Over the past decade, Asian companies have been launching accelerated and wide-ranging digital transformation initiatives. This has enabled some of them to become leading national and even international players, as well as digital pioneers in their respective industries. This case examines the successful digital transformation undertaken by the Chinese company Midea, one of the world's leading home appliance manufacturers. By digitally transforming the company, Midea improved its financial performance and reshaped its business on a wider scale. While many cases that address digital transformation focus on the early phases of the process, Midea's case illustrates a successfully completed digital business transformation. This allows participants to have an overview of the entire digital transformation journey and see what the potential outcomes might be.

The case illustrates how Ping An can anticipate digital trends such as cloud computing and evolve from its core business to expand to new areas. Ping An began by selling property and casualty insurance but soon expanded to banking and financial services. The firm then invested heavily in I.T. development in order to take part in the Internet economy, focusing on five verticals: financial services, healthcare, automobiles, real estate and smart cities. In the five verticals, Ping An incubated 11 independent technology affiliates that dwarfed a valuation of $70 billion. By 2020, 3 companies were publicly traded as independent entities. Ping An was no longer a financial institution, instead, it had become a "finance + technology" and a "finance + ecosystem" company. While so many financial institutions and other traditional businesses always talk about digitization and transformation, but the progress is pretty slow. Ping An is in a very different place. The Ping An case is interesting both from a Chinese and a global perspective. As a firmly rooted Chinese firm, Ping An embodies the rise of a traditional company that learned to harness new technologies and compete with China's pure technology players. From a global perspective, Ping An offers lessons in how to develop an ecosystem of technology affiliates: the firm has developed a set of best practices for incubating, funding and collaborating with spin-offs.

While Ping An is so successful to transform and reinvent itself to a tech giant, it discovered the demand of small and medium sized financial institutions to deploy technology. In December 2015, Ping An set up OneConnect, a fintech spinoff, to export its internal technology and repackage them as services to other banks and insurance companies in China. Case (B) is about how Ping An incubated OneConnect and development of OneConnect. OneConnect is in an expansion phase, growing from its Chinese client base to offer its cloud-based services across Asia. At the beginning it relied very much on Ping An in terms of technology, people and other resources, and became more and more independently later on. OneConnect turned out to be a unicorn and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2019.

Case (C) is about Autohome, which is the only unicorn Ping An acquired, rather than built from the ground up. After acquisition by Ping An, Autohome was transformed form a pure automobile website to develop four key offerings - content, transaction, finance, and lifestyle - all powered by AI, big data, and cloud technology. After the acquisition, in the span of three and a half years, Autohome's stock price quadrupled.

This case was written in 2019, 10 years after Xuzhou Construction Machinery Group Co. Ltd. (XCMG) initiated its SAP ERP project in 2009. The digital transformation of XCMG has been so fast, that within less than 10 years, it developed from this internal IT project to a digital platform that provides services to many external enterprises. This case is to discover the factors that enabled this rapid digital business transformation. The case study shows the digital transformation of XCMG, the leading construction equipment manufacturing company in China. Established in 1943, before the establishment of the People's Republic of China, for past over 66 years, XCMG was a traditional manufacturing company, and enjoyed the dividends of the China's economic development. XCMG was so successful in its manufacture b2b business not only domestically, but also internationally, by learning from oversee companies and continuous innovating. Until recently, China's economic development slowed down, and the China-US trade friction emerged, however, XCMG had already prepared for this situation, and started its digital transformation 10 years ago.