Offshore transactions worth nearly $10bn in first quarter as companies target foreign resources, consumer and manufacturing sectors.

Chinese companies are buying overseas assets at the fastest pace in five years, pushing through an increasingly hostile regulatory environment to acquire mines, consumer brands, and manufacturing companies across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. The surge comes at a moment of sharp contradiction, as Beijing tightens its grip on what foreign buyers can acquire in China, Chinese firms are accelerating their own push outward.

The numbers

The value of Chinese offshore M&A deals increased for the fifth straight quarter to $9.6 billion in the first quarter of 2026, according to new data from the US-based research firm The Rhodium Group. That makes it the strongest quarter for Chinese outbound M&A since 2021.
The overall trend goes back to Q1. Outbound M&A from Greater China reached nearly $12 billion in January 2026, the highest level for the month since 2017. The newly announced outbound FDI for full year 2025 reached $124 billion – a 18% spike year on year, marking the highest level since 2018, according to the Rhodium’s China Cross-Border Monitor.
This is in stark contrast to the 2016 peak. In 2016, 773 deals valued at over $200 billion were made by Chinese companies, targeting the UK, Europe and the US. Ten years ago, North America had the biggest share of Chinese FDI, with 27%, but in 2025, it had the smallest, with 2.6%. The geography of Chinese acquisitions has undergone a fundamental change.

What’s driving the push?

The motivations are not opportunistic but rather structural. China’s foreign direct investment has been “proving unstoppable” as companies seek overseas expansion opportunities to redirect a record trade surplus amid lingering domestic demand concerns, according to HSBC economists led by Ines Lam in a recent report. Establishing production abroad also “assists China to counter rising trade barriers,” they added.
Rhodium analysts point to three overlapping priorities shaping where and how Chinese firms are deploying capital: securing raw inputs for high-tech production, gaining more control over supply chains, and accessing energy resources to support AI data centres and advanced factories.
“It’s not an indiscriminate wave, it’s a disciplined wave,” said Colin Banfield, head of Asia Pacific M&A at Citi. “These deals are happening selectively and it’s important to look at the underlying types of business and whether there are potential foreign investment sensitivities. If you’re going into south-east Asian or ASEAN markets there are fewer issues from a jurisdictional foreign investment perspective — but if you’re going into the US or Europe, it’s much more selective,” he said.

The deals that define this wave

The biggest deal of Q1 2026 was Zijin Mining’s $4 billion purchase of Canadian mining group Allied Gold Corp, which owns gold assets in Mali, Ivory Coast and Ethiopia. The agreement is part of a trend of Chinese companies investing billions of dollars in sub-Saharan countries in order to secure supply chains for copper, lithium, cobalt, and gold.
In the consumer sector, Anta Sports announced in January a 29% stake purchase in German sportswear maker Puma for $1.8 billion, making it Puma’s largest shareholder. The move gives Anta global reach without full ownership, a structure that has become a template for Chinese consumer brands looking to expand without triggering outright foreign investment reviews.
Two other deals illustrate the breadth of the current wave. Chinese company Luckin Coffee, which is controlled by Centurium Capital Management, is buying out Blue Bottle Coffee from the United States for approximately $400 million. And Picea Robotics has closed its $352M deal with American vacuum robot company iRobot, which marks the end of a saga that started with Amazon’s failed bid to purchase iRobot years ago in the home robotics space.

The regulatory headwinds

The push for outbound deals is occurring at a time when there is growing pressure in the host nations, and the opposition is not just from the United States.
The government has denied an appeal by JAC Capital against an order to sell off its 80% stake in chip-maker FTDI, which produces widely used interface chips, in the UK. The ruling indicates London is ready to assert its national security investment powers, even if the purchase took place before the legislation came into effect.
In Belgium, military intelligence is investigating Chinese group GDAT’s acquisition of helicopter operator NHV through an Ireland-based holding structure. The probe reflects growing concern across European capitals about the use of financial engineering to obscure the Chinese identity of acquiring entities.
It’s a “much more selective” change, as Banfield noted, when it comes to deals into the US and Europe. In the last two years, several European governments have enacted or tightened foreign investment screening laws, while the EU’s framework is currently being revised to expand its scope and application.

Beijing plays both sides

China’s most vocal stance on cross-border M&A occurred last month when it put a stop to Meta’s $2 billion purchase of the AI startup based in China, but reincorporated in Singapore, called Manus.
China’s National Development and Reform Commission issued a one-line statement banning the “foreign acquisition” of Manus and called on all involved to relax the process of the deal. The decision was elevated beyond economic regulators to China’s National Security Commission, chaired by Xi Jinping himself, according to multiple reports.
Chinese officials reviewing the acquisition reportedly described it as a “conspiratorial” attempt to hollow out the country’s technology base. At one stage of the review process, authorities restricted two Manus co-founders from leaving the country — a detail that underlines just how far removed this was from a conventional regulatory review.
The shift was “strongly indicative of what Chinese authorities may do going forward” in terms of acquisitions of Chinese deep-tech companies”, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. The intervention might prevent future acquisition bids by US firms to purchase Chinese-funded companies incorporated in the United States.
The principle holds true in both directions: China aims to acquire resources, factories, and consumer brands overseas, but retain its technology, especially in AI, in its own hands. Beijing is not against M&A as a tool, according to one analyst. It only wants to be used by whom and for what.

The Xi-Trump meeting

The Manus ban came weeks before a planned mid-May summit between President Trump and President Xi in Beijing, where Chinese investment in America is expected to be on the agenda. The timing was notable, a signal to Washington that Beijing retains the ability to escalate on tech acquisition policy even while the two sides explore a broader trade framework.
For global deal-makers, the message from the first quarter data is that Chinese outbound M&A is back in force — focused, resource-oriented, and increasingly concentrated in markets where regulatory friction is manageable. The question for the rest of 2026 is whether that momentum holds as Xi-Trump diplomacy shapes the investment landscape in the world’s two largest economies.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.