China's carmakers have moved past the question of how many vehicles they can ship abroad. The next question is whether parts, repair know-how, diagnostic data, and service follow the car to wherever it ends up on the road. At AAG 2026, Chinese aftermarket companies laid out their next moves into Europe, ASEAN, and Central Asia. On August 20, the autonomy, smart chassis, and intelligent cockpit systems unveiled by Chinese OEMs showed just how quickly the cars these companies will one day have to repair are changing. This is what China's "second globalization" looked like from the floor in Guangzhou.

By Sang Min Han  _ han@autoelectronics.co.kr
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On the morning of August 19, 2026, two lions — one gold, one red — took the lobby of the Poly World Trade Expo Center in Guangzhou. The dance opened the 11th Auto Aftermarket Guangzhou (AAG) 2026. Inside, 1,818 exhibitors filled the halls, and Chinese-made brake pads, sensors, lamps, cooling systems, and repair data lined every aisle, waiting for buyers from overseas.
That afternoon, someone told a very different story.
"Plenty of Chinese cars have arrived. What's missing is someone who can fix them when they break."

That's what a contact in Kazakhstan told Dai Chen, an aftermarket veteran — and it captures, in one line, the problem China's auto industry now faces abroad. The cars have already crossed the border. The parts, the repair capacity, the diagnostic data, and the service that need to follow them have not caught up.
That's why the word heard most often at AAG 2026 wasn't "parts" or "EV." It was "going abroad." If China's first globalization was about selling cars to the world, the second is about planting an entire ecosystem — parts, repair, data, service — everywhere those cars end up.
The show, first held in 2015, spread across 85,000 square meters and seven halls this year, up 6.3% in floor space and 2% in exhibitor count from last year. Thirty-five talks and forums ran in parallel over three days. Visitors came from 68 countries and regions, and 48 delegations of overseas buyers made the trip to Guangzhou.
Walking the floor felt like reading a map in miniature. Next to a booth with a wall-sized compatibility chart for headlamps stood another lined with a circle of automaker logos — Changan, Chery, GAC, BAIC, Volkswagen — marking a parts supplier's client roster. A few steps further, a company selling wrap-film cutting software had a world map dotted in red: some 40,000 customers across China, another 15,000 spread over 120-plus countries. Companies making the smallest pieces of a car — cooling systems, oxygen sensors, door-lock actuators — sat side by side down the aisles, all waiting on the same overseas buyers. Every corner of the floor told the same story: a Chinese parts supply chain already in motion toward the rest of the world.
At the opening reception, Fiona Chiew, general manager of Messe Frankfurt (HK) Ltd, put it this way:
"Over the past decade, AAG has built a bridge connecting South China's automotive aftermarket with global resources."
Sun Run Hai, general manager of co-organizer China National Machinery Industry International Co. (SINOMACHINT), offered a more structural read: "The automotive aftermarket is entering a new stage of development, driven at once by scale expansion and consumption upgrading."

The trouble is that repair networks, parts supply, and data infrastructure haven't kept pace with how fast Chinese cars have gone global. And a harder problem is already waiting behind it: the cars Chinese manufacturers are building today are far more difficult to repair than the ones that came before. On August 20, on a stage in the same city, Chinese automakers showed exactly what that car looks like.







A $535 Billion Map

Dai Chen, founder of Magic Cube Auto-Aftermarket, laid out the widest view of this shift. Taking the stage first, at 1:30 p.m. on August 19, he put the global aftermarket at $535 billion in 2026 — up from $428 billion in 2022, and headed toward $720 billion by 2032. Three forces are driving that growth: the global vehicle fleet's average age climbing to 12.5 years, electric and intelligent vehicles pushing up the share of electronic components, and independent aftermarket channels and digital distribution eating into OEM parts' territory.
Dai entered the industry in 2008 running a repair-chain business, eventually operating 51 shops. In 2015, Magic Cube College's overseas training program took 1,411 Chinese entrepreneurs abroad. In 2023, he co-founded MCAA (Magic Cube Autoparts Alliance) with eBay and TecAlliance, now a network of more than 230 parts distributors worldwide.
"The question isn't whether to go abroad anymore. It's how to do it right."

From there he worked through six regions — Europe, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia, Latin America. In tightly regulated Europe, he argued, the shift has to be from competing on price to competing on value. In Southeast Asia, where intra-regional tariffs are coming down step by step, products need to be redesigned for local climate and vehicle specs. In Central Asia, where repair infrastructure hasn't kept up with the growing vehicle base, that gap itself is the opportunity.
The second axis is EV parts. As early electric vehicles reach five to eight years on the road, battery degradation and motor wear are starting to generate real repair demand — a market built not by new car sales but by cars already out there. China's position in this market is already unmistakable: CATL and BYD alone account for more than half of global share.
Dai compressed all of it into a three-stage roadmap. In the near term (one to two years), set up assembly in countries with strong access to the European market, like Turkey or Morocco. In the medium term (three to five years), plug into the supply chains of companies already established abroad, like BYD or CATL. In the long term (five-plus years), build production and R&D bases in automotive strongholds like Germany, Hungary, and Spain. At that final stage, the company's identity changes too — from "a Chinese supplier exporting to Europe" to "a local supplier that develops, produces, and services in Europe."




From left: Dai Chen, Sheng Ke, and Feng Hailong.



You Can Enter a Market on Price. You Can't Own It That Way.

A big market and a market you can actually hold are two different things. And the bigger the market, the bigger the trap waiting for companies that lead with price alone.
That was the point Sheng Ke, a Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Expert at the Mekong Institute and author of the column "Sheng Ke's Notes on Going Abroad," made on the afternoon of August 19.
By FMI (Future Market Insights) figures, the ASEAN aftermarket will grow from $31.2 billion in 2025 to $46.5 billion in 2030 and $75 billion by 2036 — a compound annual growth rate of 8.3%. More than 100 million vehicles are on the road across ASEAN's six core markets. Three camps compete for that fleet. Japanese brands hold the mid-to-high end through decades of OEM parts systems and official service networks. European brands defend the luxury segment on technology and brand heritage. China is pushing into emerging segments fast, on supply chain cost and price. What happens after that entry is the real question.
Sheng Ke broke the typical path of a Chinese parts company going abroad into three stages. First, a company launches believing a good product sells itself, and leans on trading houses or large wholesalers. Second, sales pick up, but the company is reading the market purely through distributor feedback and has no real sense of end-user demand. Third, sales plateau and distributors start squeezing on price. He calls that last stage getting "trapped by the channel."
One slide carried a line in red: a dangerous "scissors effect" — export volume climbing exponentially while brand value and margin fail to follow.
He broke that trap into three specific risks. The first is channel dependency. A large local wholesaler looks like an attractive partner to a company just entering a market, but the deeper the relationship goes, the more control over end users and real selling prices shifts to the distributor. In markets like Cambodia, payment can take half a year to collect, and long-standing local wholesalers hold distribution relationships that are hard to displace quickly. A buyer offering a $1 million order on day one isn't automatically a good customer, either — some use volume as bait to push prices down and lock a supplier into dependency. The second risk is product fit. ASEAN mixes left- and right-hand-drive markets, the same model often carries different specs for the domestic Chinese market versus ASEAN, and heat, humidity, and salt air all have to be designed around. The third is compliance — certification requirements like Indonesia's SNI vary by country, and for safety-critical parts like brake pads, an incident involving uncertified components becomes a legal liability.
None of this makes ASEAN a pessimistic case. There's a structural opening, and it traces back to Chinese EVs going abroad. EV penetration in Thailand has already hit 12%, and Chinese automakers like BYD, Chery, and Geely carry real weight in the region. When the finished vehicle leads, the aftermarket follows — which means Chinese parts companies shouldn't wait until after a car is sold to go looking for a market. They need to build supply and service relationships from the moment the vehicle itself goes abroad.
Indonesia in particular stands out: 280 million people, ASEAN's largest single market, roughly 40% of the bloc's combined GDP. It's also an archipelago of 17,000 islands. That looks like a logistics disadvantage, but the fragmentation cuts both ways — no competitor can lock down a national network quickly either, which turns a properly built distribution network into a real barrier to entry for whoever gets there first.
"Crack Indonesia, and you've effectively cracked ASEAN."

His advice for execution was concrete. A company's top executive should go and stay in-market for at least six months, and every subsequent visit should be made with the eye of a consultant, not a tourist — watching repair shops and distribution networks, not sightseeing. No company should move fast without the financial reserves to absorb at least two years of losses, and it's worth committing roughly RMB 200,000 upfront just to secure market data from local industry associations. Build relationships with local engineering students and develop them into testing and market-execution talent. And don't stop at the overseas Chinese network and Chinese-language social media — build content with local consumers themselves, and get inside the local culture.
"You can enter a market on price. You can't own it on price alone."







What Repair Shops Lack Isn't Data. It's Standards.

Putting down roots locally only leads to a harder question: who fixes the car that's been sold, and on what basis?
Feng Hailong, general manager of the repair-information platform AIWrench, answered that question directly on the afternoon of August 19. What he described was a very concrete problem inside China's repair industry.
Misjudging the scope of a job leads to rework. Inexperienced technicians damage parts by removing and reinstalling them more times than necessary. Parts that were never faulty end up as a cost the supply chain absorbs. Labor pricing compounds it: by his figures, an authorized BMW shop can charge more than RMB 900 an hour, while an independent shop takes in around RMB 200. Yet once you account for technician wages, rent, and social insurance, the real labor cost at an independent shop in a tier-one or tier-two city isn't actually low.
"People assume repair shops lack data, or lack traffic. What they actually lack is standards."

One slide made the point literally. A single job — removing, installing, and replacing the coolant return line on a turbocharger — carried a standard job code, a system-assigned labor time of 53 standardized minutes, an hourly rate of RMB 960, and a reference total of RMB 4,240. Work that used to rest on a technician's experience and instinct had been converted into a standardized procedure, time, and price. Part location, wiring diagrams, diagnostic history, repair video, and manuals all sit inside one interface — so a technician doesn't just see "replace this part." They're walked through which tools are needed and what torque to apply to which bolt, in order.
The company already supports most major European, American, and Japanese brands domestically, and keeps adding to its global brand list, including BMW and Mercedes-Benz. What matters isn't which brands it supports — it's the direction: packaging the repair knowledge and work standards built up in China into a single product and taking it abroad.
"If you take only the product abroad, no one remembers you. You have to bring the technology, the service, and the data together."

Repair data that's hard to price competitively inside China's crowded domestic market can command real value abroad once it's bundled with operations and service. Combining multiple brands' repair data into a single platform is also a competitive edge for overseas shops that would otherwise have to buy each brand's data separately.
"By rebuilding the value of labor through standardized tools, and solving the workforce problem through systematized methods, we let repair companies return to what they actually are — technical service providers — and grow sustainably."

Feng's point isn't limited to the repair industry. Testing, certification, and standards are crossing borders alongside Chinese cars themselves. CATARC launched a China-ASEAN Automotive Standards and Regulations Research Center in Indonesia back in 2018, and has worked with local institutions in Malaysia on next-generation vehicle standards, regulations, testing, and certification. In June 2026, it also established a Southeast Asian testing and certification base in Thailand. What China is now taking abroad alongside its cars and parts isn't just hardware. It's the system for testing, certifying, and repairing the vehicle itself.



Europe's Used Parts, China's Raw Materials

Globalization doesn't run in one direction. Another supply chain on display at AAG ran in the opposite direction — from Europe into China. Alternators, starter motors, steering components: used cores pulled out of German cars and fed into China's remanufacturing industry.
Laudin Internationaler Handel GmbH, headquartered in Hamburg, sits at the center of that reverse flow. It exhibited at the show as well.
Three things hold up the German side of this supply chain. First, Germany's roughly 50 million passenger cars carry an average age of 10.9 years, and the older the fleet gets, the more demand there is for parts like alternators, starters, and steering components. Second, labor costs for repair in Germany run high enough that shops tend to swap out an entire part rather than fix the specific fault inside it. Third, Europe already runs a mature Core Return system for used parts, which keeps components with remaining remanufacturing value flowing steadily back into the market.
The trouble starts on the other side of that flow. One core challenge is the mismatch between the supply of used parts and remanufacturing demand — core availability isn't steady, so remanufacturing capacity planning keeps getting thrown off.
The other is that vehicle electrification and software integration are outrunning traditional remanufacturing know-how. A new-generation ECU or smart system can't be brought back to life just by physically restoring the hardware. It has to communicate with the vehicle and take on new software, and in some cases that requires the manufacturer's own authorization to proceed.
That's the same point Feng Hailong made about standards and data, from a different angle. A part's value no longer resolves down to metal and mechanics alone. Reuse and remanufacturing both now depend on data, software access, and traceability traveling with the part. On August 20, on a different stage in the same city, the Chinese companies actually building that kind of car took the floor.




Desay SV and CVC, a Chinese testing and certification organization, announced the establishment of a Joint Laboratory for Automotive Electronics Quality and Reliability. CVC operates the National Quality Inspection and Testing Center for Intelligent Automotive Components, providing testing, certification, and standardization services for automotive electronics.



The Vocabulary for a Car Has Changed

The room that spent August 19 talking about brake pads, starter motors, used cores, labor rates, and overseas distribution was, by August 20, talking about cars in an entirely different language: robotaxis, AI, smart chassis, intelligent cockpits, biosignals, digital twins. The two days can look like two different industries. They aren't. The car that aftermarket players worried about on August 19 and the car that automakers and tech companies were building on August 20 are the same car — the one an OEM makes today is the one the aftermarket will have to fix in five or ten years.
Wang Dengfeng of Dongfeng described the car as a moving, embodied intelligent agent. In his framing, smart driving is the car's cerebrum, the smart chassis its cerebellum, and drive, brake, and steer its limbs. Where braking used to just be braking and steering just steering, perception, decision-making, control, and actuation are now stitched together into a single software system. What Laudin Internationaler Handel flagged on August 19 — that new-generation ECUs and smart systems are outrunning traditional remanufacturing techniques — took physical shape on stage on August 20.
The seat that Ma Jia of XPENG presented reads a driver's heart rate and breathing and responds before a command is even given. A seat, in the old aftermarket, meant reupholstering leather or servicing a motor. A seat with sensors, an ECU, software, and a user interface built into it is a different object entirely. Whoever repairs it later won't need a part number. They'll need diagnostic data, wiring diagrams, software, work procedures, and calibration steps. Feng Hailong's line on August 19 — what repair shops lack isn't data, it's standards — lands differently once you've seen this seat.
Zhao Qiao of Leapmotor released autonomous-driving validation data gathered across 195 cities in 32 countries. That's a step beyond simply shipping a China-built car overseas — it's validating the vehicle directly against each region's roads, climate, and conditions. It lines up exactly with the warning Sheng Ke gave about ASEAN on August 19: that a car built for China's domestic market can't just be shipped as-is into a region running both left- and right-hand-drive vehicles under heat, humidity, and salt exposure. Automakers are already running into the same problem at the vehicle-development stage. Localization isn't a job for the aftermarket alone. It's homework for the entire Chinese auto industry.
Hello Inc. introduced its Level 4 robotaxi business, extending its reach past vehicle sales into operations and service. The company also showed a robotic arm used for cockpit durability testing and lighting developed through a DeepSeek-based digital twin. It isn't only the car that's getting more intelligent — the way it's developed and validated is moving onto AI as well.
AAG runs on two big themes, the aftermarket and future-mobility technology. Shift the timeline slightly and they turn out to be the same story. The intelligent chassis Dongfeng described, the sensor-laden seat XPENG showed, the vehicles Leapmotor is validating across the globe — all of it eventually ends up on a lift in a repair shop. The next competition in the aftermarket won't be about who can supply parts more cheaply. It will be about who can keep a software-defined car running to the end of its life. That's why Feng Hailong talked about repair standards and why Laudin Internationaler Handel flagged the limits of traditional remanufacturing. China's aftermarket will change at the same pace its automakers are changing the car itself.




Second from left: Sun Run Hai, General Manager of SINOMACHINT; second from right: Fiona Chiew, General Manager of Messe Frankfurt (HK) Ltd.



The Infrastructure Behind Going Global

Walking back out through the show floor, the aisles were still full. Past the booth with the wall of headlamp compatibility charts, past the circle of OEM logos marking a supplier's client roster, sat the eBay Motors booth.
"eBay helps China's auto parts industry go global," read a banner above a display for its logistics partner, Orange Connex. At a row of consultation tables, Chinese company representatives sat working through onboarding steps and shipping terms. Parts manufacturers, data vendors, logistics providers — all standing toward the same destination: going abroad.
What ties all of it together is Messe Frankfurt's exhibition network. What makes that network valuable to Chinese companies isn't any single show — it's that none of the shows stand alone. A company that learns how to go abroad and meets its first buyer in Guangzhou can meet a local distributor in Jakarta a few months later, then test other ASEAN markets in Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City. What Messe Frankfurt is really selling these companies may not be booth space at all, but a repeatable way back into new markets. At AAG, at least, its role looked less like running an exhibition space and more like building the infrastructure Chinese supply chains use to enter new markets.
Near the entrance, a board listed the company's sister shows across Asia: Automechanika Jakarta, launching in Indonesia this September, followed by Shanghai in December, then Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Chengdu, and Ho Chi Minh City through the first half of next year. Suppliers and buyers who meet in Guangzhou can expect to run into each other again in another city a few months on.
The overseas network Dai Chen has built through MCAA with Messe Frankfurt since 2017, the local rooting Sheng Ke described, the repair standards and data Feng Hailong laid out, the reverse supply chain Laudin Internationaler Handel showed — each started from a different place, but they're headed toward the same one. It starts with selling a part and moves on to selling repair data, standards, trust, and finally, a local identity. Fiona Chiew's line from the opening ceremony — "a bridge connecting global resources" — only takes on its full meaning here.
At the opening ceremony, Fiona Chiew said:
"Now in our 11th year, we're not resting on what we've already achieved. We're using a decade of industry experience to deepen our services further."
Sun Run Hai added: "Turning this show into an 'old friend' that everyone wants to meet again every year takes even longer, sustained effort."

What Guangzhou showed is that China's auto industry is no longer just selling cars. It's taking on the job of repairing them, supplying their parts, feeding their data, and keeping their customers for the five or ten years after the sale. Across the different stages and aisles of the Poly World Trade Expo Center on August 19 and 20, the conversations pointed to where China's auto industry has to go next. Exporting finished vehicles is a speed China has already proven. Exporting the aftermarket is an endurance test it hasn't proven yet.

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