The Acquirer, The Purist, The Specialist, The Localizer: A Framework for China Sportswear in 2026

Anta, Li-Ning, On, and Adidas each found a different growth model. The middle of the market moved, but Nike didn’t move with it, at least not yet.

Illustration generated with AI for editorial purposes

People have been asking me whether Nike could turn its China business around. A shorter answer to that question appeared in a Reuters piece last month. The full answer required pulling apart five other companies that reported earnings recently.

This piece is that answer.

The K-Shape

Before looking at individual companies, it helps to understand what is actually happening in this market.

China’s sportswear market is not splitting into premium and mass. What changed is what consumers buy in the middle.

By price band, the middle is still the biggest pool. RMB 300 to 800 is where most Chinese consumers buy their sport and outdoor products, and that pool grew in 2025. Consumers in the middle did not abandon the price point.

Five years ago, a consumer with RMB 700 to spend on athletic footwear bought a Nike lower-end sneaker or an Anta running shoe. In 2025, the same consumer is more likely to buy from Camel, 361, or a Kolon entry-level performance product. Completely different brand archetypes are competing in the same consumer segment.

The category called “sportswear generalist” is being replaced by “category specialist and functional outdoor” inside the same price tier. Instead of moving up or down, consumers are moving sideways into a different definition of what athletic product means. Outdoor brands in particular have benefited from this transition, because their products carry functional credibility across multiple use cases. An outdoor running shoe that works for a weekend trail and a weekday commute is more pragmatic than a training shoe that only works in a gym.

The premium end and the lower end are also growing. Arc’teryx and Salomon are pulling pricing power up. 361 Degrees and the deeper-tier strategies are finding consumers who never bought sportswear before. But the headline story of this earnings season is in the middle, where the same spending power is going into different brands.

The four models that follow are each a different response to this. Each has found a way to be where the money has moved. Nike’s section, at the end, explains why the brand that used to be the default choice in this middle is no longer the default.

The Acquirer: Anta

Anta is the dominant force in Chinese sportswear. It also gets misread more than any other company in this category, especially by international observers.

The misreading happens because people compare Anta to Nike or Adidas like it’s a single brand. It’s not. Anta is a brand portfolio operator that happens to share its name with one of the brands in the portfolio. Once you separate those two things, the picture gets clearer.

The Anta brand grew 3.7% in 2025. The Anta Group grew 13.3%. In a market where the sports category grew 15.7%, the namesake brand ran behind the market by twelve points. The group grew close to the market rate, but only because Descente grew 59.2%, Kolon grew high double digits, and Amer Sports contributed at the group level. Group revenue crossed RMB 80 billion, roughly USD 11.1 billion, about 1.7 times Nike’s full-year Greater China revenue.

Anta’s approach: Keep the core brand as the foundation of the business, then diversify through acquisition, building a portfolio of brands that each capture a different consumer segment. When one brand plateaus, the next one picks up. FILA did this for years. Now Descente and Arc’teryx are doing it. The 29% stake in Puma opens another chapter.

Before going further, one objection deserves a direct answer. A common defense of large brands at slow growth is the law of large numbers. Once a brand reaches RMB 30 billion in revenue, the argument goes, it can no longer outgrow the market it is already a meaningful share of. By that logic, Anta main brand at 3.7% and Li Ning at 3.2% are simply running into the math of scale instead of underperforming.

The argument has surface appeal, but Anta’s own portfolio undermines it. Descente crossed RMB 10 billion in 2025 retail and grew 59.2% on top of that base. FILA at RMB 28 billion grew 6.9%. Adidas Greater China, comparable in size to the Anta main brand, grew 13% in 2025. They are at comparable scale with very different growth rates. Scale slows growth, but it does not determine it. What separates Descente at 59% from Anta main brand at 3.7%, inside Anta group, is category positioning and consumer relevance.

The reason this matters is that “the brand is just too big to grow” becomes an easy explanation that prevents the harder question. Which is: what about the brand’s category, its product, its consumer connection, has stopped working? This is an uncomfortable question for any company at scale but also the question worth asking.

The risk: Inventory turnover at 136 days is the highest in the industry. Multi-brand complexity compounds with scale. FILA’s operating margin at 27.7% is healthy, but FILA’s growth has slowed. If the acquisition engine needs to keep running to maintain group-level growth, people start asking: where is the next FILA? And what happens when you run out of brands to put into the portfolio?

Anta has proven that acquisition can spark growth, but it’s not yet proven that this growth is indefinitely sustainable.

The Purist: Li-Ning

Li-Ning grew 3.2% in 2025. Among the brands that grew at all this year, this is the weakest topline number.

The convenient framing is that Li-Ning is a single-brand purist by choice. The reality is more complicated. Li-Ning has tried the multi-brand portfolio path. Lotto, Aigle, Danskin, Kappa, Bossini, the brief stake in Double Happiness. Most of these came in with serious investment and clear category logic. None of them scaled into meaningful contributors. Compared to what Anta did with FILA and is now doing with Descente, Li-Ning’s portfolio history is a record of brands that were acquired, integrated, and quietly written down.

So when you see Li-Ning today as a single-brand company, what you are looking at is partly strategic clarity and partly organizational reality. Li-Ning has learned that brand portfolio operation is not its strength. The current structure is what is left after fifteen years of trying alternatives.

Li-Ning’s approach: Concentrate everything into the namesake brand. Deepen product investment. Reposition from cultural premium toward performance credibility. The running business is where this is being tested in real time. Running retail grew over 10% and now accounts for 31% of Li-Ning’s retail sales, up from 16% five years ago. The pivot is real and it is measurable. The three flagship running shoe franchises sold a combined 11 million pairs. Inventory turnover at 61 days is the best in the industry by a wide margin, a level of operational discipline most multi-brand operators cannot replicate.

The risk: 3.2% in a 15.7% market means Li-Ning is losing relative position even as it operates well. Without the multi-brand hedge that protects Anta, a consumer downturn hits the entire business at once. The pivot from cultural premium back to performance credibility is narrow and not yet complete. If the running pivot succeeds and the newer category investments like racquet sports gain traction, Li-Ning becomes a focused brand. If it stalls, the single-brand model becomes a constraint with no exit door, because the exit door, brand acquisition, has been tried and did not work.

Li-Ning’s purity is real. It is also not entirely a choice.

The Lifestyle Specialist: On

On Holding delivered 35.6% global growth in 2025. APAC revenue grew 106.7%. Gross margin held at 62.5%. By the numbers, this is the standout of the earnings season.

The numbers also need to be read against a structural question. On built a USD 3 billion business by selling at premium prices to consumers who want performance credibility with lifestyle versatility. The cloud sole, the Swiss engineering story, the technical positioning are all real. But a large part of On’s growth in China and across APAC has come from urban professionals who wear On to the office, to the coffee run, to the airport. The shoe carries a specialist signal and a lifestyle use case at the same time. That combination is what lets On charge USD 200 and rarely discount.

On’s approach: Use the visual identity and brand language of a category specialist to capture lifestyle pricing power. The cloud sole looks like performance technology. The minimalist branding and the runner heritage do the rest. The magic of On’s positioning is that it lets the consumer feel like the shoe is for athletes while buying it for very different reasons.

The risk: When a brand’s value is primarily social, scale introduces structural tension. APAC growing 106.7% in a single year means the shoe is showing up everywhere. When a brand crosses a certain density threshold, the social signal it carries flips. What once communicated insider taste starts communicating conformity. Chinese consumers have a sharp radar for that tipping point. Lululemon walked this curve, niche symbol then middle-class uniform. Arc’teryx is walking it now. On is somewhere on this curve, and the question is whether the runway is one year, two years, or longer.

The defense, if there is one, is depth. Lululemon had superior materials and yoga communities underneath the brand when identity diluted. Arc’teryx had technical credibility with climbers. On has running heritage but not yet a comparable behavioral community at scale. Can CloudTech and LightSpray deepen technical credibility through visible innovation? Can tennis or apparel build categories with their own behavioral gravity? These are the choices the company is making, and they are being made in real time.

On has proven that a specialist signal can capture lifestyle pricing power at scale. Whether that pricing power survives the next phase of brand maturity is the open question.

The Localizer: Adidas

Three years ago, every analysis of Adidas in China was about failure. Ten consecutive quarters of decline. Loss of cultural relevance. The story was over.

Then it reversed. Adidas grew 13% in Greater China in 2025, extending the streak to ten consecutive quarters of growth. Operating profit margin reached 22.1%. The turnaround is real, and at this point it is no longer a turnaround. It is a sustained operating model.

Adidas’s approach: Go deeper into the local market than any global brand has before. Under Bjorn Gulden, Adidas moved to 60% locally designed product, 95% locally manufactured, and a channel partnership with Hai Lan Home (HLA) that puts Adidas in roughly 700 doors across tier-three through tier-five cities. An MD with deep regional knowledge runs Greater China. This is a global brand operating like a half-local brand beyond surface level.

Adidas also made smart cultural moves. Sponsoring Shu Cao (Jiangsu Super League), the grassroots football culture that resonates at street level. The approach respected the grassroots culture while building commercial connection, and it worked. Design-wise, Adidas leaned into its long-standing perception as the more fashionable alternative, while simultaneously building running credibility through marathon sponsorships and the EVO SL franchise.

Adidas is not the only brand reaching deeper into China. 361 Degrees grew 10.6% in 2025, with 76% of its store base in tier-three cities and below. Nearly a hundred new “super stores” opened in lower-tier markets last year. The contrast with Adidas is interesting. Adidas is a global brand learning to reach the Chinese mass market through partnership and local adaptation. 361 Degrees was built for that market from day one and has the operating model to match. They arrive from opposite directions.

The risk: How much of Adidas’s turnaround is structural reform, and how much is the Samba and Gazelle product cycle? Product cycles end. Adidas has historically been strong at mining its back catalogue, but they have not yet identified what comes after Samba. They are trying to push EVO SL from performance into lifestyle to fill that gap. The HLA partnership brings scale but introduces brand dilution risk in lower-tier markets, where the shopper who walks into a HLA store is not the same shopper who walks into an Adidas flagship. And if Nike begins to seriously localize, Adidas’s first-mover advantage narrows fast.

Adidas in China is the best turnaround story in recent seasons. Whether the turnaround can sustain depends on the product innovation cycle and whether Adidas can follow McDonald’s and KFC, which reached a point where Chinese consumers no longer think of them as foreign brands.

The Global Generalist: Nike

The four models above show what the market is rewarding right now. Nike’s story answers why the playbook that used to be the only right answer stopped working.

Nike reported Q3 FY2026 on March 31. Greater China revenue came in at USD 1.615 billion, down 10% on a currency-neutral basis. That is the seventh consecutive quarter of decline. Running grew double digits. Sportswear declined double digits. Nike Digital fell 21%. Wholesale dropped 13%. EBIT rose 11%, reflecting a deliberate shift toward margin over volume.

The headline numbers beat analyst expectations. Then management delivered Q4 guidance: Greater China revenue expected to decline 20%. The stock fell more than 8% after hours, approaching decade lows. Multiple investment banks downgraded to neutral.

There are three structural dimensions to what is happening.

Brand perception: the knowledge badge is fading

For two decades, Nike was the ultimate knowledge badge in China. You wore the Swoosh because of what it represented: global cultural status, athlete endorsement, sneaker culture credibility. The purchase decision was driven by story instead of function.

That system is breaking down. Post-pandemic, Chinese consumers shifted toward what I have described in previous writing as behavior badges. Brand loyalty built through personal participation in sport and community, rather than cultural symbolism. Running crews, yoga groups, training communities. The brands embedded in those activities hold pricing power. The brands relying on narrative alone do not.

Nike’s Q3 data maps directly onto this shift. Running, a category where consumers have functional needs and community touchpoints, grew double digits. Sportswear, the category most dependent on cultural cachet and sneaker collecting, declined double digits. The brand’s relevance is now being measured differently.

The narrative problem compounds this. Nike’s Chinese New Year “Just Do It” campaign was genuinely good. It reminded people of the Nike ads they loved 15 years ago. But it wasn’t built into rhythm to sustain or connect with the new consumer contexts. It created a moment and then there was nothing to sustain it. Behavior badge brands do not work in campaign bursts. On’s story is built through daily routines and store interactions. Lululemon’s is built through every yoga class. In the knowledge badge era, one Jordan ad could sustain six months of brand premium. In the behavior badge era, consumers forget you between campaigns.

Product innovation: the capability is there, the speed is not

Nike is not short on R&D talent. Nike Mind sold out globally. AlphaFly remains a reference point. The problem is that the innovation cycle is lengthening relative to the speed of the market in China. Global product development takes 12 to 18 months (or longer) from approval to shelf. In a market where consumer trends shift in months, that gap is structural.

ACG illustrates this tension. The concept is right. Outdoor is growing. Nike invested heavily, including opening a global-first ACG store in Beijing. The design and marketing are strong. But consumers in the outdoor category still prioritize function and proven performance. ACG has not yet established what it wants to be known for in a space where Arc’teryx owns technical credibility and Hoka and Salomon own trail culture. Cool marketing without a clear performance niche is an expensive experiment.

Meanwhile, competitors are iterating faster. Descente’s product cycle is locally managed and executed. Anta’s main brand may only be growing 3.7%, but its specialist brands can respond to trends within a single season. On is commercializing LightSpray in real time even at a very limited scale. Nike is known for innovation. Whether that innovation reaches consumers fast enough is what matters.

Channel and distribution: the partners are under pressure

This may be the most tangible dimension. Nike’s wholesale business declined 13% in Q3. Digital declined 21%. The 100 pilot stores showed improved traffic and comp sales, but 100 doors in a market of over 5,000 is early-stage experimentation.

The real signal is in the partners. Topsports, Nike’s largest distributor, saw store footprint shrink by 14% last year. Pou Sheng, the second largest, reported a profit decline of 57%. These are publicly listed companies with their own earnings pressure. When distributors are liquidating inventory and cutting forecasts, there’s no room for them to invest in brand-building for Nike as they are trying to survive.

The pattern across distributor earnings is consistent. Nike used to be a guaranteed seller. Now it requires discounting to move, margins are thin, and retailers are increasingly looking at Hoka, On, or Anta’s premium brands as more profitable alternatives. Rebuilding trust with wholesale partners after years of aggressive DTC strategy takes time, and the new Greater China leadership inherits this challenge from day one.

Management describes the current approach as intentional reduced sell-in to restore marketplace health. The Q4 guidance of negative 20% reflects this. Some of it is strategic. Some of it is the reality that the market is not waiting.

The connecting problem

These three dimensions are not independent. Brand perception affects willingness to pay full price, which pressures channels, which forces discounting, which further erodes brand perception. Product innovation that arrives 18 months late misses the cultural moment that would have given it relevance.

When a brand is dominant, it can operate across all categories, run multiple narratives simultaneously, and absorb execution gaps. When a brand is under pressure, it needs focus.

This is what I have been telling clients and journalists for the past year: all the pieces exist for Nike in China. The storytelling capability is there. The product development resources are there. The distribution scale is there. The athletes, the technology, the brand equity built over 30 years are all there. The work is connecting them into a coherent strategy, and connecting them faster than the current organizational structure allows. Nike’s own internal mantra is that we serve athletes. When that becomes the operating principle again rather than a slogan, the pieces start to align on their own.

Nike did not choose the wrong model. The model that worked for 20 years, global scale advantage plus brand premium, depended on conditions that have changed. Consumers in an aspirational phase. Immature local competition. Limited alternatives at every price point. All three conditions have reversed simultaneously. The game changed and new rules are still being written.

What This Earnings Season Tells Us

The China market is no longer forgiving to anyone.

The Acquirer model rewards portfolio management but demands operational discipline at scale. The Purist model rewards cultural authenticity but punishes slow growth. The Lifestyle Specialist model rewards the ability to sell a specialist signal at lifestyle scale, but it depends on social dynamics that can flip without warning. Behavioral depth, when it exists, is the only durable defense. The Localizer model rewards market adaptation but depends on product cycles that require smart orchestration.

None of these is a permanent answer and they all come with a defined risk profile.

Growth rate comparisons across these companies are misleading without accounting for scale, market maturity, and stage of brand development. A 106.7% APAC growth rate from a small base and a 13.3% group growth rate at RMB 80 billion are both meaningful.

What this earnings season reveals is what the market is selecting for. Specificity over breadth. Local relevance over global consistency. Consumer relationships built through participation rather than aspiration.

The era when scale was its own strategy is over. Every brand now has to choose a specific bet and accept its specific cost.

Here are three questions for anyone managing a brand in this market:

Which of these four growth models does your current strategy most resemble, and have you honestly assessed the specific risk that comes with it?

Is your brand’s pricing power built on what your product represents, or on what your consumer actually does with it? And has that shifted in the past two years without anyone noticing?

Is your go-to-market infrastructure designed for the market structure of 2019, or 2026? Because those are two very different markets, and the gap is widening every quarter.

Recent named citations on broader China sportswear market: Reuters (Casey Hall, March 30, 2026) WWD / Footwear News (Denni Hu, April 17, 2026) BBC News (Osmond Chia, April 27, 2026) The Wall Street Journal (Jon Emont, May 12, 2026)

Wei Kan is the founder of Conduit Asia, a cross-cultural brand strategy consultancy. He spent over 20 years leading marketing for Nike and Converse, Yahoo!, and BenQ across Asia-Pacific before founding his consultancy to help brands navigate cultural complexity in APAC markets.

Connect wei.kan@conduitasia.com | conduitasia.com | LinkedIn