Matthieu David is the founder and CEO of Daxue Consulting, a China-focused market research and strategy consulting firm. Based in China since 2008, he has spent close to twenty years advising companies and organizations in one of the world’s largest, fastest-changing and most complex markets.
Over the course of his career in China, Matthieu has contributed to more than 400 client engagements, working on market entry, consumer research, competitive intelligence, route-to-market, branding and growth strategy. His experience spans industries including beauty and cosmetics, luxury and fashion, food and beverage, healthcare, automotive and technology, as well as assignments involving public institutions and government-related organizations.
Matthieu is also President of ESSEC Alumni China, a community of around 2,000 alumni across the country. He is actively involved in keeping this community connected and engaged, while strengthening its ties with business leaders, economic stakeholders and French institutions in China.
His perspective on China has also made him a regular source for international media. Matthieu has been interviewed or quoted by publications and broadcasters including the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Forbes, Le Monde and CNA, among others, on subjects ranging from Chinese consumer behaviour and retail transformation to food and beverage, foreign brands and market-entry strategy.
Matthieu’s understanding of the Chinese market was shaped by operating businesses in China before advising others on how to do so.
Before building Daxue Consulting, he managed D’Elysée, a Beijing-based company inspired by the European experience-gift model pioneered by companies such as Smartbox and Wonderbox. The business grew to a team of around a dozen people.
That experience exposed him directly to challenges that would later become central to Daxue Consulting’s work: fragmented distribution networks, differences between national and local market structures, rapidly evolving consumer behaviour, the need to adapt an offer to local market conditions, and the difficulty of obtaining reliable information on which management teams could confidently base their decisions.
It also led to a conviction that has shaped Daxue Consulting ever since: in China, information has little strategic value unless it is current, verified, contextualized and connected to a management decision.
This was particularly important in a market changing quickly enough to make conventional assumptions obsolete within a relatively short period.
As Matthieu later summarized his experience of entrepreneurship in China in an interview with ESSEC Alumni: “The world was not flat.” The point was not simply cultural. Companies entering China and developing their businesses in the country encountered real differences in regulation, distribution, digital ecosystems, consumer behaviour and organizational structures. Understanding those differences required investigation on the ground rather than the mechanical application of models developed elsewhere.
The name Daxue (大学) means “university” in modern Chinese and also refers to The Great Learning, one of the classical texts associated with the Confucian tradition.
The name reflects the intellectual principle on which the firm was built: important business decisions should begin with disciplined investigation and learning.
From its beginnings, Daxue Consulting has therefore sought to combine primary research, data, fieldwork, local expertise and strategic analysis rather than rely primarily on received wisdom about China.
Its role is not simply to accumulate information. It is to turn evidence into decisions.
This philosophy can be summarized in three steps: investigate, document, decide.
Matthieu studied at ESSEC Business School, where he completed the Grande École program after attending the French classes préparatoires at Lycée Thiers in Marseille. Alongside his management studies, he also pursued university studies in law.
He subsequently studied at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, one of China’s leading business schools, where his management education was combined with immersion in the Chinese business environment and the study of Mandarin.
Peking University later invited him back to Guanghua as a guest lecturer on Doing Business in China, where he shared lessons drawn from his experience launching and operating companies in the country.
His professional experience before Daxue Consulting also included finance in Hong Kong and consulting in Paris, giving him experience across European and Asian business environments before he focused his career on China.
Matthieu is fluent in French, English and Mandarin Chinese.
Matthieu’s work has covered both consumer-facing and industrial questions, with particularly extensive experience in beauty (Fillmed, Elizabeth Arden and L’Oréal), fashion and luxury (Ganni, Tory Burch and Ami Paris), and food and beverage (Savencia and Ferrero).
He has also worked on projects involving healthcare companies including Servier and Sanofi, as well as companies and organizations operating in automotive, technology—including Twitter and MacPaw—and the public sector.
What distinguishes this experience is its continuity.
Rather than observing China through isolated assignments, Matthieu has been building companies, conducting research and advising management teams in the country through successive transformations of the Chinese economy: the rise of e-commerce, the mobile and social-commerce revolution, the expansion of domestic brands, the premiumization of consumption, COVID-era disruption, and the increasingly sophisticated competition between Chinese and international companies.
That long-term perspective has repeatedly been sought by international media.
When the Financial Times examined the supply-chain consequences of a major food-safety incident affecting international restaurant chains in China, it turned to Matthieu for analysis of the difficulty of replacing suppliers capable of operating at sufficient scale.
Reuters consulted him on the development of China’s dairy and cheese market, quoting his assessment: “The market is wide open.”
Forbes sought his analysis of the prospects for international food-service brands outside China’s most competitive cities, while Le Monde consulted him to explain why traditional foreign retailers were struggling to adapt their asset-heavy models to the much faster rhythm of Chinese e-commerce.
These interventions reflect the same approach that underpins Daxue Consulting’s work: understanding not only what is happening in China, but the mechanisms behind it and the consequences for business decisions.
Matthieu is also the creator and host of China Paradigm, a podcast through which he interviewed around 120 entrepreneurs and business leaders in China. The objective was to build a library of first-hand knowledge and experience that could help others better understand the realities of building and developing a company in China.
Under Matthieu’s leadership, Daxue Consulting has developed around a simple premise: market research should not end with a report.
Research becomes valuable when management can use it to choose between alternatives: whether to enter a market, how to position a product, which consumers to target, how to structure distribution, what price to charge, which competitors matter, and where to allocate resources. Effective strategies must emerge from the details of the research rather than being imposed on the evidence after the fact.
This is why Daxue Consulting combines market research with strategy rather than treating the two as separate disciplines.
Matthieu’s work sits at that intersection: connecting consumer evidence, competitive intelligence, market data and field research with concrete management decisions.
After close to twenty years living and working in China, his objective remains essentially the same as when Daxue Consulting was created: replace assumptions about China with evidence—and turn that evidence into better decisions.
Matthieu David has been quoted, interviewed or featured by international and French media including the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Forbes, Le Monde, Yahoo Finance, TechNode, Tech in Asia and BFM, among others.
He has also been invited to share his experience by Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management and other business and professional organizations.
Today, he continues to lead Daxue Consulting while contributing to discussions on Chinese consumers, market entry, international brands, distribution, innovation and the transformation of China’s business environment.
