China: Why Is Aldi Being Hyped to the Skies?
Discount Retail Chain Aldi is causing every major retail giant in China to lose sleep.
Aldi doesn’t offer paid memberships, doesn’t run flashy ads, and refrains from making a big splash on the internet. How does it succeed? A bottle of milk for 7.2 yuan, and a fresh-baked pastry for 1.9 yuan. Right in tier-1 cities, it delivers everyday products at genuinely affordable prices. Recently, it went viral—not only because it sells grocery staples at bargain prices, but also because it has started offering budget alternatives to high-end beauty products.
A primer touted as a "dupe for Clé de Peau Beauté (CPB)" sells for just 24.9 yuan, whereas the authentic Clé de Peau Beauté (CPB) version costs 540 yuan. And therein lies the issue: the two products look virtually copy-pasted.
What happened next? Shiseido took Aldi to court. But something even more miraculous occurred: as soon as news of the lawsuit broke, that exact primer sold out completely, even surging to second place on the mini-program’s personal care bestseller list.
Discounter Aldi — a century-old German discount retail chain started "Sharpening the Blade" in Shanghai and now going for a Nationwide Expansion
Founded in Germany in 1913, Aldi now operates over 13,000 stores worldwide and stands as one of Europe’s largest discount supermarket chains. Its operational model is extreme: stores are small, spanning only about 1,000 square meters—a stark contrast to other mainstream supermarkets that often approach 20,000 square meters. Its product range is exceptionally lean, featuring only around 2,000 SKUs, which is less than a tenth of its competitors' offerings.
On Aldi's shelves, more than 90% of the products are its own "private label" brands. This means it doesn't need to negotiate with major third-party brands, eliminating entry fees and shelf-display charges altogether. All its profits stem strictly from selling goods.
Aldi entered China relatively late, opening its first store in Shanghai in 2019, after which it kept a low profile for six years. During those six years, Hema expanded rapidly from Shanghai to nearly 500 Hema Fresh stores, with its GMV surpassing 100 billion yuan; Sam's Club doubled its presence from twenty-some stores to nearly 70, accelerating its capture of middle-class wallets; RT-Mart struggled to transform its 500+ hypermarkets; and Yonghui wrestled with closures and store restructuring, shrinking significantly from its peak thousand-store scale.
Aldi, meanwhile, focused solely on meticulously refining its Shanghai operations without showing overt grand expansion ambitions. Many industry observers scoffed, viewing Aldi as painfully slow and largely invisible. But by 2025, the tide turned, and Aldi embarked on an aggressive expansion sprint.
In April 2025, Aldi stepped outside Shanghai, entering Suzhou and Wuxi. At the Wuxi flagship opening, crowds packed the shopping mall well in advance, forcing the store to open an hour earlier than its scheduled 8:00 AM launch. When four stores opened simultaneously in Nanjing, one recorded single-day sales of 1.38 million yuan, taking the top spot nationwide for single-store sales. By March 2026, Aldi’s total store count in China crossed the 100-mark. Their CEO in China announced plans to add another 50 stores within the year.
To date, Aldi operates more than 130 stores in China. Sites for the first batch of 11 stores in Hangzhou have already been finalized for a joint launch in early 2027: skipping single-store market trials to roll out 11 stores at once, blanketing the city immediately. As it turns out, Aldi wasn't slacking off over those six years—it was sharpening its blade.
Industry Copycats and Legal Controversies
Because Aldi successfully proved this business model in China, competitors quickly caught on and rushed into the arena. Hema rebranded its budget supermarket chain as "Chaohesuan NB" and opened up franchising in November 2025; by August 2026, its store network had already surpassed 500 locations—expanding at a pace far faster than Aldi. Meituan launched "Happy Monkey," expanding to 58 stores across 13 cities backed by Meituan's traffic and data ecosystems. JD.com entered the discount sector as well, leveraging its self-operated logistics and formidable procurement capabilities.
On a single street, three discount stores can sometimes be found less than a kilometer apart. Aldi is no longer competing against a single rival, but rather against the entire retail industry betting on the exact same track simultaneously.
In addition to market competition, Aldi is currently embroiled in legal battles. Shiseido recently sued the company, alleging that the exterior design of Aldi's LACURA-brand primer bears a high degree of similarity to CPB, constituting unfair competition; the court hearing is set for November this year.
This is not the first time. In 2025, Mondelez sued Aldi in the United States over alleged packaging infringement on Oreo, a cider brand sued it in the UK, and an infant snack brand sued it in Australia. Curiously, however, every lawsuit seems to bring Aldi another wave of viral popularity.
Mainstream online sentiment split into two camps: existing customers worried, "Will I still be able to buy this later?", while non-buyers were instantly intrigued, thinking, "It's this cheap? I'm going to try it." As a result, sales for the sued primer spiked instead of dropping, selling out across numerous stores.
The Extreme Efficiency Behind the Low Prices
Walking into an Aldi, your initial reaction might be a bit strange: why are there so few items? The shelves aren't luxurious; many products sit directly in their original shipping cartons, and some packaging looks suspiciously familiar.
The bottle of oolong tea on the shelf uses a blue-and-white color palette reminiscent of Suntory; the dark brown body-wash bottle looks a bit like Aesop; and that makeup primer—in a black tube with a gold cap, currently being sued by Shiseido—targets CPB in its design layout.
Aldi's packaging design is no accident; it is a calculated strategy. By leveraging the visual familiarity built up over decades of advertising by major brands, Aldi lets consumers recognize product types at a glance. This saves the time and cost of educating consumers while avoiding 200,000 to 300,000 yuan in new mold production fees.
Furthermore, 80% of Aldi’s suppliers in China are local. It bypasses distributors completely, signing long-term 3-to-5-year or even 20-year contracts directly with factories to lock in capacity on a non-returnable buy-out basis. Eliminating all middle layers allows every bit of saved cost to reflect directly on the price tags.
Moreover, by stocking only two to three thousand SKUs and offering just two or three options per category, Aldi consolidates sales volume across what would normally be spread over a dozen brands onto just one or two items. As procurement volume rises, unit costs plummet.
A typical store operates with only five or six cross-functional employees handling cashiering, restocking, and bakery duties alike. There are no service desks or fancy merchandising displays; products are sold right out of their transport boxes. This system of extreme efficiency is what Aldi spent a century perfecting in Germany.
A Changing Consumer Mindset
While this strategy carries a hint of "cunning shortcuts," why are consumers buying into it so eagerly? Because times have changed. Consumers have grown far more discerning, and the halo around luxury brands is fading. People are beginning to question: out of a 4,000-yuan cream, how much goes toward marketing and ad budgets? For a high-end designer bag, how many times over does the selling price exceed its actual manufacturing cost?
"Good enough is best" has emerged as a new consumer philosophy, and Aldi hit this node perfectly. From budget-conscious middle-class families to busy young professionals with no time to cook, to seniors strolling by for produce — Aldi caters seamlessly to them all.
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