reality facing the technology industry. At a time when tariffs, supply-chain diversification, and geopolitical tensions are encouraging many Western companies to reduce their dependence on Chinese manufacturing, Chinese companies and brands remain eager to reach Western customers, investors, retailers, distributors, and business partners.
Innovation Beyond Manufacturing
One overarching theme emerged repeatedly during the tightly choreographed trip: China’s technology ambitions now increasingly extend beyond making products for other companies and toward creating technologies, brands, and businesses of its own.
The shift also reflects broader changes in global technology industry manufacturing strategies. Since COVID, many Western brands have adopted “China-plus-one” manufacturing strategies, expanding production into countries such as India, Vietnam, and Malaysia to reduce supply-chain risk and geopolitical exposure. At the same time, China’s economy has slowed from the double-digit growth rates that fueled its manufacturing rise, prompting policymakers and companies alike to place greater emphasis on higher-value industries such as AI, robotics, software, and advanced technology. In that context, China’s desire to be seen as an innovator rather than simply the world’s factory is as much an economic strategy as a branding exercise.
Evidence of China’s manufacturing-to-innovation transition effort was visible not only at the Global Connect event but also during visits to a variety of companies and organizations in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Shanghai.
It became increasingly clear, at least to me, that many of the companies participating in Global Connect wanted Western visitors to see them as innovators and technology developers rather than simply Chinese mimics and manufacturers of Western designs and innovations.
One stop on the tour was InnoX, a Shenzhen-based incubator and accelerator that supports approximately 1,000 entrepreneurs and 100 startups within a 16,000-square-meter facility. According to InnoX executives, roughly 80 percent of those startups focus on AI-related hardware, while approximately 80 percent target international markets from the outset.
For InnoX COO Carol Yu, the region’s greatest strengths are the Shenzhen government’s early investment in innovation and an ecosystem that helps entrepreneurs rapidly transform ideas into commercial products.
“We’re compressing the innovation cycle from ideation, prototyping, testing, then user feedback to mass production and launching to the market,” Yu explained. “We’re really compressing the whole innovation cycle into a very, very short period of time.”
Yu asserted that InnoX’s process of identifying entrepreneurs and refining product concepts, combined with China’s ready access to suppliers, engineers, and manufacturers, allows startups to dramatically shorten development cycles.
Rootique founder and CEO Denise Wu, whose company developed an advanced minoxidil-delivery system for hair regrowth, said the value of InnoX extends far beyond providing office space or funding.
“This is really comprehensive support,” Wu said. “They’re providing very systematic support. The mentors are from companies such as Anker, DJI, and Huawei, and they support the R&D process. They also help connect us with capital to get the money – anything you need to make the idea come alive.”
From Startup to Scale
If InnoX demonstrates how startups can be quickly created and funded, Longcheer illustrates what happens when those startups and ideas reach industrial scale.
Based in Shanghai, Longcheer develops the products behind many well-known global brands while remaining largely invisible to consumers. Longcheer executives boast that it ships more than 200 million smart devices annually.
Despite today’s geopolitical tensions, Longcheer chairman Dr. Jeffrey Du emphasized how the company’s outlook remains international.
“Today the geographic situation of the world is not as good as 10 years ago, but our strategy is still global,” Du said.
Global ambitions, Du argued, remain supported by China’s manufacturing ecosystem.
“We leverage China’s complete and mature upstream and downstream industry cluster advantages,” Du stressed.
These industry-cluster advantages were a recurring theme throughout the trip. As InnoX’s Yu noted, proximity of component suppliers, product designers, manufacturing facilities, and logistics networks often allows Chinese companies to move from prototype to production at envious speeds.
Training the Next Generation of Robots
The next phase of China’s innovation pipeline may be artificial intelligence and robotics.
Potential humanoid robot futures were on display at Shanghai-based Keenon Robotics, which says it has deployed more than 100,000 service robots in more than 70 countries and regions. While much of the robotics industry’s recent commercial attention has focused on industrial, hospitality, delivery, and cleaning robots, Keenon executives argued that real-world robot deployments may ultimately prove more valuable as training grounds for future humanoid and embodied-AI systems – but also highlight the challenges that remain before humanoid robots become practical consumer or commercial products.
“Data is the most important thing for robots to learn how to figure out the world,” said Bin Wan, Keenon’s COO, who reported how current real-world robot deployments generate the operational data needed to train future systems.
“We’ve already exceeded over 100,000 units running in the real world already,” Wan said. “We also created our own database, so we have this data for us to learn already.”
That emphasis on data collection reflects a broader strategy increasingly visible across China’s technology sector: deploy products, gather operational data, improve performance, and rapidly scale.
Making Connections
Taken together, InnoX, Longcheer, and Keenon each illustrated different stages of the coordinated and purposeful Chinese innovation pipeline. InnoX helps create startups. Longcheer helps transform ideas into products at scale. Keenon demonstrates how deployed technologies can generate the data needed to train future systems.
The challenge, Pereira observed, is no longer simply helping Chinese companies build products. Increasingly, the challenge is helping those companies find customers, partners, investors, distributors, and media exposure outside China.
Pereira wants Global Connect to become a regular meeting place for Chinese innovators and Western partners attending major technology events worldwide.
“We want to be the place to meet people while you’re at CES, while you’re at IFA, while you’re at Web Summit,” Pereira said. “We want to be part of the ecosystem rather than competitive.”
Whether Global Connect succeeds remains to be seen. But if the companies showcased during this year’s event are any indication, China increasingly wants the world to notice not only what it manufactures, but what it invents.
See also: Beyond Phones, TVs, And Robo Cleaners: 10 Chinese Innovations That Caught Our Eye
