4,142 Foreign Firms at CIIE. What Multinationals Now Ask of a China Leader

A Chinese National Running Audi China

On 22 October, Audi published a China leadership announcement. Effective 1 November 2026, Zhang Jun succeeds Johannes Roscheck as President of Audi China. Rolf Michl, until then managing director of Audi Sport, moves to Shanghai as chief operating officer, and the China management board is reduced to a two-person structure led jointly by the pair. Roscheck returns to Ingolstadt in early 2027. It is the first time since Audi China was established that the top position has gone to a Chinese executive.

The CV is worth reading in full. Zhang brings more than twenty years of international management experience. Before this appointment he was vice president of Chery International and CEO of the Chery brand, having earlier run Chery's European business. He was a managing director at Stellantis, leading Alfa Romeo and DS in China, and held leadership roles at Nissan covering Japan and North America. Between 2018 and 2020 he worked at Audi China in senior management, helping to build the SAIC-Audi sales organisation. A foreign company, then a Chinese carmaker, then back to the foreign company: the path closes a loop.

Set the sales curve beside the announcement and the timing stops looking arbitrary. Audi's China deliveries reached 729,000 units in 2023, up 13.5 per cent; fell to 649,000 in 2024, down nearly 11 per cent; and slid to 617,500 in 2025, a decline narrowed to about 5 per cent. After two consecutive years of contraction, the group handed decision-making authority to someone fluent in the pace of local competition. Audi's own wording cites new competitors, technical innovation and shifting customer expectations, and calls for a leadership team combining international experience, deep local market knowledge and strong execution.

The phrase easiest to skim past is the one about understanding Chinese competitors. The traditional mandate for a China president was execution of group strategy plus control of the local channel. The mandate now on the table is judgement about local rivals. That rewrites the profile for the role, and it explains why a man who took Chery into Europe was invited back by a German luxury brand. In China CEO search work at Henderson Executive Search over the past two years, client briefs rarely open with familiarity with group process and now open with decisions made independently in this market.

4,142 Exhibitors and 2,000 New Faces

The ninth CIIE runs from 5 to 10 November in Shanghai. Ministry of Commerce figures released on 16 October put participation at 162 countries, regions and international organisations, with 4,142 foreign companies exhibiting. Total space passes 440,000 square metres for the first time, the corporate exhibition alone exceeding 370,000. Fortune 500 companies and industry leaders top 300 for the first time, and close to 200 institutions have attended all nine editions; more than 2,000 exhibitors are first-timers, and over 480 products will make a global, Asian or China debut.

The mix of exhibitors is shifting as well: American companies occupy more than 50,000 square metres, first for an eighth consecutive edition. Across nine editions, CIIE has drawn 27,000 company-visits from more than 180 countries and regions, with intended deal value above USD 580 billion. The 2,000 first-timers matter more than the headline scale. Each company attending for the first time is an organisation that has just written serious China commitment into its annual plan. Henderson Executive Search has a working observation about such entrants: the first people they hire tend to shape the organisation for the next five years.

Austrian machine tool maker WFL is a useful case. It spent 36 days shipping a high-end milling-turning centre from Austria to Shanghai for an Asian premiere, its first appearance at the expo. Its Beijing chief representative, Liu Yanxia, described CIIE and Shanghai as the core hub for expanding across Asia-Pacific. Organisational language translates that into a representative office first, then a decision on a trading company, a service centre or local assembly. A representative office is a headcount of one; a trading company a dozen; local assembly several hundred. Recruitment demand tracks whichever step the company has reached.

Companies that have attended all nine editions travelled the path in reverse. IKEA brought a China-premiere home furnishing solution; Johnson Health Tech is exhibiting for a fifth time, its stand grown from about 200 square metres to 740, and its China chief executive, Li Yongkai, noted the group set up a China home R&D centre before it ever exhibited. From no presence to a presence, from presence to R&D, from R&D to supplying the world: each segment needs different talent.

When the Regional HQ Grows a Research Arm

Shanghai's vice mayor, Lu Shan, put it plainly at the October briefing. More exhibitors are moving from six days of exhibiting to rooting in China and increasing investment. Some convert from traders into investors, producing in China for global supply. Others upgrade from serving the China market to becoming a global R&D hub. Between January and August, Shanghai registered 4,172 new foreign-invested enterprises and USD 12.382 billion in contracted foreign investment, up 9.8 per cent. Forty-four new regional headquarters and 39 new R&D centres were certified, taking cumulative totals to 1,120 and 675 (Table 1).

Sanofi illustrates what growing a research arm means in practice. In September, an upgraded Sanofi Shanghai foreign-funded R&D innovation centre opened in Jing'an with its own separate legal entity. A translational excellence centre run with Huashan Hospital is the fourth of its kind globally and the first outside Europe. The more important change is in the division of labour. Sanofi's collaboration with Huashan previously centred on later-stage international multicentre trials, where Chinese enrolment accounted for about 15 per cent of the total, protocols were designed globally and the China team executed. Two early-stage trials now run entirely in China, with all participants recruited locally and the Shanghai team involved in protocol design from the outset.

Tang Lei, who leads Sanofi China's translational medicine work, describes the shift as moving from receiving a script written elsewhere to writing it. The rationale is time. Patent protection for innovative drugs is finite, and shaving weeks from each phase can cumulatively shorten a development cycle that normally runs a decade by a full year. The recruitment implication runs deeper than it appears. Once the authority to write the script moves, the China organisation needs people who can decide which trials to run, how to design them, and how many people and how much money to commit. The functional upgrade of multinational regional headquarters in Shanghai is, at bottom, an upward shift in the level of every role beneath it.

The count has moved modestly: certified R&D centres in Shanghai rose from 670 to 675, regional headquarters from 1,107 to 1,120. The change is in composition, with new sites carrying real research mandates rather than a signboard. Henderson Executive Search sees a pattern: headquarters put R&D in China once the local team has proved it can define a problem.

The Brief Moves from Selling to Building

Put the pieces together and the boundaries of the China general manager role expand in three directions. The first is full profit and loss. The China head once answered for revenue and share, with cost centres, research and supply chain at headquarters. As groups move research and capacity into China, every line of the P&L lands locally. The second is cross-system coordination. Audi's two-person board, a local principal paired with a headquarters veteran as operator, is itself a cross-system solution requiring both men to work in the other's language.

The third is building from zero. Johnson Health Tech set up a China home R&D centre before its first expo appearance, Herbalife upgraded its Shanghai product innovation centre into a global one, and Sanofi created a standalone R&D legal entity. Each move needs someone to assemble a team, define processes and set performance measures from a blank page, with no reference point: headquarters cannot supply a template, the local market cannot supply a ready-made team, and professional depth is the least scarce ingredient.

Zhang Jun's record keeps being cited because it leaves evidence in all three directions. Stellantis and Nissan gave him process discipline inside a foreign system; Chery gave him the speed and cost instincts of a Chinese carmaker; two years at Audi China gave him ground-level understanding of a dual-joint-venture structure. Audi's line about combining international experience with deep knowledge of the Chinese market states that value directly. In China general manager assignments at Henderson Executive Search, clients now ask explicitly for candidates who have made local decisions inside a foreign company and built systems inside a domestic one.

Three Roles Being Repriced

The first is the China principal, where pricing has moved from selling to running a business. The tests are concrete: has this person carried a complete P&L, made trade-offs when the budget was cut, said no to headquarters and absorbed the consequences. Few come out of a pure sales line; most are business unit heads, regional general managers or operating executives who have run a standalone unit. Salary research reports show long-term incentive weighting rising and fixed pay falling, a structural shift that is itself a price on accountability among senior talent in China.

The second is the R&D centre head, where the logic has moved from receiving projects to defining them. The value of a role like Tang Lei's at Sanofi lies in judging which trials to run, how to design them and where to commit resources; volume of execution says little about it. These people combine two traits: a global project record inside a multinational pharmaceutical or device company, and genuine standing within China's hospital, regulatory and clinical networks. As foreign R&D centres set up separate legal entities, the position has been elevated from R&D manager to head of a research entity, with compliance, budget, government affairs and local hiring added. The addressable talent pool narrows sharply.

The third is the local supply chain director, where the logic has moved from procurement execution to localisation strategy. Cost and delivery used to be the whole scorecard. There is now a second layer: which stages to move into China, which local suppliers to qualify, and how to manage conflict with a global procurement organisation. Every company at the expo announcing production in China for global supply has to solve this first. Such candidates need fluency in both global sourcing rules and the Chinese supplier ecosystem, and those two languages usually grow in different people. The most common failure Henderson Executive Search sees is a client recruiting against a procurement director profile and finding the real requirement is someone who can redraw a supply chain's geography.

The Seam Between Expatriate and Local

Localisation has been discussed for years, and the hard part sits in arranging people during the transition. An expatriate executive understands the language of headquarters, global process and how to win resources in a boardroom, but reads local speed and cost structures through a layer of distance. A local executive understands channels, customers and how to survive a price war, but can miss the compliance lines and allocation logic of the centre. Audi's answer puts both types into one decision layer, the local principal owning direction and execution, the headquarters veteran running operations, decision paths shortened while the interface to Ingolstadt is preserved.

The recruitment implication is that the scarcest talent in a transition is the one who can translate between two systems, with seniority a secondary consideration. Henderson Executive Search has seen several transition arrangements in manufacturing clients, and results differ widely, the difference coming down to whether the two people will share a single decision rhythm. Such candidates show three verifiable traits: time at headquarters, enough to hear what global alignment actually means; a signature signed independently in the China market, with the consequences that came with it; one cross-system integration, whether a joint venture restructuring, a dual-brand merger or the establishment of a research entity. Zhang Jun's 2018 to 2020 stint at Audi China matters here more than the headline, because two years of adjustment were paid for in advance. Companies hiring at this level tend to screen on industry fit and overlook system familiarity, and the latter often determines whether the first six months produce output or consumption.

The Ninety Days After the Expo

Six days of exhibition, ninety days of decision. That is the usual rhythm for a foreign company landing a project in China: contact at the show, assessment within a month, approval by month two, recruitment by month three. The window worth watching runs from mid-November into February, with the expo serving as a starting line. Shanghai has laid on 54 investment tour routes and 34 promotion events this year to compress that cycle.

When a regional headquarters lands, the first senior talent hires are usually operating and functional roles. On the project cadence Henderson Executive Search works to, a foreign company establishing a China headquarters fills three positions first: China head or chief operating officer, finance head and human resources head. Setting up a research entity, the first two become the R&D centre head and the regulatory affairs head. Starting local production, the first two become the supply chain director and the plant director. All begin before the organisation exists, which puts the highest weight on having built something from zero.

Policy adds a second source of time pressure. Announcement No. 29 of 2026 sets the VAT export rebate for new energy vehicles at 9 per cent from 1 April 2027, down from 13 per cent, covering 67 commodity codes. A European draft on hybrid quotas proposes 350,000 units in the first year with increases capped at 6 per cent thereafter. Together these pull forward the timetable for producing and managing inside China, and foreign-invested enterprise recruitment moves with it.

What the Market Is Actually Buying

Multinationals hiring senior people in China have moved from a good-looking CV to verifiable evidence: a full P&L carried, a cross-system integration delivered, decisions taken independently here with consequences attached. None of the three survives an interview; they are confirmed only by examining specific projects.

That is where executive search earns its place at this stage. The difficulty in foreign-invested enterprise recruitment is rarely an absence of candidates. It is that the right talent sits inside another system and does not know this door is open. An operating executive who has integrated two brands inside a joint venture may never think to look at a European company preparing to open a China research entity. A vice president who took a domestic carmaker into Europe may never imagine a luxury brand is looking for someone who understands its competitors. Creating one effective conversation between those two ends is the whole job of a headhunter, and it is why companies that run senior searches in-house so often end up with the same shortlist as their competitors.

Henderson Executive Search has served foreign-invested clients across manufacturing, healthcare and consumer sectors for years, and the clearest change this year is in how clients frame the question. They used to ask what the market pays for a role. More often they now ask how many people like this exist in China, where they sit and whether they would move. The question has shifted from price to supply, which tells you the hiring logic of multinationals in China has moved from recruiting to a budget toward ranking roles by scarcity. That is a market a headhunter reads daily. Among the 4,142 companies at CIIE, what determines who is still standing two years from now is the handful of appointments made in those ninety days. Stand size says nothing about it.