This post is a companion to the latest 3DLANES podcast episode.
Audi’s CEO, Gernot Dolner, went to an auto show in China in late May and came back with a declaration: the era of the global product is over. That’s a bold statement to make when you run one of the biggest automotive brands on the planet. It’s the kind of quote that’s either very prescient or a little late. After sitting with it for a bit, I think it might be both.
Before we talk about the death of something, we should agree on what we’re burying.
A global product is, simply, one product sold everywhere. There are minor adaptations on products, for example, England and Japan drive on the other side of the road, so the steering wheel moves. But the engineering and platform are the same, the manufacturing is the same, the marketing is largely the same. Brands love this for obvious reasons. Economies of scale: produce more of the same thing and the cost per unit goes down. Lower R&D spent: develop it once, sell it everywhere. Simpler supply chains: the same components, regardless of destination. Faster global launches. One rollout, not a dozen regional ones.
The examples are everywhere. Volkswagen’s MQB platform underpins the GTI, the Golf R, and the Porsche Macan. Toyota’s Corolla is the same car whether you’re buying it in Texas or Tokyo. The same Canon, Nikon, or Sony ships globally with maybe a firmware difference at most. The same Rolex is on wrists in Geneva, Dubai, and Los Angeles. This model made perfect sense for a long time, and there is a theory that explains exactly why.
Something I picked up recently in my MBA coursework is Raymond Vernon’s Product Life Cycle theory. It clicked immediately when I heard the Audi CEO’s quote. Vernon breaks the trajectory of any product into three stages:
| Stage | What’s Happening |
| Innovation | Product is created close to the home market; focus is on the technology and development |
| Growth | Product gains international traction; brand begins exporting globally |
| Maturity | Product becomes standardized; production efficiency and cost reduction take over |
German engineering. Japanese electronics. Swiss watchmaking. All of them innovated at home, grew internationally, and eventually became standardized enough to manufacture and sell anywhere. That maturity stage is what gave us the global product. The question now is what comes after.
The global product worked because the conditions supported it. Trade was convenient. China became the world’s manufacturer, efficient, scalable, and cheap at scale. Consumer aspirations were remarkably similar across regions. The internet made visibility universal. The same Porsche 911 was being dreamed about in Germany, California, and Japan at the exact same time. That’s the power of a truly global brand backed by a truly global product.
But several things are shifting at once, and they’re all pushing in the same direction.
China is no longer just the world’s manufacturer. It’s a market with its own expectations, and those expectations have diverged significantly from everywhere else. The EV market in China is the clearest example. The electric vehicles being produced and consumed there are, ahead of what we have access to here. They have better software, more competition, lower price points, different ecosystem entirely. Chinese consumers aren’t waiting for a global product to trickle down to them. They have their own trajectory now.
The Audi CEO saw this directly. Volkswagen and Audi have been selling global products into a market that has outgrown them, and the result is that they’re losing ground in China. Add to that the current trade friction, tariffs on both sides, tightening regulations, diverging software requirements, and the conditions that made the global product work are clearly under pressure. California has different emissions standards than the rest of the country. Europe gets station wagons that barely reach U.S. dealerships. Companies are actively avoiding electronic components from certain regions over surveillance concerns. The products are starting to split along the same fault lines as the politics.
To me, this is not entirely new.
Growing up in El Salvador, I remember the Volkswagen Gol, not Golf, G-O-L, a rounder, slightly different version of the Golf that you’d see all over Latin America in the late 90s and early 2000s. Volkswagen already knew how to adapt a product for a market when they needed to. So did every watch brand that has ever released a Middle Eastern edition with different numerals or a regional dial variant. Regional products have always existed at the margins. Audi is not discovering something that nobody knew.
What is different now is the scale of divergence. It is no longer about swapping numerals on a dial or shifting the steering wheel. China’s automotive market is operating on a fundamentally different trajectory, different tech stack, different consumer behavior, different priorities entirely. That is not a regional trim level. That is a different product.
So is Audi late? Maybe. But I think the more interesting question is whether they are reading the situation correctly, even if they’re reading it a few years behind the curve.
Something I wrote about on the Substack recently is the tension between commoditization and identity. The global product was, by design, a commodity: similar specs, similar performance, easy comparison, price competition. That model works until the markets you’re selling into stop wanting the same thing.
The alternative isn’t just localization. It’s products that carry enough identity. Be it through heritage, through emotional connection, through regional relevance, something that helps them resist commoditization. Porsche does this with racing heritage. Watch brands do it with craft and provenance. Cameras, interestingly, are somewhere in the middle. I don’t see the major camera brands fragmenting their lineup by region anytime soon, and that says something about where they are in Vernon’s cycle versus where cars are.
The question for Audi and Volkswagen is whether they can build that kind of identity across multiple regional markets simultaneously. That is a harder thing to engineer than a shared platform.
No, I do not think globalization is dead. And I’m not sure the Audi CEO actually believes that either, if we’re reading between the lines. What we are seeing looks more like an evolution than a funeral. Globalization has always moved in cycles, you expand, you optimize, friction builds, you pull back and localize, and then you find a new equilibrium somewhere.
The watch industry will still sell the same Omega to someone in Tokyo and someone in Toronto. The same sensor will still end up in cameras shipped worldwide. But cars, and probably pockets of tech, are finding that the gap between markets has grown too wide to cover with a single shared platform and a marketing rebrand.
The era of the pure global product may be past its peak. But that is not death. That is maturity running into its own limits and forcing something new. We will see what Audi and everyone else comes up with next.
Thank you for stopping by,
DL
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