I usually sit down at the end of the year to summarise the activities of Jessica and me. This year was different. Before I could write something about what was gained, I first had to talk about what was lost. In recent weeks, I published two in memoriam articles about Bart Horsten and Olaf Zwijnenburg, two people with whom I cooperated closely and who were taken from us much too soon.
How I gave up on The Netherlands (and Belgium)
In the article about Olaf, I mentioned something else that was lost in 2025: my confidence in my audience in the Netherlands. Since China reopened its borders in 2023, I have been trying to organise retail study tours for Dutch organisations, as I did before COVID. I have, however, found it extremely difficult to get Dutch professionals interested. Most people have minimal interest in learning more about retail in and from China, and those who do say that they want to join a tour have all kinds of reasons not to go when push comes to shove. Few of the reasons mentioned sound very reasonable to me; most don’t show a lack of time but a lack of priority.
The lack of interest that seems to stem from complacency and, at times, even arrogance, feeding into ignorance, was also evident in Olaf’s many attempts to bring together a group of Dutch retailers for a tour. There were no fewer than six failed attempts by Olaf and me to find at least 10 people to go to China with us. Previously, Focusplaza, with whom I had done tours in 2019 and 2023, also found it challenging to recruit a new group. As a result, I decided to stop recruiting individuals for tours and to work only with partners who gather groups, so I can focus on what I’m actually good at and enjoy: designing and leading tours that consistently receive ratings of 9 to 9.5 out of 10.
But even highly relevant trade media or trade associations in the Netherlands and Belgium don’t see the need to enable their members to learn more about China, rejecting any idea of cooperation or thinking the financial risk was too high (despite my experience that my business partners make a healthy profit). Meanwhile, there is no lack of retailers complaining about unfair Chinese competition, but those who invest in building competitive intelligence are extremely rare. And that’s extremely worrying since the impact of Chinese internet companies will not decrease. On the contrary …
While the Benelux shows no interest, I have been doing more and more business with organisations from other countries. I had the utmost pleasure to take groups from the K5 Future Retail network to China in October 2024 and October 2025. Next year, we are even organising two tours, one for previous participants who want to return to China to learn more. I will also do a tour with the Norwegian retail organisation Virke. In fact, I have more requests for (private) tours than I can actually deliver. Recently, I had to tell two German companies and one Brazilian prospect that I didn’t have enough time to service them in 2026.
Reports
For me, there were enough interesting topics to explore, so I continued to focus on sharing insights with those seeking to deepen their knowledge of Chinese retail innovations.
I wrote five new Tech Buzz China reports on Temu’s development (Temu Watch #7, #8, #9, #10 and #11). Many of these focused on the impact of the US tariffs on Temu’s business. One thing has become clear from the research I did for these reports: they won’t make Temu disappear, only change. Most people in Europe don’t realise this yet, as they put their faith in regulations they think will stop Temu.
In early 2025, many American TikTok users ‘fled’ to Rednote, the international version of Xiaohongshu. I wrote an article explaining why I didn’t think it would last, as well as two Tech Buzz China reports on the business outlook (The split personality of Rednote and Xiaohongshu, Xiaohongshu (Rednote) after the TikTok Refugees’ dust has settled).
With interest in TikTok Shop peaking in Europe as the e-commerce platform launched in several European countries, I conducted new research. I published five Tech Buzz China reports on its global development (TikTok Shop Update part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5).
Interesting things were happening in China’s domestic market as well. I wrote two reports about JD.com’s entry into the food delivery business (part 1, part 2), a report on developments with Alibaba’s re-commerce platform Xianyu (complete with lots of pictures I took at its offline stores in Hangzhou and Shanghai), three reports on Tencent’s revival of e-commerce in WeChat (part 1, part 2, part 3), a report on Pinduoduo’s entry into the instant retail market and an assessment of JD.com’s JD Malls in China.
Besides these extensive reports, which can run up to 10.000 words, I wrote a few hundred posts on X, Substack Notes and LinkedIn. In these posts, I shared insights from more time-sensitive developments that I could not shelf until I could write a monthly deep-dive report about them for Tech Buzz China.
Keynotes
As an independent researcher, the research and reporting work mentioned above, which accounts for more than 60% of my time, is not funded by any fixed income. At Tech Buzz China, we have some paying subscribers, and while that income helps, it’s not nearly enough to keep the lights on (if you are interested, it’s about half of the minimum income where I live).
My actual income mostly comes from sharing the insights gained in my research with audiences through keynotes and study tours. In 2025, I spoke at fewer events than the year before, but the average audience and stage size got significantly larger. Some highlights were Retail Reconnect and Fashion Talks (both in Antwerp), my second appearance at the K5 conference in Berlin, and last but not least, speaking on an enormous stage in Norway for Virke. I also did two 2-hour in-company sessions for Poland’s biggest e-commerce platform and one of Europe’s most prominent home electronics brands.
I was a guest on several podcasts, including Teamretail and Shanghaizhan (which resulted in an excellent karaoke evening in Berlin in June), European Guanxi (to be published) and my third appearance on Let’s Talk Marketplace.
I also did about 40 interviews for media outlets in the Netherlands, Norway and Germany. These primarily focused on the US takeover of TikTok and competition from Temu and Shein. It was nice to share lots of insights on these stages and through these media, but something was lacking. Almost all of these keynotes and interviews were about Chinese companies that have already entered our market.
But that isn’t enough …
To understand these companies and others that will come to our markets in the coming years, we need to do two things: examine what they have already done in markets like the US or Southeast Asia (where they typically launch before Europe) and look at what the parent companies have already done in China. Rarely do I see this happen. And therefore, people’s knowledge about Pinduoduo is limited to what Temu does in their country. People’s knowledge about Alibaba is often limited to AliExpress. Few people know how JD.com, Meituan and others, which are also starting initiatives abroad, have become so successful in China. How they have built up enormous cash reserves from their success in a market where they have up to one billion users, and how they will use their local playbooks to conquer market share in ‘our’ markets.
Only when business is already being lost to Chinese competitors do people get interested. That’s why I was invited to give my first real keynote on Temu no less than 21 months after it launched in the US. It took the Netherlands 26 months. By that time, it was often too late, and there was only hope that regulations (from national or European governments, which are even slower) would solve the problem.
As my reports for Tech Buzz China have shown, it won’t …
Fortunately, it wasn’t all doom and gloom at 2025’s events; together with Fred Sengers, I presented two new China Pub Quiz events, for Leiden Asia Centre and Vereniging Nederland China, respectively.
Study Tours
The lack of interest from the Netherlands led to the cancellation of plans for a spring 2025 tour. Instead, I used the month to conduct more field research in China and prepare for future tours by location scouting and building relationships with companies willing to host us.
In October, I returned to China with two groups. The first was the second K5 tour, consisting of people from Germany, Poland and Switzerland. The K5 groups have been my favourites among the 11 groups I have guided so far. The participants’ seniority is high, and their eagerness to learn is unsurpassed. Never have I seen other groups that share so many insights on LinkedIn, in blogs and in podcasts. It’s enormously gratifying to see the knowledge you share being multiplied like that.
The second tour was a 12-day tour with a group of Dutch food retailers and their spouses. Not a group that was recruited ‘from scratch’ but gathered by someone who had joined me for a tour in 2019 and wanted to go back with his industry peers. They also wanted to see more of the Chinese culture, so we extended the tour from 7 to 12 days, added an extra city (Xi’an) and one extra ‘cultural day’ on top of the business study days in each of the four cities we visited.
On these two tours, we visited several leading Chinese retail/internet companies, including JD.com, Alibaba, Yowant and Dingdong Maicai. Another special aspect of the 12-day tour is that my other half and colleague in ChinaTalk, Jessica Sun, joined this tour to support me and the group.
Dutch and Chinese lessons
And talking about Jessica, 2025 saw her reinvent herself. As more and more schools in the Netherlands drop Chinese from their curricula, some of the work she has done as a Chinese teacher is coming to an end.
To be honest, I have always had my doubts about the effectiveness of Mandarin lessons in Dutch middle schools. The number of hours made available to students is often less than for Western European languages like German and French, but it takes at least three times as many hours to learn Mandarin. As a result, the level of Mandarin that students have attained upon graduation is very low, often not higher than A1 or, at most, A2. Furthermore, there usually is no way to continue studying Mandarin in higher education unless you become a sinologist. But few people do that and choose a technical, economic, health care or other higher education where Mandarin lessons are not available.
As such, I have always been sceptical about Chinese education in the Netherlands, but it’s even more worrying that there is less willingness to offer the language of one of the two most important countries in the world. And that might be another reason why I’m giving up on The Netherlands …
As mentioned, Jessica has reinvited herself and, while continuing to give private Mandarin lessons for businesspeople, she is now teaching Dutch to Chinese migrants. She’s enjoying that enormously and is getting great feedback that she’s really proud of.
And so, we head into 2026. I have discontinued the Dutch versions of some of my websites (esander.com and chinatechtrip.com), thinking that the time spent maintaining them could be better spent. I also stopped the ChinaTalk newsletter, which saw reasonable open rates but few people actually clicked through to the content. I’m looking forward to taking dozens of people from Germany and Norway to China next year, writing at least a dozen reports about Chinese internet companies for subscribers around the world and already have bookings for performances on various events. It’s just a shame that there won’t be many Dutch to read, see or experience these.
And talking to other Dutch China specialists, I hear comparable experiences; they have more business abroad than on their home ground.
Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, once wrote: “Know both your enemy and yourself, you will not be in danger for a hundred battles.” But most don’t seem to be willing to know their enemy, so I fear for the outcome of the battles they will have to fight in the coming years and decades …