China Sportswear 2026: Everyone Is Trading Jerseys
Chinese brands go international. International brands go Chinese. Market share is shifting, and the way this industry worked for 30 years is coming apart.
Since leaving corporate and starting my consulting practice, I get to see things from a different angle.
The question I keep asking myself is: what actually works now? Honest answer: I don’t know. At least not with certainty.
That said, there is one thing I’m increasingly confident about: the old “design at headquarters, adapt for China” model, which was once highly effective, is no longer a winning formula for Chinese consumers.
At the start of 2026, I want to put a set of predictions on the table. Please think of this as a set of bets. Some will be wrong. I’ll tell you which ones I’m least confident in.
Major shifts
The German brand might be more “Chinese” than Chinese brands
This sounds counterintuitive. Stay with me.
Adidas Greater China now designs the majority of its apparel locally. Industry media estimates put that figure at around 70%. Their China Creative Studio has full product authority, a level of autonomy that remains rare among multinationals. On the manufacturing side, industry sources suggest that roughly 95% of products specifically developed for the China market are now produced domestically.
And it goes deeper than local production.
A partnership with HLA (海澜之家) puts them in hundreds of stores across low-tier cities. These are places most global brands don’t touch. Most don’t even try. Adidas built distribution infrastructure that reaches consumers who’ve never seen a store of international brands.
Despite ongoing discussions of cultural appropriation claims by some consumers, their “New Chinese Style” collection drove 25% of Q3 growth. Not adapted from global. Created here. The design language speaks to local aesthetics in ways that feel native, not translated. It’s not just local consumers who want it. International KOLs are actively looking for ways to get access to products developed and sold only in China.
In effect, Adidas is building a parallel approach. One that shares the same three stripes, but operates with a much deeper understanding of Chinese consumer logic.
Meanwhile, Anta is moving the opposite direction. Anta acquired Amer Sports in 2019, bringing Arc’teryx, Salomon, and Wilson under a Chinese parent company. Jack Wolfskin followed in 2025. Now they’re pushing into Western retail with stores like the Beverly Hills opening, chasing global athletes, building premium positioning outside China.
A Chinese company running the playbook that Western brands wrote in the 90s.
By the end of 2026, we might be realizing that the most “localized” operator in China might be German. The most “global” ambition would be Chinese.
Running has become hyper fragmented
For years, running in China had clear leading brands. That era is over.
Hoka has doubled its China sales and now operates over 100 stores. On is pushing toward the same scale. Xtep dominates marathon visibility with 31.7% wear rate at major races. Local brands also win among sub-3-hour marathon runners. Higher than Nike. Higher than Adidas.
The brand list keeps growing. Satisfy, NNormal, Bandit coming in from the West. Neidao and others building from local.
I’ve written before about how China’s running economy evolved from sport to lifestyle platform. First boom created runners. Second boom created culture. What we’re seeing now is fragmentation. The culture splintered into subcultures. Each subculture has its own brand loyalties.
Hoka if you want cushioning. On if you want comfort and style that carries beyond training. Xtep and Li-Ning if you need race-day gear at accessible prices with serious technology. Satisfy if you care about cultural context as much as performance.
Big brands still sell running shoes, but their dominance is no longer taken for granted. As running participation becomes more mature, Chinese runners are more pragmatic and the market offers a full range of options for them.
Nike’s problem won’t be solved by symbolic storytelling
Nike’s Just Do It campaign in November featured a Swoosh-shaped spoon as a symbol of local storytelling and it stormed the internet.
After the campaign and the latest quarterly results, I tracked consumer discussions. Four patterns kept showing up repeatedly across platforms and conversations, which I previously shared on LinkedIn:
- Country-of-origin perception: As production moved to Southeast Asia over the past decade, some Chinese consumers started blaming quality and durability issues on the shift. “Made in China” is increasingly perceived as a quality signal, and for some consumers, even a reason to buy.
- Mid-market squeeze from both ends. Local brands like Anta and Li-Ning competing hard on value with genuinely nice products. Premium players like On, Salomon, Hoka taking the aspirational space that Nike used to own. Nike is getting pressure from above and below.
- Geopolitical shadow that won’t lift. Events from 2021 changed how younger consumers feel about the brand. For Gen Z, the Swoosh carries less cultural weight than it did for their older siblings. As geopolitical tensions continue, this creates a long-lasting and largely irreversible impact on how younger consumers perceive international brands.
- Discount dependency. Years of heavy promotions trained consumers to wait. Full price now feels like a mistake. This is hard to reverse. Once you teach people to expect 30% off, you can’t untrain them with a campaign.
I genuinely appreciated the locally developed narratives within the Just Do It campaign, especially the one around Chinese sprinter Su Bingtian. But symbolic storytelling alone won’t solve Nike’s structural challenges in China.
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Nike isn’t collapsing in China. They have capital, talent, reach, but it takes time and determination to right a ship with such a massive scale.
Under Armour goes back to its roots
Stephen Curry is gone. Curry 13 was the last UA shoe before the split. Without the basketball face, UA has a great opportunity to focus on what they do the best: training.
Hyrox drew 3,200 participants in Shanghai. Puma signed them through 2030. Adidas grabbed ATHX. Functional fitness is crowded but leaderless at this moment.
UA’s original story was the person who trained harder than everyone else. Somewhere they forgot to keep telling the story. In my research on women’s performance needs, UA kept surfacing. Not as a fashion choice.
Women’s training is the biggest opportunity sports brands are still missing in China. UA might be better positioned than most to take it.
Maturing categories
Some categories used to wow us. Now they are normalizing.
Lululemon won so hard it became boring. When the CEO news broke, loyalists were loudest: “Same styles. New colors.” “Buying out of habit, not love.” The moat is real. It’s not filling itself though. Athleisure is here to stay and Lulu won’t be easily replaced by its competitors such as Alo and others. However, much of Lulu’s future growth is likely to come from inertia, as the category matures and consumer attention shifts elsewhere.
Outdoor exploded over the past five years. Arc’teryx replaced Jordan to occupy the best location at premium malls, sitting right next to luxury brands, and everyone owns a shell now. The Himalayan fireworks thing cracked something. Discovery phase is over. Now it’s a fight for winning in small segments in outdoor as it gets so saturated.
Tennis market is technically booming — court numbers hit 53,805 and tournaments are breaking revenue records. But we must watch the “friction” factor. Tennis stacks friction: courts, coaching, equipment, coordination. While there is a “Tennis Fever” right now, when budgets tighten during an economic downtrend, high-friction activities are often scrutinized by consumers first. Three months ago I was more bullish. I’ve adjusted to be cautiously optimistic.
What’s Emerging
Skiing is moving indoors. 66 indoor ski resorts, year-round identity forming. Football jerseys separating from football. World Cup year, no fandom required. Li-Ning treating esports as a native language. LPL partnership, own a team, Asian Games medals in 2026.
None of these are guaranteed. All are signals.
The Anta/Li-Ning Question
Anta holds over RMB 55 billion in cash. That’s nearly USD 7.6 billion. They’ve been building a war chest while others struggled with quarterly targets.
Look at their track record. Fila China acquisition in 2009 turned a fading brand into a growth engine. Amer Sports in 2019 gave them Arc’teryx, Salomon, Wilson. Jack Wolfskin closed this year for 290 million USD. Each deal bigger than the last. Each deal more global.
They’re not done.
At around 2.5 billion euros, Puma is suddenly small enough to talk about. Market cap down over 50% from peak. A storied European brand, weakened. The kind of target that wasn’t available two years ago.
Curry is a free agent. His signature line split from Under Armour. The most marketable basketball player in China is shopping for a new partner.
Li-Ning has ambitions too. Different style. More focused on cultural positioning than M&A. But they powered Suguru Osako to break the Japanese marathon record wearing their shoes. Their badminton products are wildly popular in South East Asia. They’re proving they can compete on product, not just brand.
Something material happens in 2026. An acquisition. A superstar signing. A move that reshapes the map.
I don’t know what form it takes. Could be Anta buying a European brand. Could be Li-Ning signing Curry. Could be something nobody’s discussing yet. But the ingredients are visible. They have the cash. They have the ambition. They have the operational capability. And now there are targets that didn’t exist two years ago.
Anta went after Puma, and Li-Ning signed Curry. The badge question sits under both.
For 30 years, Chinese sportswear meant “domestic market, local brands, value positioning.” That era is ending.
Chinese brands will swing at the global stage. Global brands will try harder to become Chinese.
2026 won’t just look different for sportswear in China. It will operate by an entirely different logic, and many brands won’t realize it until it’s too late.
Wei Kan is the founder of Conduit Asia, a sports and lifestyle brand strategy consultancy in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He spent 25 years leading marketing for Nike, Converse, Yahoo!, and BenQ across Asia-Pacific before founding his consultancy to help brands navigate cultural complexity in APAC markets.
Quoted on China consumer and sport markets by the Financial Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Nikkei Asia and the BBC.
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