In 2025 China’s business landscape produced a string of high‑profile surprises that together reveal how geopolitics, culture and brutal market competition are reshaping corporate strategy. A handful of unexpected outcomes — the international leap of social app Xiaohongshu, a domestic animation blockbuster, the meteoric rise of collectible‑toy maker Pop Mart, Starbucks’ partial transfer of its China operations, and a zero‑commission food‑delivery blitz — exposed new fault lines in consumer demand, supply chains and corporate margins.
What began as a foreign policy fight over TikTok became a soft‑power windfall for Chinese social platforms. U.S. pressure on TikTok drove an exodus of international users, some of whom migrated to Xiaohongshu and dubbed themselves “TikTok refugees.” The result was a rapid acceleration of Xiaohongshu’s globalisation plans — a reminder that tech restrictions intended to contain influence can instead redirect users and cultural attention toward rival platforms.
China’s cultural sector staged its own surprise: the domestic animated film often called Nezha 2 smashed box‑office expectations, taking roughly RMB 15.9 billion and rewriting more than 100 records. The film fused traditional myth with contemporary themes — environmentalism and generational angst — and demonstrated that high‑quality IP, culturally rooted storytelling and savvy marketing can produce global‑scale commercial returns and lucrative ancillary sales.
Pop Mart’s trajectory crystallised the boom‑and‑bubble dynamic of China’s consumer economy. The collectibles company reported explosive revenue growth in 2025 — quarterly increases in the hundreds of percent and an overseas revenue surge — while its Hong Kong‑listed shares ballooned from near HK$10 to a peak above HK$339. Such volatility underscores both the appetite for China’s creative brands and the fragility of hype‑driven valuations.
Not every surprise was celebratory. Starbucks announced a joint venture with Boyu Capital in which Boyu may take as much as 60% of the China business, valuing the new vehicle at roughly US$4 billion with no cash or debt in the deal. For a brand whose “third‑space” premium once seemed inviolable, the move signals a recalibration: multinational consumer brands are willing to trade ownership for local capital and operational flexibility amid tougher growth conditions.
Perhaps the most disruptive commercial shock was the food‑delivery “war” that began with a February flash sale by JD offering near‑zero commissions and cascaded into an industrywide subsidy race. Meituan, Alibaba’s food arm and JD together reported a combined profit shortfall approaching RMB 80 billion as they poured subsidies and discounts into customer acquisition. The episode exposed the structural tensions between scale‑seeking platforms and profitability, and raised questions about how sustainable growth is to be financed in China’s cutthroat digital services market.
Beyond these headline stories, 2025 spotlighted deeper structural vulnerabilities. A globally‑felt transformer shortage underlined that compute power ultimately depends on electricity and hardware‑grade supply chains; bottlenecks in energy infrastructure and component supply can upend plans for cloud and semiconductor expansion. At the same time, tech and chip companies moving into adjacent sectors showed how quickly specialist firms can find themselves competing outside their expertise.
Taken together, these surprises sketch a Chinese economy that is both resilient and riven by short cycles of frenzy and correction. Cultural exports are maturing into scalable commercial projects; domestic platforms can seize international opportunity when rivals are politically constrained; and capital is willing to restructure legacy Western brands’ footprints in China. Equally, the delivery subsidy war and speculative spikes in consumer stocks expose a market still searching for sustainable business models and credible governance of investor expectations.
For global investors and policymakers, the lesson is twofold. First, regulatory and geopolitical pressure can have unintended market consequences that accelerate rival ecosystems rather than contain them. Second, consumer‑facing growth in China now requires a sharper focus on unit economics and supply‑chain robustness; brand appeal alone no longer guarantees durable returns.
As 2026 approaches, companies that weathered the shocks will be those that convert short‑term attention into repeatable revenue, shore up operational resilience, and accept that China’s commercial surprises are not one‑off events but signals of a market in rapid, often messy, transition.