Yang Yuanjia of SEPPES Door Industry Wins Alibaba.com Station’s Top 10 “True Bull Award” “Rooted in China” Smart Overseas Expansion Strategy Resonates Widely

Recently, the 2025 Alibaba.com Station True Bull Awards—dubbed the “foreign trade version of The Debaters”—concluded successfully. Twenty global trade professionals engaged in a seven-hour debate, exploring strategies for overseas expansion amid an era of uncertainty. Among them, Yang Yuanjia, General Manager of SEPPES Door Industry (Suzhou) Co., Ltd., secured a spot in the “2025 Top 10 True Bull Awards” with his distinctive global expansion philosophy and impressive worldwide performance. His debate topic, “Rooted in China, Radiating Globally,” garnered support from tens of thousands of foreign trade professionals, emerging as one of the event’s focal points.

This annual gathering of the foreign trade community has crystallized “Evolution Amidst Change” as its core consensus. Today’s Chinese foreign trade professionals have long shed the label of “the world’s factory laborers,” transforming instead into decoders of global demand. The story of Yang Yuanjia and SEPPES Door Industry stands as a vivid microcosm of how Chinese foreign trade enterprises are achieving intelligent upgrades and high-quality global expansion. This post-80s entrepreneur, who didn’t speak English, spent a decade making the leap from “daring not to compete with overseas brands” to “defeating overseas brands.” He successfully brought Chinese-made industrial doors into Germany’s top automotive factories. Today, he boasts the impressive achievement that “one in every seven Fortune Global 500 companies chooses SEPPES,” having opened doors to markets in over 70 countries through Alibaba.com.

“Roots in China, reach across the globe—this isn’t just a slogan. It’s the conclusion we’ve drawn, door by door, through our experience serving over 70 countries worldwide.” At the Zhenniu Awards debate, Yang Yuanjia’s statement rang out with conviction. Under his leadership, SEPPES Door Industry has carved out a distinctive path for smart industrial door exports by specializing in the R&D and production of intelligent industrial doors tailored for factories and production lines. Unlike traditional squeaky roll-up doors, SEPPES’s smart industrial doors not only open and close swiftly and smoothly via buttons or automatic sensors but also precisely “communicate” with material handling robots and robotic arms to achieve automated coordination for material flow. The smart display screen integrated into the door serves as a “core asset,” continuously showing real-time operational status and instantly labeling fault points in the local language during malfunctions, significantly reducing maintenance costs.

In Yang Yuanjia’s view, the development of these core competencies hinges on the strategic choice of “rooting in China.” China’s comprehensive industrial chain ecosystem provides the complex systems engineering support required for the high-frequency operation and unmanned switching of smart industrial doors, enabling continuous iteration of product functionality and technology. To this end, SEPPES Door Industry has established two major factories, its headquarters base, and core service teams entirely within China. Front-end customer acquisition and demand matching leverage the digital platform of Alibaba.com Station, achieving an efficient response model where “customers submit requirements online, and the domestic team delivers solutions and quotes within the same day.”

Addressing the common challenge of “close-proximity service” in international trade, Yang Yuanjia offers a unique solution: focus on systems rather than manpower, leveraging intelligence to overcome geographical disadvantages. For minor issues like loose screws, customer engineers can resolve them independently using prompts from smart displays. For complex problems, uploading screen information via Alibaba.com Station’s AI customer service provides 24/7 online guidance. Combined with the control system’s automatic restart recovery function, the vast majority of projects no longer require dispatching engineers, yet service efficiency far surpasses traditional models. “It takes hours for local European teams to arrive on-site, and email communication might delay things for days, forcing workshops to halt production for days. But our system recovers automatically—faster than any human could run,” Yang Yuanjia illustrated. After adopting SEPPES Door Industry’s products, a top German automotive factory stated they were “more user-friendly and intelligent than doors from local suppliers.”

SEPPES Doors’ strategy of establishing deep roots in China has enabled the company to precisely capture the trend of integrating smart manufacturing with the Internet of Things (IoT). It has rapidly leveraged China’s mature IoT supply chain to enhance its product portfolio. Yang Yuanjia likened the logic of global expansion to military discipline: “Before securing your position, don’t extend your supply lines. The core strengths of Chinese manufacturing lie in its comprehensive supply chain, robust R&D capabilities, and large-scale production. Fragmenting these advantages and dispersing them across different countries is essentially dismantling the fortress into small cottages.”

Today, SEPPES Door Industry’s path to global expansion has become a benchmark for the industry: rather than engaging in head-to-head competition with established overseas brands in traditional markets, it has chosen to solidify its core strengths domestically. By embracing intelligent upgrades to shift lanes and overtake competitors, and leveraging digital platforms to proactively deliver value worldwide, the company has redefined its approach. As Yang Yuanjia stated in his acceptance speech: “Going global isn’t about sending people abroad; it’s about exporting our intelligent systems. First, we must firmly establish our roots in China, then let the world find us.”

A representative from Alibaba.com stated that Yang Yuanjia’s philosophy resonates widely, reflecting China’s foreign trade transition from “scale expansion” to “quality enhancement.” With the deep integration of AI technology and digital platforms, an increasing number of “AI-native foreign trade enterprises” like SEPPES Doors are emerging. These companies are redefining the essence of “advanced foreign trade” and expanding the practical scope for the “rooted in China, radiating globally” approach to overseas expansion.