SEPPES Doors' Yang Yuanjia Wins Alibaba.com True Niu Awards Top 10 as His China-Rooted Smart Globalization Strategy Resonates

The 2025 Alibaba.com True Niu Awards, known as the foreign trade version of a debate show, recently concluded. Twenty annual foreign trade figures from around the world debated for seven hours on how companies should go global in an uncertain era. Yang Yuanjia, General Manager of SEPPES Doors Industry (Suzhou) Co., Ltd., won the 2025 True Niu Awards Top 10 with his distinctive global expansion philosophy and strong international performance. His debate theme, Rooted in China, Serving the World, won the support of tens of thousands of foreign trade professionals and became one of the event's focal topics.

SEPPES Doors General Manager Yang Yuanjia debating at the True Niu Awards

This annual event for the foreign trade community made evolution amid change a shared consensus. Today's Chinese foreign trade professionals have moved beyond the label of world-factory intermediaries and have become interpreters of global demand. The story of Yang Yuanjia and SEPPES Doors is a vivid example of Chinese foreign trade companies upgrading intelligently and going global with higher quality. This post-1980s entrepreneur, who does not speak English, spent ten years moving from being hesitant to compete with overseas brands to defeating them. He helped Chinese-made industrial doors enter top German automotive factories and has achieved the standout result that one in every seven Fortune Global 500 companies has chosen SEPPES. Through Alibaba.com, the company has opened markets in more than 70 countries.

SEPPES Doors General Manager Yang Yuanjia debating with his opponent

Being rooted in China and serving the world is not a slogan. It is a conclusion we reached by installing door after door while serving customers in more than 70 countries, Yang said firmly during the True Niu Awards debate. Under his leadership, SEPPES Doors focuses on the R&D and production of intelligent industrial doors for factories and production lines, following a differentiated path for smart global expansion. Unlike traditional rattling rolling doors, SEPPES intelligent industrial doors can open and close quickly and smoothly through buttons or automatic sensing. They can also communicate precisely with handling robots and robotic arms to support automated material flow. The intelligent large screen installed on the door has become a core tool: it displays operating status in real time and, in the event of a fault, identifies the problem in the local language, greatly reducing operation and maintenance costs.

Supporters holding signs to cheer for Yang Yuanjia

In Yang's view, these core competitive advantages all depend on the strategic choice of being rooted in China. China's complete industrial chain ecosystem supports the complex systems engineering required for high-frequency operation and unmanned opening and closing of intelligent industrial doors, allowing product functions and technologies to iterate continuously. For this reason, SEPPES Doors keeps its two factories, headquarters, and core service teams in China, while front-end customer acquisition and demand matching are handled through Alibaba.com's digital platform. This enables an efficient response model in which customers submit requirements online and the domestic team provides solutions and quotations the same day.

Four overseas True Niu Awards contestants from other countries

For the common foreign trade challenge of close-range service, Yang offered a distinctive solution: compete through systems rather than manpower, and use intelligence to offset distance. For small common issues such as loose screws, customer engineers can solve the problem themselves by following prompts on the intelligent screen. For more complex problems, they can upload screen information through Alibaba.com's AI customer service and receive 24-hour online guidance. With the control system's automatic restart and recovery function, most projects do not require engineers to be sent overseas, and service efficiency can exceed traditional models. A local European team may take hours to arrive, and email communication can delay things for days, stopping the workshop for days. Our system recovers automatically and moves faster than people, Yang said. He added that after a top German automotive factory used SEPPES Doors products, it said they were easier to use and more intelligent than doors from local suppliers.

Yang Yuanjia receiving the 2025 Alibaba.com True Niu Awards Top 10 honor

The China-rooted strategy has also allowed SEPPES Doors to accurately capture the trend of integrating intelligent manufacturing with IoT, quickly using China's mature IoT supply chain to improve its product system. Yang used a military principle to describe the logic of going global: Do not lengthen your supply lines before you have secured your position. The core strengths of Chinese manufacturing are complete supply chains, strong R&D, and large-scale manufacturing. Splitting those strengths across different countries is essentially turning a fortress into scattered small houses.

Zhang Kuo, President of Alibaba.com, speaking and sharing Jack Ma's attention to the competition

Today, the SEPPES Doors global expansion path has become a reference for the industry. Rather than confronting overseas brands head-on on old tracks, the company strengthens its core advantages in China, overtakes through intelligent upgrading, and uses digital platforms to bring value proactively to global customers. As Yang said in his acceptance remarks, going global does not mean sending people overseas; it means sending an intelligent system overseas. First put down roots in China, then let the world find you.

Yang Yuanjia with three expert judges: Zhang Kuo, President of Alibaba.com; Professor Xue Zhaofeng, noted economist; and Liang Ning, product strategy expert and bestselling author

A representative of Alibaba.com said Yang's philosophy resonated widely because it reflects the transformation of Chinese foreign trade from scale expansion to quality improvement. With deeper empowerment from AI and digital platforms, more AI-native foreign trade companies like SEPPES Doors are emerging. They are redefining what advanced foreign trade means and giving the path of being rooted in China and serving the world broader room for practice.

The 2025 Alibaba.com True Niu Awards competition venue