BMW AG 
Users accused the Munich-based car manufacturer of discrimination. Stand employees had preferred foreigners to Chinese visitors. Mini apologized for the incident and announced that it would train its stand staff better.
BWM had distributed free ice cream at the Mini stand. A video showed two Chinese visitors being turned away on the grounds that they had run out of ice cream. A short time later, however, a Western visitor received another portion. The keyword "BMW Mini" subsequently ranked second in searches on Weibo with more than 93 million clicks; many users posted negative comments about the incident, which, according to local media, took place on Wednesday.
A person familiar with the incident said that 300 portions of ice cream had been reserved for visitors at the stand. This ice cream had run out by the time the incident occurred. The western visitor was a BMW employee. The stand employees were not regular BMW employees, but had only been recruited as temporary workers for the trade fair.
In recent years, Chinese consumers have repeatedly reacted sensitively to the behavior of foreign and domestic companies. Some of these protests started as shitstorms on social networks and later led to boycotts. In 2019, this affected Dolce & Gabbana: the luxury fashion label recorded weaker business after stars and users pilloried an advertising campaign on social networks as racist. The Italian company apologized and spoke of a "cultural misunderstanding". The decision not to use cotton from the Uyghur province of Xinjiang resulted in a boycott by Chinese customers for many Western fashion manufacturers, including Adidas, Nike and Puma. Influencers had called for the buyers' strike.
(Report by Brenda Goh, Qiaoyi Li, Ethan Wang and Christina Amann, edited by Hans Seidenstücker. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at Berlin.Newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or Frankfurt.Newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets)
