Day: October 21, 2025

• China’s economy may be sputtering but its homegrown firms are cashing in overseas.
• China is moving beyond making cheap goods to exporting tech, intellectual property, and culture.
• Global profits are becoming China’s newest growth engine, which could reshape its economy.

China’s economy is still stuck in a yearslong slump marked by a property crisis, weak consumer demand, and deflation — but its biggest companies are raking in cash abroad, according to a new Goldman Sachs report.

As the domestic market stagnates, Chinese firms are turning abroad for customers and finding fatter profits once they get there.

Gone are the days when China was simply exporting more goods at rock-bottom prices. It’s now exporting services, technology, intellectual property, and culture.

It has also strategically increased its overseas direct investment in recent years, particularly to emerging markets and Belt and Road Initiative countries.

“This strategy enables Chinese companies to diversify supply chains, build production capacity closer to end markets, and enhance business resilience,” wrote analysts from Goldman Sachs in a note republished on Sunday.

Chinese listed companies now earn about 16% of their total revenue overseas, up from 14% in 2018, per Goldman’s analysis. That’s well below the roughly 50% average for developed-market firms, but it’s rising fast.

The bank expects that share to keep climbing by about 0.6 percentage points a year.

Beyond ‘Made in China’

The shift marks a clear break from China’s old growth model. For decades, “Made in China” meant low-cost manufacturing for Western consumers.

Now, the country’s exports are moving up the value chain. The offerings span broad categories, from toys and furniture to electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and solar panels.

Chinese products also remain competitively priced at a discount of 15% to 60% compared with global rivals, according to Goldman’s analysts.

In the US, consumers have become increasingly familiar with Chinese upstarts like Labubu-maker Pop Mart, Luckin Coffee, and Temu, which are exporting not just products but China’s digital business models abroad.

Tariffs haven’t slowed the companies’ momentum either. Goldman estimates that a 100% tariff on Chinese exports to the US would cut corporate earnings by only around 10% in the short term, since many firms have diversified supply chains and reduced US exposure to roughly 4% of sales.

The success of Chinese firms overseas is fueled by weakness at home.

A “nexus of overcapacity, intense competition, and disinflation,” Goldman notes, has caused damaging price wars that have squeezed profit margins across many industries.

A global growth shift

The global push could have broader economic effects.

As more profits flow from overseas subsidiaries, a measure of total income earned by a country’s citizens and companies worldwide. China’s gross national product, or GNP, may eventually outpace its GDP, much like Japan after its asset bubble burst in the 1990s, according to Goldman.

That shift could affect markets as Chinese corporate earnings become less tied to domestic demand and more dependent on global consumption trends.

Goldman highlights a group of 25 leading companies across 12 industries that already earn about 34% of their revenue abroad. On average, those stocks — including Alibaba, BYD, and PDD Holdings — are up nearly 40% year-to-date.

“These trends could extend, supported by Chinese companies’ comparative cost advantages and product quality upgrade,” wrote Goldman’s analysts, referring to firms’ overseas growth momentum.

• Jennifer Aniston said she pursued acting even though her father tried to talk her out of it.
• Her father, John Aniston, is best known for his nearly four-decade stint on the drama “Days of Our Lives.”
• “My dad was telling me, ‘Please don’t do this, you’re just going to suffer rejection,'” she said.

Before Jennifer Aniston became one of Hollywood’s most recognizable faces, her actor dad tried to steer her away from the business.

The “Friends” star is the daughter of John Aniston, best known for his role on the NBC drama series “Days of Our Lives,” where he portrayed Victor Kiriakis on and off for 37 years.

Despite acting up until he died in 2022, her father didn’t want her following in his footsteps.

“My dad was telling me, ‘Please don’t do this, you’re just going to suffer rejection,'” Aniston told hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman on Monday’s episode of the “Armchair Expert” podcast.

“‘Just go get a job. Like, get a real job.’ All the cliché things,” Aniston said, recalling her father’s words.

Aniston decided to ignore his warning and pursue acting anyway.

“Whatever drives you, if you find passion in something and you love it, go do it,” Aniston said.

That perspective has also shaped how she views the “nepo baby” discourse in Hollywood.

“I mean, look at all the law firms. Blanky Blank Blanky and Blanky Blank. I mean, all right, isn’t that a version of it’s all in the family? It’s all in the family,” Aniston said. “So, maybe you got into into a door because you’re so-and-so’s kid, but if you suck, guess what? You’re not going to continue to do it.”

During the two-and-a-half-hour podcast, Aniston also said she “would have given anything” for her father’s attention after her parents divorced when she was nine.

Aniston saw her fame skyrocket as one of the core cast members on the long-running sitcom “Friends,” and won a Primetime Emmy in 2002 for her role. She’s also had a successful career in movies, and has appeared in films like “Marley and Me” and “We’re The Millers.”

In August 2019, Forbes listed Aniston as the world’s fifth highest-paid actress, estimating that she made $28 million before taxes between June 2018 and June 2019.

Since November 2019, Aniston has starred in and produced the AppleTV drama, “The Morning Show.“

Aniston has previously spoken about her father’s influence on her career.

In a 2012 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Aniston said her dad’s attempts to discourage her from acting only strengthened her resolve to succeed.

“He didn’t want me to be heartbroken because he knew it was a tough business. It compelled me to go for it even harder,” she said.

In August, she told Vanity Fair that she had hoped her career success would impress him.

“Always wanting to get Pop’s approval — it was the thing that drove me and was also my biggest heartbreak: trying to impress and prove your value to a man who’s only capable of so much,” Aniston said. She added she believed if she had established herself as an actor, “then he will love me as much as I love him.”

A representative for Aniston did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.

Aniston’s father isn’t the only parent who’s warned their children against doing what they did themselves.

In April, Phoebe Gates said her father, Bill Gates, wouldn’t let her drop out of college to start a business like he did.

“They were very much like, ‘You need to finish your degree; you don’t just get to like drop out and do a company.’ Which is so funny because my dad literally did that, and that’s, like, the reason I’m able to go to Stanford or have my tuition paid,” Gates said.

• Coach’s former CEO says the US isn’t the place to make good bags if brands want to turn a profit.
• Lew Frankfort said making bags overseas would give customers the “best possible value,” too.
• His comments come as companies have been shifting manufacturing to the US amid tariff turmoil.

If brands want to make money from selling well-made bags, the US isn’t the place to produce them, says Coach’s former CEO.

In a podcast interview with Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid, host Brian Sozzi asked Lew Frankfort, Coach’s chairman emeritus, if it was possible to make good bags and accessories profitably in the US with the Trump administration’s slew of tariffs.

Frankfort said it is possible, but the best value can only be achieved by producing outside the US.

“If you want to give consumers the best possible value, you really need to make most of your products outside the United States, still out of the finest possible materials, supervised by leaders and craftspeople who really understand make,” he added.

He said that despite the tariffs, the US lives in a global economy and will return to it.

“I think the tariffs that are in place today, and threatened for tomorrow, is something that we’re going to live with through this administration, but over time we can only succeed as a global economy,” he said.

Frankfort joined Coach in 1979 and served as its CEO from 1985 to 2014.

Coach, which started as a leather bag shop in New York City in 1941, now produces most of its products in Asia. Tapestry, its parent company, manufactures most of its products in Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines, per its July earnings call.

Coach saw sales of $1.43 billion in its latest quarter, a 14% increase from the year before, per Tapestry’s earnings report in August.

Tapestry’s stock is up about 158% in the past year.

Some companies are looking at shifting their production facilities to the US to mitigate tariff impact. Executives of French luxury giant LVMH said in an earnings call in April that that there was capacity to increase the production of Louis Vuitton products in the US.

And Apple has pledged to invest $600 billion into US manufacturing over the next four years.

However, others like Kering, the parent company of Gucci and YSL, does not intend to do so. Kering’s CEO, François-Henri Pinault, said in a February earnings call that it “makes no sense” to move production out of Europe.

“Most of our brands we are producing in Italy and in France, and this is part of the promise that we bring through our products, through our heritage, to the consumer,” he said.

Representatives of Coach did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.