{"id":14256,"date":"2024-06-27T13:00:15","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T13:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/?p=14256"},"modified":"2025-04-23T08:59:36","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T08:59:36","slug":"which-chinese-companies-are-sponsoring-the-euros","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/which-chinese-companies-are-sponsoring-the-euros\/","title":{"rendered":"Why are so many Chinese companies sponsoring the Euros?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eagle-eyed China watchers will have noticed a lot of familiar names if they have tuned into the Euros over the past couple of weeks.<\/h2>\n

Five of the 13 official global sponsors of the UEFA Euro 2024 championship are Chinese companies, giving China the most significant advertising presence at the event. This is a testament to Chinese brands\u2019 growing desire for global expansion (and to the draw of the billions of dollars of revenue the Euros is set to generate).<\/p>\n

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The Chinese companies sponsoring the tournament are home appliance giant Hisense, cross-border e-commerce platform AliExpress and financial technology giant Ant Group (which owns Alipay<\/a>, both part of Alibaba), smartphone brand Vivo, and new energy vehicle manufacturer BYD. Hisense, TikTok, Vivo and Alipay also sponsored Euro 2020. At that time, UEFA told the BBC that while it wasn\u2019t specifically focusing on Chinese collaborations, it was looking \u201cto engage a global audience, as do the brands who join [its] commercial programme.\u201d<\/p>\n

Per Bloomberg Intelligence, the Chinese brands will \u201clikely lean on their affiliation with the tournament to expand into new overseas markets and strengthen their presence in existing ones.\u201d Many of these companies already have the edge in their home market \u2013 BYD is China\u2019s biggest EV company and even sold more battery electric vehicles<\/a> (BEVs) (526,409) than Elon Musk\u2019s Tesla (484, 507) in Q4 of 2023.\u00a0 However, there’s a scramble to increase international engagement among the country’s biggest shopping platforms in particular, after the success of Temu<\/a>‘s reported US$14 million splurge on two TV spots during Super Bowl LVII in February 2023.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlibaba needs to raise weekly active users (WAUs) on AliExpress during June 14-July 14 by up to 70% versus a month earlier to prove that its marketing expenditures on this year\u2019s UEFA European Football Championship can aid its e-commerce expansion outside China, in the same way that Temu\u2019s advertising at the US Super Bowl had an impact,\u201d notes Bloomberg\u2019s report.<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0 if previous tournaments are anything to go on, the success rates of such plans appear high. The overseas revenue of Hisense jumped 83% after the TV maker became a sponsor of the tournament in 2016.<\/p>\n