Mainland giants accelerate expansion as local players face unprecedented competition.
Updated
January 8, 2026 6:34 PM
HKTV Mall in Amoy Plaza. PHOTO: WIKIPEDIA USER -WPCPEY
Hong Kong is entering a new phase of competition as mainland platforms accelerate their expansion into the city, turning it into a frontline testing ground for Chinese companies preparing to push into global markets. With retail, logistics and food-delivery businesses all reshaped in the past year, Hong Kong has become the closest international environment where mainland firms can experiment with pricing, supply chains and customer behaviour under a familiar regulatory and cultural framework.
The shift became especially clear this week. At HKTVmall’s Vision Day on November 11, 2025, CEO Ricky Wong warned that Hong Kong’s traditional retail model is facing its toughest moment yet. He said the biggest threat is not mainland competitors like Taobao, JD.com or Pinduoduo entering Hong Kong, but the city’s longstanding dependence on physical shopping. If local retailers do not evolve, he said, they risk becoming “very easy to die of thirst in the desert”. Wong even welcomed the rise of mainland e-commerce giants, arguing that the more players enter the city, the faster consumers will shift online — a transition HKTVmall relies on for growth.
Yet his optimism is layered over a challenging reality. HKTVmall’s own numbers reflect pressure from competition and changing consumer habits. The company reported average daily GMV of HK$22.2 million during the latest shopping festival season — up 2.8% month-on-month but still down 4.3% compared year-on-year — showing that even established online platforms are struggling to maintain momentum as mainland entrants squeeze prices and widen product selection.
The city’s food-delivery market illustrates the shift even more sharply. Deliveroo, once the fastest-growing platform in Hong Kong and at one point holding more than half of the market, officially shut down in April this year after a long decline. Its trajectory mirrored the sector’s upheaval: the company surged during the pandemic but lost ground after restrictions eased, first overtaken by Foodpanda and then pressured heavily by Meituan-backed Keeta, which entered Hong Kong in 2023 and quickly seized about 30% of citywide orders.
Deliveroo’s exit and the handover of parts of its business to Foodpanda did little to stabilise the market. Keeta’s rapid expansion instead pushed Foodpanda onto the defensive, leaving two major players competing in a market shaped by mainland-style pricing and operations. Hong Kong’s delivery sector, once dominated by global firms, is increasingly defined by Chinese platforms optimizing speed and efficiency at a scale few competitors can match.
These changes are unfolding as Chinese companies shift their focus toward new global markets.
With China reducing its reliance on the US and EU and exports steadily moving toward ASEAN, Hong Kong has become a strategic launchpad. The city’s proximity, language familiarity and regulatory structure make it the nearest international setting where Chinese firms can test overseas strategies before expanding into Southeast Asia, the Middle East or Latin America. The result is a competitive intensity that local companies have rarely experienced. Retailers face price pressure they can’t match, local platforms are losing ground to mainland giants and global players are struggling to stay in the game.
Consumers benefit from lower prices, faster delivery and wider choice — but for Hong Kong businesses, the landscape has turned unforgiving. Mainland companies are not treating Hong Kong as a final destination but as the first stop in a broader global push. That positioning is reshaping the city’s entire consumer economy. As more mainland firms look outward, Hong Kong’s role as a testing ground will only deepen and the first players to feel the impact will be those operating closest to the consumer.
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A look at how motivation, not metrics, is becoming the real frontier in fitness tech
Updated
February 7, 2026 2:18 PM
A group of people running together. PHOTO: FREEPIK
Most running apps focus on measurement. Distance, pace, heart rate, badges. They record activity well, but struggle to help users maintain consistency over time. As a result, many people track diligently at first, then gradually disengage.
That drop-off has pushed developers to rethink what fitness technology is actually for. Instead of just documenting activity, some platforms are now trying to influence behaviour itself. Paceful, an AI-powered running platform developed by SportsTech startup xCREW, is part of that shift — not by adding more metrics, but by focusing on how people stay consistent. The platform is built on a simple behavioural insight: most people don’t stop exercising because they don’t care about health. They stop because routines are fragile. Miss a few days and the habit collapses. Technology that focuses only on performance metrics doesn’t solve that. Systems that reinforce consistency, belonging and feedback loops might.
Instead of treating running as a solo, data-driven task, Paceful is built around two ideas: behavioural incentives and social alignment. The system turns real-world running activity into tangible rewards and it uses AI to connect runners to people, clubs and challenges that fit how and where they actually run.
At the technical level, Paceful connects with existing fitness ecosystems. Users can import workout data from platforms like Apple Health and Strava rather than starting from scratch. Once inside the system, AI models analyse pace, frequency, location and participation patterns. That data is used to recommend running partners, clubs and group challenges that match each runner’s habits and context.
What makes this approach different is not the tracking itself, but what the platform does with the data it collects. Running distance and consistency become inputs for a reward system that offers physical-world incentives, such as gear, race entries or gift cards. The idea is to link effort to something concrete, rather than abstract. The company also built the system around community logic rather than individual competition. Even solo runners are placed into challenge formats designed to simulate the motivation of a group. In practice, that means users feel part of a shared structure even when running alone.
During a six-month beta phase in the US, xCREW tested Paceful with more than 4,000 running clubs and around 50,000 runners. According to the company, users increased their running frequency significantly and weekly retention remained unusually high for a fitness platform. One beta tester summed it up this way: “Strava just logs records, but Paceful rewards you for every run, which is a completely different motivation”.
The company has raised seed funding and plans to expand the platform beyond running, walking, trekking, cycling and swimming. Instead of asking how accurately technology can measure the body, platforms like Paceful are asking a different question: how technology might influence everyday behaviour. Not by adding more data, but by shaping the conditions around effort, feedback and social connection.
As AI becomes more common in consumer products, its real impact may depend less on how advanced the models are and more on what they are applied to. In this case, the focus isn’t speed or performance — it’s consistency. And whether systems like this can meaningfully support it over time.