Rainbow redefines the future of shopping

At 10:30 on a Saturday morning, the Rainbow Shopping Mall in Shenzhen’s Bao’an District is already alive with weekend energy. In the space 3.0 supermarket, a young office worker heads straight for the yogurt and oat crisps she wants, guided by an AI shopping assistant. She opens the Rainbow app, scans the QR codes, and pays without waiting in line. Later, in the department store, she chooses a pair of sneakers, snaps a photo of her receipt for loyalty points, and within seconds uses those points for a parking discount as she leaves.

Sp@ce 3.0 supermarket in Shenzhen Baoan Tianhong Shopping Center

The entire process is fast, seamless, and designed around the customer. Behind the scenes, Rainbow’s smart retail features also keep operations humming. In the fruit section, promotions for Xinjiang plums and Mengyin peaches are activated instantly via the electronic shelf label system. In the smart warehouse, staff equipped with a mobile picking app have cut order-picking time from over 30 minutes to just eight minutes. On a giant dashboard, managers watch live sales updates, logistics movements, product rankings, and customer feedback in real time, ready to make quick operational decisions.

It’s a vivid example of how Rainbow has been reshaping the retail experience. Over more than a decade of digital transformation, the company has made breakthroughs in customer service, operational efficiency, and supply chain management. By pairing a robust network with its own AI model, Rainbow has set new benchmarks for the industry.

New store deployment: from weeks to minutes

Opening a new store is a stress test for any retailer, and network setup has traditionally been a bottleneck. A seasoned regional manager recalls preparing for openings with “backup Wi-Fi for unexpected delays, paper receipts in case of system crashes, and even manual inventory tracking in Excel.” Conventional deployments required skilled engineers to configure VPN tunnels and optimize routing policies on-site—a process that could take several days for each store. For chains opening multiple locations, rollouts could drag on for months, with bandwidth utilization often stuck below 60%.

Rainbow solved this with Huawei’s SD-WAN networking and iMaster NCE-Campus solutions. Using “zero-configuration” technology, new store networks can now be deployed in 10 minutes via simple email instructions. Bandwidth utilization has jumped to 90%, and device commissioning no longer ties up the IT team for hours. “Now we can complete deployments smoothly, even with several openings at once,” says a company insider.

Seamless omni-channel operations

Once a store is online, the next challenge is handling orders (online and off) during peak traffic. Rainbow’s unified omni-channel system links all sales channels through its physical stores. On busy weekends, some locations attract over 100,000 visitors, making network stability crucial for everything from cash registers to logistics dispatch.

For logistics, real-time communication between headquarters and loading crews ensures freight vehicles depart on schedule. Any delays in this chain can lead to idle trucks and reduced efficiency. Similarly, warehouse stock checks must be fast and accurate, especially during high-volume periods.

Huawei’s intelligent uplink selection and dynamic optimization allocate resources where they matter most. Mission-critical applications like point-of-sale systems run on dedicated multi-service transport networks, while other services use the Internet with emergency backup links. This ensures smooth transactions and on-time deliveries, even under heavy loads.

Rainbow also uses a network “digital map” to visualize traffic from over 51 million digital users across 130 sites. IT teams can see network quality for each store and each key application, pinpointing and resolving faults before they cause disruption. This capability is vital for Rainbow’s more than 200 supermarkets, shopping centers, and department stores in seven major regions, where traditional site maintenance would be too slow and labor-intensive.

AI as the smart brain

If SD-WAN is Rainbow’s “capillaries,” its AI model—Ling Zhi Lark—is the “brain.” Built on Huawei Cloud computing power and later integrated with DeepSeek for localized deployment, Lark now drives precision marketing, customer service, sales guidance, product analysis, and operational decision-making.

In the past, retail decisions were often made on the basis of gut instinct. Marketing campaigns were shaped by experience, product selections were based on subjective judgment, and store performance depended heavily on staff skills. Data played a limited role.

Lark has changed all of that, delivering AI-driven customer analysis that predicts both initial and repeat purchases. Shoppers in a hurry get targeted recommendations; bargain-hunters see the most relevant discounts.

Post-sales, AI gathers feedback from multiple public and private channels, analyzing key dimensions like product freshness, store management, and variety. Within two minutes, it generates recommendations for improvement and sends them to the right teams. This has cut work order processing times in half and lifted customer satisfaction to 98%.

AI-powered marketing and design

Eye-catching marketing materials are essential but time-consuming to produce. Rainbow’s Lark AI model transforms this process, offering tools for image cutout, virtual modeling, product enhancement, and mass production of campaign assets. Its extensive template library supports both online and offline campaigns. Poster creation time has dropped from three hours to 10 minutes, boosting resource-sharing efficiency by 40% and design productivity by 30%. During last year’s Double 11 shopping festival, Rainbow’s design team used AI to produce over 8,000 targeted marketing assets in just hours—matching customer interests with unprecedented precision.

Beyond marketing, Lark supports a comprehensive management system that merges brand insights with location analytics. This allows Rainbow to place the right brands in the right malls, boosting conversion rates and overall sales. The result is a retail operation where strategic decisions are based on solid data rather than guesswork.

Leading smart retail’s next wave

Since its founding in 1984, Rainbow has grown into one of China’s largest chain retailers. Huawei has been a key partner, providing the cloud-network-security integration that links Rainbow’s stores nationwide with its headquarters in Shanghai. In 2024, Rainbow’s intelligent network generated a gross merchandise volume of about CNY5.44 billion from online sales and digital services alone.

The Huawei Cloud-powered Lark AI model—the retail industry’s first large language model—has quickly become a benchmark for innovation, already being adopted by other retailers. For Chairman Xiao Zhanglin, digital technology is “a transformative engine reshaping retail, elevating quality, and boosting efficiency.”

Over four decades, Rainbow has seized opportunities and reinvented itself amid shifting tides. With its powerful network and AI brain, it is now setting the pace for a smarter retail future.