Strategy

“To conquer the enemy without resorting to war is the most desirable. The highest form of generalship is to conquer the enemy by strategy.”
Sun Tzu
The Art of War

America finally cracked live shopping. It did the opposite of what China did.

27 August 2026

I have long been a strong supporter of live shopping. I have seen the Chinese ecosystem firsthand and understand how finely tuned it is. My argument has always been that it can travel beyond China, but only if it is retuned for a western psychology.

For four years the received wisdom in Silicon Valley was that it would not travel at all. Facebook closed its live shopping feature in October 2022. Instagram followed five months later. Amazon Live limped on, described by one analyst in the Chinese tech press as content so awkward most users did not know it existed. The verdict looked settled. China had Li Jiaqi and a live-commerce market worth 4.9 trillion yuan in 2023, close to a third of everything the country bought online. America had a shrug.

Today 833 million people, three quarters of China’s internet users, watch livestreaming. And the category the West wrote off has found its form in the least likely place. A company started in Los Angeles in 2019, selling big-headed plastic figurines, has just raised 545 million dollars at a 20 billion dollar valuation. Whatnot sold 8 billion dollars of goods in 2025. In the first half of 2026 alone it passed that entire figure again, a full year’s trade in six months. And here is the number that should stop any western retailer cold: its users watch for more than 80 minutes a day. That is not shopping behaviour. That is closer to Netflix.

What matters is not that America can do live shopping after all. It is that the American winner looks nothing like the Chinese one.

China built live commerce on a single mechanism. The platform owns the traffic and routes it to a handful of superhosts who convert it. The platform decides who is seen, and the host holding that visibility holds the leverage. It is efficient, it is enormous, and it is fragile, because it started to rest on a few individuals and the terms set for them.

Whatnot inverted it. There is no superhost. There is a golf-gear seller who did not know how to switch the stream on until his viewers taught him, and who then sold over 100,000 dollars of clubs in a single six-hour session. There is a 25-year-old with no degree whose business now turns over more than a million dollars a week. There is a trading-card shop in Florida that went from two staff to thirty-nine. Not one star pulling a crowd, but thousands of small communities pulling their own.

The distinction runs deeper than personnel. TikTok Shop, the other American contender, is discovery commerce. The algorithm decides what you did not know you wanted, and short video, not live, does most of the selling. That is advertising economics wearing a shopping cart. Whatnot is the reverse. The buyer arrives already knowing what they love, a sneaker, a sports card, a vintage bag, and the auction is where the tribe transacts. Not attention converted into sales. Passion given a till.

Three models, one sentence. China sells through the few. TikTok sells through the feed. Whatnot sells through the crowd.

The question now being asked, in Shanghai as much as in San Francisco, is which of those is actually the healthier ecosystem. Growth that depends on no single star does not wobble when a host defects or a contract sours. It compounds. Western retailers spent four years concluding that live shopping was un-American, and missed this entirely, because they were asking the wrong question. They asked whether America would copy China. The answer was no. America found a different physics.

What to watch. Whether the model survives category expansion. Whatnot grew up in collectibles, where scarcity and community are native. Groceries and electronics have neither. If the auction energy holds as the catalogue broadens, the community model is genuinely general. If it curdles into another marketplace, the moat was the hobbyists all along.

The Roth Read. Stop asking whether your customers will watch a livestream. Ask who is doing the selling, and whether they belong to your brand or to a community you do not control. The work is not casting a host. It is finding the communities already trading in your category and earning a place among them. China bet everything on a handful of stars. America bet on the crowd, and the crowd does not sign with a rival next quarter. If your live-commerce plan has one face on it, you have built the fragile version.

Forget the backflips. China is teaching robots to clock in.

6 August 2026

For years the story from China’s robotics labs came with a soundtrack: a whir of servos, a crowd gasping, a humanoid landing a backflip. Impressive. Also beside the point. The signal this week is quieter and far more consequential. In an underground lab in Beijing, and on a training floor in Hefei, China has stopped asking whether its robots can dance. It is asking whether they can work.

A Chinese robotics firm, Gaobot, put the case plainly to camera this week: for decades industrial robots have done one thing, thousands of times, on a fixed program. Bolt here. Weld there. Repeat. What China now wants is a machine that can handle the mess of a real factory, the odd angle, the dropped part, the job nobody bothered to write a routine for. On 6 August, at a pre-training ground for embodied intelligence in Hefei, 83 robots from different companies were put through more than thirty replicated real-world scenes: the home, the shop floor, the warehouse. Not a demo. A rehearsal for employment.

The numbers behind this are not modest. IDC expects China’s spending on embodied intelligence to climb from 1.4 billion US dollars to 77 billion over five years, a compound growth rate near 94 per cent. Embodied AI has, for the first time, been written into the national government work report. Unitree, which shipped 5,500 humanoids last year, more than anyone on earth, has filed to go public. The language coming out of the sector is telling: 2026 is being called the year of mass-production commercialisation, the year the work leaves the lab.

Here is why a retailer should read this over their coffee, not skim past it. The West has spent this year debating the humanoid as spectacle and as threat: will it take my job, can it fold my laundry, is it safe. China has quietly reframed the question as a supply-chain one. A machine that follows a fixed program is a tool. A machine that learns a new task from watching, that adapts to a scene it has not seen, is closer to labour. And labour, unlike tooling, scales into every corner of an economy: the stockroom, the loading bay, the shop floor at closing time.

Notice, too, where these robots are being sold. Unitree and AgiBot are not just filing IPOs; they are opening shops. A flagship store in Beijing. An Agibot deployment inside a JD MALL in Shanghai, fitted out as a retail complex, around five million yuan of investment in a single store. The West imagines robots arriving through the factory door. China is building the retail entrance first, letting the public meet the machine over the counter, where familiarity, and demand, are made. Dobot has gone further still, launching a humanoid pitched at the young family and the home.

The mechanism matters, and it is not magic. China’s edge is structural: the batteries, the motors, the rare earths, the assembly lines sit inside the same borders as the labs. When the New Yorker’s Kai-Fu Lee says the two countries are now “two different universes,” this is the concrete meaning of it. One universe is arguing about what the robot might mean. The other is collecting the training data, thirty scenes at a time, and pricing the shelf space.

What to watch. Watch the training grounds, not the trade shows. WAIC gives you the polished demo; the Hefei data-collection floor gives you the roadmap. When a single site is running 83 robots across warehouse, shop and home scenes, the next headline is not a better backflip. It is a purchase order.

The Roth Read. Stop watching Chinese robots for the trick and start watching them for the task. If your competitor’s stockroom is being rehearsed on a training floor in Hefei this year, you do not have a technology question, you have a cost-base question, and it is already being answered without you. The West is grading these machines on whether they can amaze us. China is grading them on whether they can be hired.

China did not spend last week building video tools. It was building eyes.

5 August 2026

Every retailer who watched three Chinese labs ship video models in seven days filed the news under marketing. Cheaper ads, faster content, a problem for the agency. Wrong drawer. What landed last week was the perception layer for the machines that will one day walk your shop floor, and it landed open, and it landed cheap.

The launches came within days of each other. ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5 now generates thirty seconds of video with sound in a single pass, holding characters, scenes and camera logic together across a whole narrative rather than one lucky shot. MiniMax’s H3 does fifteen seconds with stereo audio generated jointly rather than bolted on, and on 3 August MiniMax put the weights on Hugging Face for anyone to download. Alibaba closed the week with Qwen3.8-Max, 2.4 trillion parameters, which now sits second in the world on the public leaderboard for reading images and visual material.

So run the telescope the other way. A model that keeps thirty seconds coherent, objects that persist behind an obstacle, weight that falls the way weight falls, a cup that is still on the table after the camera moves, has not learned to draw. It has learned how the world behaves. Generation is only the exam. The syllabus is physics, permanence and consequence. And the same weights that let a machine imagine a scene let it read one.

Reading a scene, fast, in bad light, with a person moving through it, is the entire job of a robot’s eyes.

That is the triangulation, and it is why this is a retail story rather than a media one. China already holds the other two legs. By industry counts it ships the overwhelming majority of the world’s humanoid robots, and TrendForce expects Chinese output to nearly double this year, with Unitree and AgiBot taking around eighty per cent of shipments. It holds the motors, the batteries, the rare earths, and the appetite to put machines in public before the ethics committee has finished its report. What it lacked was sight worth putting behind the visor. It is now building that in the open and giving it away.

Price finishes the argument. DeepSeek’s V4-Flash update, the least photogenic of the week’s launches and probably the most consequential, costs roughly three cents to run the full Artificial Analysis intelligence battery, against $3.15 for the Western frontier. A robot has a battery, not a data centre. Perception has to be almost free before it can live inside a body on a shop floor, and last week it became almost free.

A caution worth keeping. None of this means the machine understands anything. Video models still get physics wrong in ways that are amusing in a clip and unacceptable in a machine holding a bottle near a customer’s child. A convincing picture of a grasp is not a grasp, and that distance is where the next two years of the argument will be fought.

The direction, though, is not ambiguous. The robot that eventually watches your shelves, greets your customer and judges whether that customer is confused or annoyed will not be running perception you bought from a vendor you can name. It will be running weights someone downloaded, most likely trained in China, tuned by a supplier three tiers below the name above your door. And it will still be your brand doing the looking.

What to watch. Not the next video demo, and not the next leaderboard. Watch for the moment a Chinese maker ships a robot whose perception layer is one of these video models, and says so. When those two industries start sharing a checkpoint, the cost of machine sight collapses the way the cost of machine text already has, and every question retailers assumed they had until 2030 arrives early.

The Roth Read. Stop treating AI video as a marketing line item and start asking who supplies your machines’ eyes, because you are about to buy vision the way you buy electricity: from someone else, invisibly, with no say in how it was made. Put that question on your risk register this quarter. The machine watching your customer speaks for you, whoever trained it.

China’s Suning Buys Carrefour China

23 June 2019

Today China’s Suning.com has announced that it will buy 80% of Carrefour China.

The deal is structured in a way that The Carrefour Group will sell 80% of its equity interest in Carrefour China to Suning.com. This is a cash transaction valuing Carrefour China at an enterprise value of €1.4 billion. The Carrefour Group will retain a 20% stake in the business and two seats out of seven on Carrefour China’s Supervisory Board. Suning has the right to buy the remaining 20% after a period.

Carrefour was a pioneer in China bring the hypermarket format to an excited Chinese Consumer in 1995.

I remember being at their first store opening and looking at the expressions of delight and amazement on the faces of Chinese consumers as they had not seen anything like this type of format or vast ranges and choice before.

Carrefour were the first western grocery and hypermarket retailer in China to realise the critical importance of trying to re-create the buzz, excitement and feeling of freshness of the Chinese wet market inside the hypermarket.

Today Carrefour has 210 hypermarkets and 24 convenience stores in China. This has generated in 2018 net sales of €3.6 billion (RMB 28.5 billion) and EBITDA of €66 million (RMB 516 million). It has had negative like for like sales – -5.9% in 2018 following -5.5 in 2017.

Other than generating needed cash for Carrefour and a China exit they were looking for, what does this transaction tell us about retail in China and globally?

Well much…

Suning.com is one of China’s leading physical and ecommerce retailers.

It has a network of over 8,881 physical stores in more than 700 cities across China from tier one’s to tier 4 and 5’s and runs the country’s 3rd largest B2C e-commerce platform.

One of the shareholder’s of Suning.com is Alibaba and this where it potentially gets really interesting…

Alibaba Group will soon have (when this deal closes after going through regulatory approval by Chinese the competition authorities (expected by December 2019) holdings in Auchan, RT-Mart and Carrefour in China as well as Suning. Alibaba invested some $4.6 Billion US Dollars for a 19.9% stake in Suning in August 2015. When Suning also agreed to invest 14 billion yuan to acquire 1.1 percent of Alibaba.

This gives Alibaba with its own growing network of physical stores called Hema / Hippo Fresh advantageous access to more physical space in China.

The first Hema store opened its physical doors in January 2016 and now has some 100+ stores across China. Consumers can buy their groceries and fresh products especially sea food both online and offline. Hema’s increasingly middle-class Chinese consumers are ordering their food for the evening on their commute home via their smart phones. Delivery is guaranteed for 30 minutes after an order has been placed if the customer lives within a 3km radius of a Hema store.

This proposition is one of the elements that Jack Mar  refers to as “New Retail”.

 

The combination of physical and virtual retailing is the key to “New Retail’s” success. Alibaba now has even move physical coverage available to rapidly accelerate its “New Retail” concepts and thinking. But whilst having physical and virtual stores is key , it’s useless unless you can digitise the entire supply chain, from growers, manufactures and every single element along the way , including the store…And that is where Alibaba “New Retail” really excels. It has a commanding lead in, thinking, technology and capability in digitising the entire supply chain and linking this to the consumer. The world outside of China should take note and learn. Whoever said physical retail is dead…

In Conversation with Garrison Macri

11 April 2019

At STREAM Commerce in Miami I interviewed a number of the key speakers and participants as part of my “In Conversation with…” series. I am very grateful to everyone who graciously participated in the recordings and were so generous in sharing their insights. Over the next few days I will publish here the individual interviews as well as the consolidated live broadcast that we took pace each day.

Todays “In conversation… is with Garrison Macri, Global Business Development, Superup

 

In Conversation With Eric Heller

10 April 2019

 

 

At STREAM Commerce in Miami I interviewed a number of the key speakers and participants as part of my “In Conversation with…” series. I am very grateful to everyone who graciously participated in the recordings and were so generous in sharing their insights. Over the next few days I will publish here the individual interviews as well as the consolidate live broadcast that we took pace each day.

Todays “In conversation… is with Eric Heller, Founder Marketplace Ignition and ACE

 

In Conversation With Brian Shuster

9 April 2019

At STREAM Commerce in Miami I interviewed a number of the key speakers and participants as part of my “In Conversation with…” series. I am very grateful to everyone who graciously participated in the recordings and were were so generous in sharing their insights.

Todays “In conversation… is with Brian Shuster Founder & Chief Innovation Officer actv8me.

 

The Age Of Innovation

1 April 2019

The BrandZ Most Valuable German Brands 2019 was launched recently. I never shared on my blogs some of the key insight short films I narrated for the 2018 brand rankings. So before I share some of the 2019 insights, over the next few days, I will post these videos as the core insights within them are as sharp and as relevant for today …This one is about the Age of Innovation.

In Conversation with Amy Vener Pinterest

29 March 2019

At STREAM Commerce in Miami I interviewed a number of the key speakers and participants as part of my “In Conversation with…” series. I am very grateful to everyone who graciously participated in the recordings and were were so generous in sharing their insights.

Todays “In conversation… is with Amy Vener of Pinterest and Gwen Morrison of The Store WPP.

 

Record increase in value – India Series

26 March 2019

 

Brand building initiatives, market dynamism drive record increase in value Five-year anniversary ranking adds insights for future growth.

Timing is everything.

That sentiment opened the first introduction for the BrandZ Most Valuable Indian brands five year ago when I welcomed readers to our first annual BrandZ™ India ranking, launched just months after the country elected a new government.

Conditions in India were ripe for building and sustaining valuable brands, and we promised to provide the knowledge and insight required to help brands grow in this rapidly changing country. In retrospect, our assessment of change and brand-building possibilities was conservative. Rapid digitization, lower prices for data consumption, and affordable mobile phones have democratized access to information. Striving for a better life, more people— rich and poor, urban and rural—have embraced brands: local Indian brands, multinational brands, and new arrivals.

Change has brought new challenges, of course. How could it not, especially in a country as vast and complicated as India, with over 1.3 billion inhabitants. In last year’s report we discussed the impact on brands of tax reform and demonetization—the effort to accelerate the transition away from hard currency to an economy based around digital financial transactions. This year we watched those disruptions fade in the rearview mirror. In 2018, the value of BrandZ™ Indian Top 50 Most Valuable brands increased 34 percent, the greatest year-on-year growth since the launch of the ranking in 2014. Over that five-year period the value of the BrandZ™ India Top 50 more than doubled, while the BrandZ™ Global Top 50 rose 60 percent and the China Top 50 rose 76 percent. These results are based on the eligibility criteria that have been in place for five years.

The expanded ranking keeps pace with the changes in India and keeps the promise I made five years ago—to chart India’s rapidly changing brand landscape and provide insights necessary for building valuable brands. ONCE AGAIN, TIMING IS EVERYTHING Five years ago, many India start-ups were gaining traction and the service sector was growing in importance. Today, our comprehensive picture of India’s brand landscape includes important unicorn brands and business-to-business leaders. We’ve added 30 Newcomers to the ranking, and seven of them are in the Top 15, including the payment system Paytm and Flipkart, the e-commerce leader. Flipkart illustrates the pace of change. Flipkart launched in 2007, the same year Walmart entered India with a local wholesaler partner to comply with regulations limiting the activities of global retailers. Five years ago, Amazon had just arrived. Today, Flipkart and Amazon are battling for e-commerce dominance and Flipkart has accepted Walmart’s bid to acquire a majority stake. With this deal, India becomes a hotly contested market where two of the world’s largest retailers go head-to head.

It is not only the size of the Indian market today that is attracting these giants and other brands, such as Ikea, but also the market’s potential to constantly create thousands of new consumers searching for products and services that will improve their lives. This potential is everything its seems to be—but, in some ways, it is also different from what it seems to be. Understanding the nuances is a central challenge for all brands now present in India or planning to enter the market.