CASE STUDY

For international brands, China represents a vast and compelling consumer market with enormous potential, yet one that operates within its own particular digital environment.

Success, therefore, demands more than translating existing business models. Instead, it requires a re-engineering of technology, marketing and product to fit local platforms and regulations. It is a challenge of deep adaptation.

This was the task facing US-based fitness technology company iFIT.“ China is a very different market to the rest of the world,” explains Jason McMurdie, Senior Vice President of Technology at iFIT.

Building a digital foundation For iFIT, the first step was around compliance. This meant navigating China’ s rules on data sovereignty and migrating its core infrastructure, including its SAP ERP system, to local Alibaba Cloud

“ You need to have a very experienced in-country partner that you can work with and who understands the market. So to do that, we partnered with Alibaba Cloud.”

Jason McMurdie Senior Vice President of Technology at iFIT

servers. It also meant connecting with consumers where they are active: on‘ super-apps’ like Alipay and TaoBao. Deploying a CRM like Salesforce required a specialised approach.“ Salesforce doesn’ t have any data centres in China,” explains Forrister Ross, Global Account Executive at Alibaba Cloud,“ so when users in China accessed the application, it would pull data cross-border, which would fall foul of the cross-border data transfer law.”