Four Strategic Postures in the Internationalisation of Chinese Refrigeration Companies

When discussing the internationalisation of Chinese refrigeration companies, people often use categories like ODM, OBM, overseas factories, and localised services. But these concepts are not on the same dimension: ODM and OBM describe brand and order ownership; overseas factories describe manufacturing location; localised services describe customer relationships. In reality, companies often exhibit several characteristics at once and shift as they scale and markets change.

Rather than treating them as four mutually exclusive paths, it is more useful to see them as four dominant strategic postures: client-following manufacturing, brand-and-network integration, regional R&D-production-sales integration, and niche-market embedding. Each answers a different question – where do orders come from, who defines the market, which capabilities must be localised, and why will the company not be replaced?

For commercial refrigerated cabinets, a B2B product, brand is only part of the answer; product platforms, certifications, service networks, and installedbase equipment are equally decisive for internationalisation quality.

I. Client-Following Manufacturing: Hiron’s "Scale and Flexibility"

Hiron’s internationalisation is better described as client-following manufacturing rather than merely "deep ODM customisation." The company has long focused on commercial frozen display cabinets, refrigerated display cabinets, supermarket display cabinets, and smart vending machines, with a public positioning emphasising specialisation, differentiation, and customisation. Its Indonesia plant, launched in 2025, represents a total investment of RMB 467 million, with a design capacity of 500,000 units per year across the four main product lines.

The core asset of such companies is not a well-known consumer brand, but the ability to rapidly translate large-customer requirements into producible solutions. Beverage, ice-cream, dairy, and retail-chain customers buying cabinets often require uniform brand visuals, loading efficiency, temperature performance, store-deployment pace, and cross-regional quality. Once orders reach tens of thousands of units, customers want both scale and customisation. Being able to consistently handle differences in doors, lightboxes, shelves, controls, packaging, and certification under high volume is itself a high barrier.

Who actually defines the orders? Hiron’s direct customers may be local distributors or assemblers, but the orders’ scale and specifications are ultimately determined by the brand owners behind them – Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Unilever, and national convenience-store chains. These brand owners have strict internal standards for visual consistency, temperature stability, and deployment pace, often exceeding national market-access requirements. Hiron’s value lies in translating those end-brand requirements into mass-producible product solutions, helping local customers pass brand-owner factory audits and ongoing delivery reviews. End-brands may not know Hiron’s name, but Hiron-made cabinets operate in their stores.

The Indonesia plant is not just about capacity. It moves the delivery point closer to Southeast Asian customers, allowing some regional versions to be manufactured and supplied locally. For commercial cabinets, customer peak seasons and new-product launches often concentrate in short windows; a factory closer to the market enables faster order adjustments, aftersales spare parts, and promotional modifications.

This posture’s irreplaceability comes from long-term project learning, not just factory scale. The supplier knows where condensation appeared in past stores, which shelf configuration suits a particular package, which countries’ grid fluctuations trigger controller protection, and which cosmetic changes affect container loading. That knowledge is distributed across many small judgements; competitors, even with drawings, cannot replicate it overnight.

The trade-offs are equally clear: customer concentration may be high, bargaining power may tilt towards large customers, and overseas factories bear capacity-utilisation and local-management costs. Client-following manufacturing is not low-risk; it simply exchanges market risk for customer-relationship and operational execution risk.

The difference from "niche-market embedding": client-following manufacturing involves fewer customers, each very large, with relatively common product platforms; core competence comes from scaled flexible delivery. Niche-market embedding involves many customers and varied scenarios; core competence comes from knowledge density in specific contexts.

II. Brand-and-Network Integration: Haier Buying a Market Entry and Service Infrastructure

Haier Smart Home completed its acquisition of Carrier’s commercial refrigeration business in 2024, with an enterprise value of approximately USD 775 million. Carrier Commercial Refrigeration has more than 4,000 employees, about 2,000 service engineers, and accumulated technology, brands, and customer relationships in CO₂ refrigeration and food-retail applications.

If this transaction is seen only as Haier extending from household to commercial refrigeration, its true assets are underestimated. 

Carrier Commercial Refrigeration has a large installed base across Europe, covering tens of thousands of supermarkets and food-retail stores, with long-term maintenance contracts, spare-parts systems, service-engineer training, and historical operating data.

Commercial refrigeration differs from ordinary consumer goods in that the sale of equipment is not the end. Supermarket and food-retail systems – cabinets, condensing units, and controls – require ongoing maintenance; refrigerant pathways, spare parts, remote monitoring, and service-provider training create long-term dependencies. An already-operating equipment network embodies many stores, engineers, parts inventories, and historical data. Switching system suppliers imposes not just equipment costs but also downtime risk, training costs, and technology-migration costs.

Thus, brand-and-network-integrated internationalisation is not about putting one’s trademark on more countries; it is about controlling a more complete customer interface: from products and system solutions to installation, commissioning, spare parts, and full lifecycle services. By acquiring its way into commercial refrigeration, Haier is effectively buying an existing market entry and service infrastructure. End-customers – supermarkets and food retailers – are not buying a single cabinet; they are buying a system that ensures the continuous, safe display of fresh and frozen food. Whoever responds fastest after a failure holds the upper hand in contract renewal negotiations.

In commercial refrigeration, the hardest brand asset to replicate is often not advertising awareness, but the already-installed equipment, service personnel, and trust relationships at customer sites.

The risks of this path are significant. Acquired brands, systems, and people need integration; historical product liabilities and pension obligations cannot be wiped clean as with a greenfield factory. The larger the network, the higher the synergy potential, but also the higher management complexity. Whether Chinese manufacturing and Haier’s digital capabilities can be genuinely connected to the legacy European commercial refrigeration system matters more than closing the transaction itself.

III. Regional R&D-Production-Sales Integration: Hisense Turning Factories into Market Sensors

Hisense has long emphasised regional operations and R&D-production-sales integration in its internationalisation. In 2025, Hisense’s HHA Smart Manufacturing Industrial Park broke ground in Chonburi, Thailand, with plans for three phases, and will cooperate with Thai and global suppliers. Hisense currently has R&D institutes, industrial parks, and overseas subsidiaries globally, with overseas business approaching half of group revenue.

The difference between regional integration and mere overseas manufacturing is whether the local organisation has product-definition and market-feedback capability. Moving mature models to an overseas factory without local R&D only makes the factory a cost centre. When R&D, sales, supply chain, and services enter the region together, the factory becomes a market sensor – it can detect Southeast Asian differences in climate adaptation, voltage, space, pricing, and channels earlier, and feed that information directly into products.

This logic applies equally to commercial cabinets. Southeast Asia has convenience stores, traditional shops, hypermarkets, and food-service channels coexisting; even within one country, store conditions vary widely. Head office receiving sales needs remotely often gets only vague descriptions like "lower price" or "stronger cooling"; local R&D and application teams can more readily identify whether the real issues are condenser clogging, night-time voltage fluctuations, door condensation, or lack of a particular spare part.

The end-customer perspective is also key. End-customers in Southeast Asia – 7-Eleven, FamilyMart, supermarket chains, and local beverage brands – have highly localised demands. In Thailand’s hot-humid environment, glass-door anti-condensation strategies need redesign; in Indonesia, unstable voltage requires wider controller tolerance; in the Philippines, cramped stores demand specific cabinet depth and door-opening direction. Head-office R&D cannot solve these problems through occasional visits; someone must be on the ground continuously observing store operations, collecting failure patterns, and talking to repair technicians. The value of regional integration is making that observational capability a routine organisational function.

The advantage of regional R&D-production-sales integration is moving market responsiveness from the order level to the product level; the trade-off is high fixed investment and complex management boundaries. Without sufficient authority, local R&D becomes mere technical support; with too much authority, platform fragmentation may occur. Without regional sales to support it, overseas capacity can become expensive idle assets.

IV. Niche-Market Embedding: ICCOLD Is Not a Miniature Version of a Large Group

According to public information, ICCOLD (Xike Cold Chain) sells products to more than 100 countries and regions, covering convenience stores, supermarkets, frozen-food, beverage, and dairy applications, and has accumulated CE, ETL, MEPS, SASO and other market certifications; the company has disclosed two manufacturing centres, about 600 employees, and an annual capacity of about 400,000 units.

Such companies do not rely on global brand advertising, nor can they easily build networks through large-scale acquisitions. Their more common approach is to embed themselves in a few customers’ or channels’ product-development processes, handling details with a shorter organisational distance. When a customer asks for changes in door-panel proportions, additional lightboxes, shelf-spacing adjustments, adaptation to local beverage packaging, or compressor and controller changes in a specific project, decisions can be made within a shorter chain.

Niche-market embedding is not simply "small companies giving good service." The real barrier is knowledge density for specific scenarios: how to maximise display capacity in limited convenience-store space; how to balance low temperature and frequent lid-opening for ice-cream brands; how to ensure heat dissipation in high-grease environments for food-service kitchens; which compressors and controllers are maintainable by local distributors. The company need not lead in every field, but it must be deeper than most competitors in the details that customers actually pay for.

The end-brand perspective applies here too. ICCOLD’s entry into 100-plus countries often starts with a beverage brand’s project in one region, then expands as that brand extends its channel network. The brand’s corporate standards – including display effectiveness, energy consumption, serviceability, and brand-visual consistency – are the real entry barriers. Once inside, ongoing new-product development and replacement demand keep orders flowing, and the supplier’s depth of understanding of those standards determines how long the partnership lasts.

Unlike "client-following manufacturing," ICCOLD has more customers and smaller individual volumes; its core competence is knowledge density in specific scenarios, not scaled flexibility. It is not a smaller version of Hiron; it is a completely different survival logic.

The risk of this posture is that knowledge may stay with individual sales and engineering staff, and it can also create large-customer dependency. If key people leave, or if the customer hands a mature solution to a lower-cost supplier, the supposed deep bond can quickly weaken. It requires the company to continually codify project experience into modules, standards, and products, rather than relying solely on flexible adaptation.

V. Four Postures Are Not Four Drawers – Companies Move Along Three Axes

The differences among Hiron, Haier, Hisense, and ICCOLD do not mean each is trapped in its own category. More accurately, companies choose positions along three axes: first, market control – who owns the brand, customer, and product definition; second, localisation depth – which functions (export, warehousing, assembly, manufacturing, R&D, service) are placed locally; third, customer structure – many transactional customers vs. a few deep-partnership customers.

The same company can occupy multiple positions simultaneously. Hiron may be a deep ODM for some customers while gradually developing its own channels in other markets; Haier has both its own brands and the acquired commercial refrigeration network; Hisense has brands, manufacturing, and regional R&D; ICCOLD does customisation and unified overseas branding. A "strategic posture" describes the current primary value source, not a permanent identity.

Xingxing Refrigeration’s Thailand project illustrates this migration. Official and park materials show the overseas base targets commercial, catering, supermarket, and hotel applications, while core components remain connected to China’s supply chain. It is neither a complete replication of the domestic system nor pure export; it is a new combination of regional manufacturing, client-following, and supply-chain coordination. Real-world internationalisation usually progresses this way, rather than abruptly switching from ODM to OBM one day.

VI. What Truly Costs in Internationalisation Is Moving Decision-Making Authority Overseas

Overseas factory investment, floor area, and capacity are easily reported and create the impression that "internationalisation is complete." But factories are only the physical foundation. The harder part is delegating a portion of decision-making authority to overseas organisations: which suppliers can be substituted, whether quality anomalies stop the line, whether customer needs can be incorporated into product platforms, who bears after-sales responsibility, and who decides when price and delivery conflict.

Commercial refrigerated cabinets depend especially on such judgement. Equipment operates in stores for years; on-site problems often cannot be diagnosed from a photo. If the local team handles only sales, all problems go back to China and response times grow; if the local team freely changes parts and parameters, global quality consistency suffers. The hallmark of mature internationalisation is not more overseas employees, but clear, traceable decision boundaries between headquarters and regions.

This is the common challenge facing all four postures. Client-following companies must convert project experience into local delivery; brand-network companies must integrate services and systems; regional-integration companies must balance empowerment with platform unity; niche-embedding companies must institutionalise personal experience. Different paths, but what truly needs to migrate is judgement – not just machines and orders.

Internationalisation is not a one-way upgrade from ODM to OBM. For some commercial-cabinet companies, stably serving global large customers while maintaining scale and flexibility may be more valuable than investing in consumer brands; for others, without brands and service networks they cannot enter system-level commercial refrigeration; and still others are better suited to deep regional or niche focus rather than global coverage.

To judge whether a path works, one should look not only at overseas revenue and factory count, but at whether the company is consistently accumulating capabilities aligned with its posture: client-following needs platform-based flexibility; brand integration needs service networks; regional integration needs local product definition; niche embedding needs high-density scenario knowledge. Any posture can succeed, and any can fail if it cannot bear the corresponding costs.

Internationalisation is not about replicating domestic capability overseas; it is about deciding overseas, anew, which capabilities must be kept in-house, which can be built with partners, and which are worth buying directly.

Sources

[1] Haier Cold Chain Indonesia Factory Opens: Investment, Area, Product Line and Designed Capacity: https://www.chinahiron.com/cn/contents/21/693.html

[2] Haier Cold Chain Company Introduction: Specialization, Differentiation, Customization and Product System: https://www.chinahiron.com/cn/channels/2.html

[3] Haier Group: Completes Acquisition of Carrier Commercial Refrigeration Business: https://www.haier.com/press-events/news/20241009_251608.shtml

[4] Carrier: Completes Sale of Commercial Refrigeration Business to Haier: https://www.carrier.com/refrigeration/en/worldwide/news/news-article/carrier-completes-775m-sale-of-its-commercial-refrigeration-business-to-haier.html

[5] Hisense Group: Thailand HHA Smart Manufacturing Industrial Park Commences Construction: https://www.hisense.com/news/1393.html

[6] Hisense Group Introduction and Global R&D, Manufacturing and Overseas Revenue Layout: https://www.hisense.com/about.html

[7] ICCOLD Cold Chain: Overseas Markets, Certifications, Manufacturing Centers and Capacity: https://www.iccold.net/cn/NewsDetail/2366605.html

[8] WHA: Xingxing Cold Chain Thailand Factory Project and Planning: https://www.wha-group.com/en/updates/customer-news/1965/xingxing-refrigeration-breaks-ground-for-its-new-factory-at-wha-eastern-seaboard-industrial-estate-4

[9] Zhejiang Provincial Council for the Promotion of International Trade: Xingxing Cold Chain's Overseas Manufacturing and Global Market Layout: https://www.ccpitzj.gov.cn/art/2024/8/5/art_1229631368_45313.html