In recent years, trade between China and Germany has boomed. In 2016, China became Germany’s largest trading partner. In the first half of 2018, China’s trade volume with Germany alone exceeded its combined trade volume with Britain, France, and Italy. Adding to the tally, Germany is one of just a handful of countries to run a trade surplus against China. After gaining early entry to the Chinese market, many German car, consumer electronics, and household goods brands have built up popular followings there, transforming “Made in Germany” into a sign of quality in the minds of middle-class consumers and even outdoing “Made in Japan” and “Made in the USA.” However, despite achieving so many milestones, trade growth between China and Germany has recently begun to stall, and is in need of a new source of impetus.

The fact that bilateral trade is already strong doesn’t preclude further growth and there are plenty of well-known German brands that have yet to enter the Chinese market. For example, products from DM, Germany’s largest drugstore chain, were long popular with unofficial importers from China, but it wasn’t until the end of 2016 that DM formally entered the Chinese market through Tmall.com, China’s leading B2C cross-border e-commerce marketplace. Suning, one of China’s leading O2O retailers, has also begun sourcing German products more aggressively, opening a representative office in Germany and deploying teams of overseas buyers to snap up German foodstuffs, household products, consumer electronics, cultural goods, and patented technologies. Another potential growth source is the „New Retail“ strategy adopted by Chinese e-commerce giants that aims to introduce high-quality, low-cost German products to Chinese households, raising the prospect that China and Germany might take bigger bites from a growing trade pie. Moreover, with Industry 4.0 on the horizon, Germany stands to gain from its technical prowess in fields such as AI, robotics, quantum information, virtual reality, and biotechnology. If German companies can apply their know-how to the Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles, and AI to meet the needs of China’s new middle class (typically those born in the 80s and 90s), they could provide a new engine for China-Germany trade cooperation for the next four decades.

So, against this backdrop, how should Chinese and German businesses deploy their respective strengths? How can they leverage the „New Retail“ strategy to effectively market German brands to China’s middle class? How can they seize the golden opportunity of China’s consumption upgrade and match German AI applications with the demands of younger Chinese consumers? These are all questions that are central to finding new impetus for China-Germany trade growth. At this forum, industry experts and entrepreneurs from China and Germany will discuss transformations in the retail landscape, helping to forge new academic, business, and political partnerships.