With a $1.8 billion stake in Puma, a Beverly Hills flagship, and 23% of China's sportswear market already in hand, Anta Sports is executing the most ambitious global expansion in the history of Chinese consumer brands , built on a supply chain edge its rivals cannot replicate.
The origin story matters because it explains the strategy. In 1987, a 17-year-old Ding Shizhong loaded 600 pairs of shoes into a bag and took a train to Beijing to sell them. He had them made in a relative's factory in Fujian province. The money he made funded a workshop. The workshop funded a brand. The brand became Anta, which translates roughly as safe steps, and it is now the third-largest sportswear company in the world by market capitalisation. Ding set out his destination in 2005: not to become the Nike of China, but the Anta of the world. Two decades later, the architecture of that ambition is visible.
Anta's recent move is its most significant yet. In January, the company signed a share purchase agreement with the Pinault family's Groupe Artémis to acquire a 29.06% stake in Puma for €1.5 billion , paid entirely from internal cash reserves, with no debt raised. That matters. Anta has pulled off a $1.8 billion acquisition without touching its credit lines, which signals the kind of balance sheet strength that changes how a company negotiates everything from athlete endorsements to retail lease terms. The Puma deal gives Anta something its existing portfolio of Arc'teryx, Salomon, and Wilson lacked: a mass-market globally recognised brand with strong resonance in the U.S. and Europe. Anta has no plans for a full takeover, but has left the door open to deepening the partnership.
On February 13, Anta opened a 250 square metre flagship store in Beverly Hills, its first U.S. brand hub. The location is deliberate. Beverly Hills carries aspirational weight that a suburban mall does not. Anta CEO Samuel Tsui described it as a defining moment, and the company has built the store around experience rather than volume: running clubs, athlete-led activities, and a curated range of running apparel, lifestyle footwear, basketball gear, and clothing priced at roughly one-third of Nike's comparable offerings. The price gap is not accidental. Anta controls manufacturing costs through vertical integration in Fujian, where it built the industrial infrastructure that once made shoes for Nike and Adidas before pivoting to build for itself.
The timing is uncomfortable in one direction and strategic in another. Donald Trump's tariff agenda is explicitly designed to bring factory jobs back to the U.S. by making Chinese imports more expensive. An Anta jacket sitting next to a Nike jacket in Beverly Hills, priced at a third of the Nike equivalent, tests the consumer sensitivity to tariff-driven price changes directly. If American consumers choose Anta at that delta, tariffs have not solved the competitiveness problem they were designed to address. If they choose Nike, the brand premium holds. Either outcome is a data point that no trade policy paper can generate.
The acquisition-led model
What separates Anta from earlier generations of Chinese brands that tried and failed to go global is the sophistication of its acquisition strategy. The Amer Sports deal in 2019, which brought Arc'teryx and Salomon under the Anta umbrella for $5.2 billion, was not a vanity purchase. Anta used its China distribution network to turbocharge both brands domestically, making Arc'teryx a status symbol in Chinese outdoor culture and multiplying Salomon's local revenue. The Puma investment follows the same logic in reverse: rather than taking a western brand into China, Anta is using Puma as a vehicle into western markets, while keeping the two companies at arm's length so Puma retains the brand independence that makes it valuable.
With roughly 13,000 stores in China, analysts acknowledge the domestic market is nearing saturation. Southeast Asia is the next phase, targeting 1,000 new stores by 2028. The U.S. and Europe follow. The companies that built Anta's supply chain expertise , three decades of making footwear and apparel at industrial scale , are now the competitive moat rather than the commodity. Ding's 1987 train journey with 600 pairs of shoes was not the beginning of a manufacturing story. It was the beginning of a brand story that is still in its early chapters in the West.
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