At the beginning of 2026, an announcement from Dalian Heavy Industry made many overseas practitioners feel worried.
This leading domestic heavy equipment company delivered a complete set of ship unloading equipment to an Indian port customer, but it was unable to collect the final payment of 140 million yuan. In the end, it could only accrue bad debts in full.
Behind this case lies the new dilemma behind China’s export volume of 26.99 trillion in 2025: the goods are sold on shelves around the world, but the money cannot be safely put into one’s pocket.
China’s overseas expansion has entered a new deep-water area. The test is no longer whether it can sell the goods, but whether it can safely get back the money from selling the goods.
This is not a problem for Dalian Heavy Industries. More and more bosses are complaining about the same problem.
In the past, when doing foreign trade, the 45-day account period was the norm. Now many customers directly request to extend it to 90 days or even 120 days, saying that local consumption is slow and their money has not been withdrawn.
A hardware export company in Yongkang, Zhejiang, shipped goods to a Russian customer, but the balance payment of US$14,000 was delayed for half a year. The other party used exchange rate fluctuations as an excuse, and finally there was no news at all.
At the Canton Fair, the person in charge of an industrial machinery company in Shenzhen also said that orders from Africa are rising rapidly, but it takes several weeks to receive payment. The local foreign exchange control is particularly troublesome, and the way for money to come in is blocked.
Zhejiang Tianyan Holdings also encountered similar difficulties.
For its products exported to Nigeria, due to the lack of local foreign exchange, customers need to pay for the goods in multiple exchanges. The payment cycle is extremely unstable, which brings a lot of inconvenience to the company’s capital flow.
There is also a boss who exports fishing gear. When he launched new products to Africa three years ago, the local currency fell by 5% in just a few days, directly eating up 70% of his profits. Most of his hard work for half a year was in vain.
Changes in the external environment have transferred financial pressure to enterprises.
On February 20, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that some of the original tariff measures lacked authorization. As a result, on the same day, the U.S. announced that it would impose a 10% temporary tariff on global goods based on the new trade bill. The policy was officially implemented on the 24th, and the tax rate was subsequently raised.
The original tax-free channel for small amounts below US$800 has also been closed. Some analysts say that if all subsequent policies are implemented, the comprehensive tax rate in the US market may exceed 100%, and the cost of selling a single item will almost double.
Overseas buyers are unwilling to bear such high costs, so they pass the pressure on to the upstream, delaying payment and waiting for interest rates to drop before settling the bill.
Compliance pressure is also increasing. With the EU’s Digital Services Law, the US’s strict customs inspections, as well as various countries’ intellectual property rights and labor standards, compliance is no longer optional, but the bottom line for life.
A boss who makes 3C products calculated that he used to have a 20% profit on each order. Now, with the compliance consulting fees, audit fees, and the platform’s deposit, the profit dropped directly to 8%. After working for more than half a year, most of the money was spent on various intermediate costs.
Fluctuations in exchange rates have added to the problem. Last year, a boss who was engaged in exporting to Southeast Asia originally wanted to wait for the U.S. dollar to rise a little before settling the foreign exchange. As a result, the U.S. dollar depreciated in the first quarter. The payment for a $1 million payment was 80,000 yuan less than expected when the foreign exchange was settled, which directly swallowed up most of the profit.
Many people don’t know that our overseas operations are no longer what they used to be.
When New China first started, going overseas was not a business at all, but a way forced to raise enough foreign exchange to buy overseas equipment.
At that time, we could only take out the most primitive agricultural products such as bristles, soybeans, and silk, and exchange them little by little for foreign exchange. Every penny had to be allocated uniformly, and all was used on the edge of industrialization. This was the simplest starting point for us to go overseas.
After we joined the WTO in 2001, Chinese manufacturing truly entered into the global division of labor network. Relying on our large and hard-working labor force, we became the world’s OEM.
In 2005, the then Minister of Commerce once said something that struck a chord with many people: We need to sell 800 million shirts in exchange for an Airbus A380.
A pair of socks printed with “Made in China” has an ex-factory price of only 2 US dollars. If it is labeled with an overseas brand, it can be sold at the terminal for 20 US dollars. We did 90% of the production, but the final profit was less than 10%.
At that time, money transfer was also slow. When overseas buyers paid, they had to go through the local bank first, then the international intermediary bank, and finally it could reach our account. Money had to be deducted at every step and it took a long time. The company could only hold on to a tight capital chain.
In the past few years, we have finally turned the situation around completely.
Chinese companies are no longer willing to stay at the bottom of the industrial chain, and have begun to break through upstream, exporting technology and brand capabilities overseas.
The transformation of Dongfeng Motor is the best example. In the past, Chinese cars relied on low-priced sales to enter the overseas market. Now they rely on three-electric systems, smart cockpits, and localized technologies for different regions to gain a firm foothold in the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
In response to the high temperatures in the Middle East, the extreme cold in Europe, and the high humidity in Southeast Asia, they have carried out special development, allowing China’s new energy vehicles to truly open up the market through technology and regain the right to define the industry.
In the unpopular field of high-voltage operation and maintenance, Guangdong’s Guanneng Technology also gave the answer. They replaced the most dangerous manual inspections with self-developed robots, and relied on 111 national patents and 20 software copyrights to sell their products around the world.
In 2025, our exports of high-tech products will reach 5.25 trillion yuan, exports of independent brands will grow by 12.9%, and the growth rate of electric vehicles, photovoltaics, and lithium batteries will exceed 27%. We are no longer looking for a position in the industrial chain, but have become a core player that others can’t live without.
Faced with funding problems, the industry is also looking for new solutions.
The traditional wire transfer model with layers of turnover in the past has long been unable to keep up with current demand. In 2025, our cross-border e-commerce imports and exports have reached 2.75 trillion yuan, an increase of 70% from 2020. The market is getting bigger, and the old capital links have long been unable to support it.
Nowadays, many cross-border financial service platforms rely on their digital capabilities to integrate originally dispersed capital links into a unified global capital network. Services like Wanlihui provide small and medium-sized sellers with out-of-the-box super accounts.
Even if there is only one accountant, it can easily handle the payment and settlement of more than 210 countries and regions and more than 130 currencies. The funds arrive much faster and the handling fees have also been reduced.
There is a media company in Jiangsu that is developing TikTok overseas. It was worried about the problem of repayment before. The money had to wait for a long time and the handling fee was still high. Later, it used the bank’s cross-border service to solve this problem.
Many companies have also begun to adjust their strategies, no longer focusing on a single market, reducing the share of the U.S. market to less than 30%, while expanding their business in Southeast Asia and Europe, and some are going overseas with their industrial chains and cooperating with local companies, which not only reduces costs but also makes repayments more stable.
The export scale of RMB 26.99 trillion is the confidence we have accumulated over decades, but it is not capital that can be relied upon to win.
It took us 68 years to solve the problem of whether we could sell the goods. From surviving through currency exchange to technological breakthrough, we have completed a long road to rise.
The new test question now is how to securely get back the money from selling goods so that every fund can be transferred efficiently.
The next step for China’s manufacturing overseas is to make every fund in global business flow faster, more accurately, and more stably, to build a solid financial backing for Chinese companies to go global, and to make our overseas journey go further and more steadily.
