As firms in many industries seek to enter new international markets to sustain their growth, they often find themselves in a strategic quandary. Product designs, marketing approaches, supply-chain management issues, and business strategies designed for one region of the world often require significant time and managerial effort to successfully reconfigure and adapt them to new markets. The evolution of customer demand, preferences, and buying patterns can vary markedly from onemarket to another. In fact, regional markets can exhibit profound differences even within the boundaries of a single nation. For example, in China, the sophisticated urban coastal mega-cities that line the Pacific shores teem with millions of customers willing to pay top dollar for foreignbranded goods. Yet, a few hundred miles inland, there are hundreds of millions of people who have yet to see a foreigner walk through their small city streets. Entry into a large foreign market generates considerable strategic opportunities as well as challenges for both multinational firms and domestic firms. Foreign markets often allow a multinational firm to introduce a new line of products designed specifically for that market, or to modify their existing products to better suit the tastes and needs of the targeted customers. These efforts can take considerable time and effort to yield success. Some firms may seek to establish a presence rapidly in a newmarket so as to capture firstmover advantages; others may move slowly in order to better understand the local subtleties and possible pitfalls of serving customers with very different preferences. Although firms in any given market compete with one another for customers, they paradoxically also become highly interdependent over time—in that they are impacted by a common set of underlying geographical factors and other macro-environmental conditions that shape the economics of competing in a given market. This article examines the fast-evolving competitive dynamics that are now redefining the brewing industry in one of the world’s largest markets—China. By examining the strategic approaches of domestic and multinational firms jockeying for market position in China, managers can better understand and act on some of the emerging Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 32–48, 2006 ISSN 0090-2616/$ – see frontmatter 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.orgdyn.2005.12.002 www.organizational-dynamics.com