Anta Sports vs Li-Ning: the gap that defines China's sportswear market

安踏体育 / Anta Sports closed 2025 with record revenue of 80.22bn yuan — up 13.3% year over year. According to an independent research institute, that keeps the company at roughly a 21.8% share of China's sportswear market. For scale: that's more than a fifth of the entire market held by one company in a country of 1.4 billion people.

The runner-up trails by almost 2.5x

李宁 / Li-Ning, the second-largest domestic player, posted 29.6bn yuan in revenue for 2025 and roughly a 9.4% market share. Both brands compete with Nike and Adidas in the same market, with a similar audience and similar price positioning — yet the gap between them is nearly 2.5x.

Where the gap comes from

The key difference is brand portfolio. Anta was the first Chinese sportswear company to build a multi-brand strategy under one roof, including the rights to FILA in China, plus aggregated distribution behind it. That gave it more than a second sales channel — it let the company cover several price segments at once, from mass-market to premium, without diluting the core Anta brand. Li-Ning has largely stayed a mono-brand company, betting on depth rather than portfolio breadth.

Market scale and what's next

China's entire sportswear market was valued at $84bn in 2025 and is projected to grow to $148bn by 2032 at an 8.43% CAGR. At that growth rate, the gap between Anta and Li-Ning doesn't close on its own — the company with the wider brand portfolio captures a disproportionate share of new demand, because it's already present in the segments new buyers are entering.

What you see on the ground

Chinese Brands That Conquered the World is a visit to production sites and showrooms of Chinese brands, where you see not just the finished collection but how the multi-brand architecture works from the inside: separate R&D teams, separate production lines for each brand in the portfolio.