After a memorable start to the season in Melbourne, Formula 1 rolls onto Shanghai for the second round of 2025 – a perfect chance for all of the Chinese partners and sponsors to roll out the red carpet and showcase their respective businesses to the ever-increasing global audience.
All three of them, that is.
F1 currently races in Japan, China and Singapore and CEO Stefano Domenicali held talks this week looking at the possibility of introducing a street race around the Thai capital, Bangkok.
Japan has the most partners involved in the series, the majority stemming from the automotive sector, whereas China – which boasts the second-largest economy in the world behind the United States – has links to just two teams.
Social media giant TikTok is the official creator partner of Aston Martin while SenseTime is Sauber’s AI technology partner – and that is it.
The waters are muddied somewhat by the opaque ownership of some cryptocurrency partners in the championship, with a number initially launched in China but having since relocated due to essentially being banned in the country.
Politics, too – barring a few major examples – are often put to one side when it comes to sports partnerships that will make money.
There were no new Chinese-based partners announced ahead of the 2025 season, although Lenovo came on board as an official partner of F1 itself last year.
Yili, a dairy products producer was a partner of Sauber until the end of last year, while Ferrari’s deal with Riva Yachts also expired in 2024.
Yili and SenseTime being part of the Sauber stable was no doubt tied to the fact Zhou Guanyu, the first full-time Chinese driver in F1, was racing for the team at the time the deals were struck.
Zhou, now a reserve driver at Ferrari, was signed by the then-Alfa Romeo squad in 2022.
His boss at Ferrari, Frederic Vasseur, was the Alfa Romeo team principal who brought Zhou into F1, labelling those who suggested the signing was made first and foremost for commercial reasons as “stupid”.
Speaking to Autosport in Zhou’s debut season, however, Vasseur did concede it had been “difficult” to tap into the Chinese market and attract backing from the region despite having Zhou in the car.
Vasseur said it was “starting to work”, yet three years on, the number of Chinese partners in F1 has actually dropped – despite the continued growth of the championship around the world.
China has been a part of that increase itself with over 150million fans and over 1million new social media followers across the Chinese platforms, bringing the total to 4.3million.
F1’s own fan segmentation found that over half of fans in the country started following the series in the past four years, while they are younger than the average sports supporters in China and more diverse – with a 50% female demographic.
As of 2023, statista.com reported that approximately 99.79% of China’s population had access to television, well over a billion individuals – and F1 has started getting more of those eyes onto its product.
For 2024, television audiences in China were up over a third while the return of the Chinese Grand Prix for the first time in five years obviously led to an uptick in numbers across the board.
Audiences for the 2024 race were up over 50% compared to those who tuned in to watch Lewis Hamilton lead home a Mercedes 1-2 in 2019, and such figures have led to Tencent signing a new rights deal.
The multimedia giant, which owns WeChat among other significant Chinese technology brands, has signed a multi-year renewal until 2027 to cover every F1 race, as well as F1 Academy – which launches its 2025 season in Shanghai this weekend.
With seven of the 25 most profitable companies in the world at present based in China, the money is there, while the aforementioned growth in fan engagement means the opportunities for exposure are also increasing.
So why are there so few Chinese brands associated with F1?
“Could you name three Chinese brands? That is the key point,” Matthew Marsh, an F1 sponsorship broker who covers the Asian market, told Autosport.
“How many brands are there that we know, that are Chinese and internationally recognised, not very many.
“Compared to Japan or even South Korea, which is a much smaller country than China, but we know Samsung, Kia and Hankook and so on. China hasn’t produced international brands, why would we expect there to be more than two or three in Formula 1?
“Some of the brands we have heard of tend not to do brand building and, if they do, they spend money on the partnership because they think it is what they should be doing, not on activating the partnership.
“I think the key part here is that the leadership of Chinese companies don't fully subscribe to the value of brand as we see it.
“International brands and mature companies see the value of building a brand because it allows you to build margin, and that's what Apple has done, right?
“Their products aren't any better, apparently, than Samsung's, but they can command a much bigger margin because of the value of the brand.
“That's not how Chinese companies operate. They're much more interested in performance marketing than they are about brand marketing. If I talk to Chinese leaders about sponsorship, which I often do, they're very interested in the things that they think will drive an immediate ROI [return on investment].
“It's as if they're buying a commodity. They're buying coal or they're buying rice or bolts. That, of course, isn't the way it works in marketing because the whole point of marketing, to some degree, is that what you're buying is a brand.
“You're buying an association with a Formula 1 team or with Formula 1, which in itself has brand value, and thus there's margin. It's not a commodity. I think that's the critical part, is that they don't subscribe to it for the way their business is today.”
Just hosting a grand prix, Marsh adds, is not a compelling reason for Chinese brands to alter their respective thought processes when it comes to marketing.
“There's no governmental pressure around Formula 1,” he said. “Yes, Shanghai has a grand prix. That's much more of a local, regional government initiative for Shanghai than it is for China.
“China's all about, and has been for decades, the Olympic Games and then more recently soccer because they want to host the World Cup as part of the soft power of hosting huge international sporting events.
“You see brands, Hisense, one that I worked with in Formula 1 and NASCAR in the past, then they got into football. I always think they got told to do football. They've sponsored UEFA and FIFA for many cycles now.”
Could the tide change in the future and what would open F1 up as a viable market for Chinese brands looking to build an international reputation?
“It wouldn’t take a massive change to turn this on its head,” added Marsh. “If Formula 1 became the sport, they would become part of it – but at the moment the combination hasn’t become exciting.
“It could if Formula 1 became bigger in China, if there was another Chinese driver who came and stayed in the sport or through another Drive to Survive type initiative.
“The initiatives that have built Formula 1 in certain countries haven't worked in East Asia. The Netflix penetration in Japan is only 25%, whereas it's 60% in the UK and 50% in the US – it is zero in China. No one sees Netflix, so the number of people that have seen Drive to Survive is very minimal.”
