HEADING News

The WAVE 2026 Brand Globalization Awards honor representative enterprises that pioneer AI exploration, achieve sustained breakthroughs in global markets, and provide new models, pathways, and inspiration for Chinese brand globalization. The "Outstanding Service Provider for Brand Globalization" award selects benchmarks through professional evaluation across five dimensions: technology infrastructure, global service capabilities, implementation results, industry value, and AI innovation. It recognizes technology service providers that truly leverage digitalization and AI to solve cross-border operational challenges for brands and help Chinese brands achieve global scalable growth. Winning this award for two consecutive years is authoritative industry recognition of HEADING's over 30 years of commercial digital intelligence accumulation and over 10 years of global practice achievements.

Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Shanghai, HEADING is a leading provider of commercial digital intelligence solutions. With over 30 years of deep expertise in the chain retail circulation sector, the company has undertaken key national research projects including the National 863 Program and the Ninth through Twelfth Five-Year Plans, and holds multiple authoritative qualifications such as "Shanghai High-Tech Enterprise" and "Shanghai Enterprise Technology Center." In 2015, HEADING took its first step toward globalization. Over the past decade, it has built a retail digital intelligence service system covering over 80 countries and regions, with a strong presence in Southeast Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas, serving Chinese chain brands going global, overseas Chinese retail enterprises, and large local retail groups.

In the Chinese market, HEADING maintains its leadership in chain retail digital intelligence, with over 40% market share among the top 100 chain convenience stores and top 100 commercial real estate clients. In the global arena, it has deeply served leading retail groups including MINISO, Sanfu, 52TOYS, TOPTOY, POP MART, the Philippines' ATAW, Indonesia's HalaKIOS, Papua New Guinea's ELISEO GROUP, and Africa's CHINAMALL. From long-term partnerships with established domestic and international clients to proactive outreach from new overseas customers, HEADING's solid service capabilities fully demonstrate the robust competitiveness of its global service system.

HEADING offers a mature global retail solution that one-stop covers overseas store checkout, multi-organization operations for multinational groups, cross-border warehousing and logistics, membership marketing, multi-country fiscal and tax settlement, and more. It supports multi-currency, multi-language, multi-tax system, multi-timezone, and multi-organization, is compatible with local payment channels in various countries, and enables group-level cross-border control. With open standard API interfaces, it can quickly integrate with various upstream and downstream cross-border systems, helping brands flexibly expand their business and complete the buildout of their global digital intelligence framework.

HEADING has built an international and diverse talent service system, with team members possessing overseas study and cross-border retail operations experience. Leveraging years of practical globalization expertise, it enables efficient and rapid implementation of overseas projects, supported by cross-timezone maintenance and operations support, comprehensively ensuring the successful deployment of international projects.

HEADING has long partnered with leading chain retail enterprises in their global market expansion, continuously driving overseas scalable store growth and performance improvement through digital intelligence: it supported MINISO's overseas store count from 0 to 3,600+; Southeast Asia's ATAW Group adopted HEADING's ERP solution, expanding from 2 brands to 4, from hypermarkets and shopping centers to specialty stores, with hypermarkets growing from under 10 to over 20 stores and specialty stores from 2 to over 10; with HEADING's comprehensive digital intelligence empowerment, Africa's CHINAMALL Group successfully achieved a dual-track strategy of deepening existing market presence and exploring new markets—on one hand, opening over 10 new directly-operated stores in existing countries to consolidate regional advantages; on the other, making strong entries into emerging markets such as Guinea, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Benin, helping it achieve a strategic leap from existing expansion to breakthrough in new markets. This milestone achievement not only demonstrates CHINAMALL's strong overseas expansion capability but also fully validates that HEADING has mature capabilities for scaled delivery and operations for global brands, providing international clients with one-stop reliable support from system implementation to business collaboration, helping Chinese solutions take root and accelerate on the world stage.

Beyond scalable growth, HEADING also focuses on delivering long-term value for global brands in compliance, risk control, cost reduction, and efficiency improvement. Recently, HEADING assisted MINISO in its overseas market checkout standardization and membership compliance enhancement project, effectively avoiding regulatory penalty risks arising from incomplete member registration processes or improper user outreach. Additionally, the deployment of self-service checkout machines has significantly reduced labor costs—taking the German market as an example, self-service checkout saves 0.5 FTE per store, and with annual labor costs of €30,000, the system upgrade cost of approximately RMB 100,000 can be recouped within one year of launch. Papua New Guinea's ELISEO Group, through HEADING's digital intelligence system, restructured its four-tier product category management and full-lifecycle product control, achieving warehouse automation, store paperless operations, automatic replenishment, smart pricing, and more—reducing losses and improving efficiency across the entire process from procurement and warehousing to terminal sales, with precise control over store gross margin. These two innovative cases were respectively selected for the "2026 CCFA Golden Wing Retail Practice Cases" and the "2026 China Supermarket Innovation Case Collection."

With over 30 years of deep expertise in the retail circulation sector, HEADING precisely understands the pain points across various scenarios including business operations, supply chain coordination, store expansion, membership operations, and cross-border management for different formats. It can flexibly adapt to diverse retail formats such as fast fashion, trendy toys, comprehensive supermarkets, and convenience stores.

Looking ahead, HEADING will continue to iterate its global retail digital intelligence foundation, deepen its presence in Southeast Asia, Europe, the Americas, Africa, Latin America, and other markets, and accumulate more localized and actionable global practice solutions. With technological strength, it will help retail brands establish brand premium and long-term growth moats in global markets, jointly seizing the opportunities of the new decade of globalization.