The Chinese Sportswear Brand Coming for Nike

A onetime teenage shoe peddler from coastal China is now aiming at Nike and Adidas from a new flagship store in Beverly Hills. The BBC reports that Anta —a sportswear giant little known in the West but sprawling across Asia—opened its first US outlet in February as it pushes into markets long dominated by Western brands. The company was founded by Ding Shizhong, who in the late 1980s hauled 600 pairs of shoes to Beijing as a teenager, sold them, and used the profits to launch a workshop. He founded Anta in 1991 and later laid out a bold vision for global expansion: "We don't want to be the Nike of China, but the Anta of the world."

Based in Jinjiang, in China's southeastern Fujian province, Anta grew out of one of the country's manufacturing hubs, where thousands of factories once churned out low-cost shoes for the likes of Nike and Adidas. That ecosystem helped local firms learn to make products faster and cheaper—and encouraged some to move from subcontracting to brand-building. Anta went public in Hong Kong in 2007 and built a huge domestic retail network while sponsoring athletes like freestyle skier Eileen Gu and NBA stars including Kyrie Irving and Klay Thompson. It has also expanded through acquisitions, including Fila's China business and a recent 29% stake in Puma.

Now Anta is testing whether its success can travel. Reuters reports that Anta has overtaken Nike and Adidas in China with 23% of the sportswear market, and its Puma stake gives it something its portfolio lacked: a mass-market global brand with recognition in the US and Europe. The BBC notes that Anta already has more than 460 overseas outlets and plans 1,000 stores in Southeast Asia alone in the next three years. Analysts say its "multi-brand strategy" lets it use familiar Western labels to ease concerns about "made in China" goods. But hurdles remain: Chinese products are often seen as cheap or derivative, geopolitics can complicate expansion, and Anta's own brand has limits outside Asia. As one Morningstar analyst tells Reuters, "For a Chinese brand like Anta to gain recognition in the US, it's very, very difficult."