More than a decade before this month’s launch of a new trail-running store in Chamonix, Baggio Zhong’s international ambitions were already set in motion. After a skiing accident in China that left the founder of Chinese outerwear group Kailas paralysed from the waist down, Zhong was released from hospital in February 2014. In July that year, he went to a trade fair in Europe to display his products on the continent for the first time. The Guangzhou-based company, under its trail-running brand Kailas Fuga, is one of many Chinese retail businesses looking abroad.

The store in the alpine resort of Chamonix, France, is the first directly operated outlet for the brand outside China, although its products are already available in hundreds of shops in regions including Europe and North America. Anta, a Fujian-based apparel conglomerate that in 2019 bought Finnish group Amer Sports, earlier this year took a 29 per cent stake in Puma. Other Chinese groups are also extending their international presence in sectors from coffee to online apps.

Kailas, which expects to have revenues of $1.7bn this year, was founded in Guangzhou in 2003 as a mountaineering and climbing brand before moving into the trail-running segment. Zhong said his interest in mountain climbing at that time was helped by online forums: “Our society as a whole still didn’t know what mountaineering was.” Kailas’s overseas presence now centres on the Kailas Fuga trail-running brand, which accounts for about 30 of its 350 stores in mainland China.

Fuga shoes and equipment retail at premium prices — running vests with water-bottle holders cost about Rmb1,000 ($149). The brand also sponsors hundreds of trail races in China and internationally, including Spain’s Penyagolosa Trails event, held annually in April. Competitors in Europe include Swiss alpine sports brand Mammut and Sweden’s Haglöfs.