A short film promoting China is shown on the screens at the Times Square in New York. Photo: CFP

Editor's Note: When Chinese brands enter the overseas market, they have to adapt to international rules and the difficulties of the local market. Is it the right time for Chinese brands to set sail? How to overcome foreign consumers' doubts? At a forum held by the Global Times on January 14, representatives from government, research institutions, companies and foreign institutions in China discussed the issues involved.

Li Wuwei (Vice Chairman of 11th CPPCC National Committee )

Compared with famous international brands, Chinese brands still lag behind in many aspects such as brand value, market share, and technology. How to create a high-quality image and rapidly change the impression of worldwide consumers that products made in China are "cheap but poor quality" has become one of the most difficult problems for Chinese entrepreneurs.

In fact, a dilemma in the internationalization process of Chinese brands is the lack of international talent. What we are facing is that our home-trained talent lacks international experience, but if introducing external talent, enterprises cannot trust them completely. Therefore, the problem of talent has become a big obstacle for overseas expansion of our brands.

Zhang Wenkui (Deputy Director of Enterprise Research Institute, Development Research Center of the State Council)

In the list of the world's top 500 brands in 2010, the US ranks the first with 237 brands. The second is France with 47 brands. China ranks the seventh with 17 brands in the list.

It can be said that brands correspond with national economic strength to some extent. The US economy is the strongest with a total volume of $15 trillion and nearly half of top 500 brands.

However, although China is already reportedly the world's second largest economy, it only has 17 global brands.

Moreover, among these brands, the first is CCTV, the second is China Mobile, and the third is Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

Strictly speaking, these brands are actually not enterprise brands with high product or service quality. Instead, their appeal is backed by the country. There-fore, the listed 17 national brands are not really powerful.