Compared with 10 years ago, few people now describe Li Shufu as a "car madman". This is not because he is not as "crazy" as before, but because many statements and practices that were considered crazy before have finally become a reality.
In 1997, the policy had not yet opened the floodgates for private enterprises to build cars. Li Shufu’s dream of "building cars" was an idiotic dream to the world, but he did not give up. Five years later, in 2002, Li Shufu officially obtained the policy "birth certificate" and became the first person to build a private car. In 2002, when Li Shufu said at an internal meeting that he wanted to buy Volvo, even insiders thought he was "crazy". Eight years later, he officially married the proud "Nordic Princess" despite all difficulties.
Li Shufu once dreamed of "building a car like Mercedes-Benz", but he started from scratch technically. When he first entered the business, he had to be skilled and dismantle the Mercedes-Benz car he bought for millions of dollars to learn and imitate. Later, he became the largest shareholder of Daimler Automobile Group.
According to the first half financial report released by Geely Automobile Holdings Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Geely Automobile", 0175.HK) on August 22, the operating income of Geely Automobile in the first half of 2018 reached 53.71 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 36%; The net profit attributable to the parent company was 6.67 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 54%, making it the most profitable car company for its own brand.
At the same time, Geely Automobile sold 767,000 vehicles in the first half of the year, up 44% year-on-year, becoming the top three brands in the domestic market.
When he first entered the business, Li Shufu said that his biggest dream was to "let China cars travel all over the world, not let the cars of the world travel all over China". Everyone thinks that this is simply a distant fantasy. But at present, Geely Automobile has begun to enter ASEAN countries, and plans to enter mainstream markets such as Europe and the United States in the next step.
I’m not a car maniac.
Li Shufu’s classic sentence of "a car is just four wheels and a sofa" is widely known in the industry. At that time, this sentence caused a lot of criticism. Many years later, people are still willing to "bring up the past" to remember the past and talk about the leap-forward changes of Geely Automobile in the past 20 years.
But Li Shufu himself doesn’t like to mention this sentence very much. He has explained the background and reasons for saying this sentence on many occasions, and stressed that it is not appropriate to simply understand this sentence as "Li Shufu thinks building a car is very simple".
Before entering the automobile industry, he started his business five times, and the first bucket of gold in his life came from taking pictures of people. The older generation of Taizhou people still vaguely remember such a picture. In 1982, in Li Jiacun, luqiao district, Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, a boy wearing a straw hat was often seen on a worn-out bicycle. He walked around the streets to take pictures of others to make money, and promised not to like it or ask for money. At that time, when the monthly salary was no more than 50 yuan, Li Shufu earned 2,000 yuan a year, and he soon opened a photo studio with the money he earned. This was his first venture. That year, he was only 20 years old.
In the great wave of reform and opening up, Li Shufu boldly tried various market opportunities. From photo studio to refrigerator manufacturing, decorating materials and producing motorcycles. With a keen market sense and a down-to-earth attitude, Li Shufu can succeed almost every time he enters an industry. In 1989, the output value of his refrigerator factory has exceeded tens of millions of yuan. The output reaches 600 to 1000 units a day, and there are long queues of foreign trucks pulling goods. But the swarming imitators made him feel helpless and forced to move to a new industry.
Later, Li Shufu set his sights on the car. At that time, private enterprises have not been approved to enter the field of car making, and the players in the market are all state-owned enterprises. Cars are far from entering ordinary families. A Santana with a price of more than 200,000 yuan still needs to find a relationship to buy. But "in the United States, one year’s salary can buy two cars. In China, we can’t buy a car for ten years’ salary, so this car can’t be popularized. Li Shufu thought that if a car of about 50,000 yuan can be built, there must be a huge market space. At the same time, "I think automobile is a highly comprehensive and complicated business, and people can’t easily enter this industry and destroy the whole pattern". These two factors determined him to devote himself to the automobile industry.
Li Shufu, who was not yet in the water, was not very clear at that time how high the barriers in the automobile industry were and how big the challenges were. But like the previous five ventures, once he thought of it, he began to act. Some people laughed at him, and a private enterprise actually came to build a car. Li Shufu was unconvinced: "Isn’t a car just four wheels and a sofa?" When this was said, people even thought it was a joke. The name "car madman" spread slowly.
But he doesn’t care about the outside world’s views. "I study very hard, watch the news broadcast every day, see what Obama is saying, and see how the automobile industry changes every day." Later, he said more than once that the timing for Geely to enter the automobile industry is the best, "not one year earlier, not one year later". Facts have proved that this is also the case. After Geely, the market also experienced a "car-making fever" of private enterprises. Oaks, Midea and other enterprises all entered the automobile industry across the border, but they all failed.
Please give me a chance to fail.
Li Shufu was born with a flexible mind, and he couldn’t build it himself. He started with imitation and "built" the first Geely pride car by hammer and hand. What really makes him feel the pressure is that there is no "birth certificate". Li Shufu saved the country by curve, and finally successfully acquired a bus manufacturing enterprise in Deyang, Sichuan, and produced it with the acquired bus qualification.
Strictly speaking, this is not in line with the specification. Geely’s development can’t always rely on the edge of the ball. At that time, Li Shufu’s investment in the automobile industry had reached more than one billion. He joked that he had "put his life and life on the line", but he had no choice but to wait on how to get the production qualification. In 2001, China’s automobile industry policy changed from catalog management to announcement management. Li Shufu quickly reported the improved models of two new cars of Geely to the relevant state departments, hoping to enter the new issue of Announcement of Vehicle Manufacturers and Products.
He was full of expectations for the loosening of the policy, but the result disappointed him again. "When someone told Li Shufu that Geely was excluded from the catalogue on the day when the Announcement was published, he didn’t even have the courage to pick up the newspaper that published the Announcement himself," wrote a report in China Entrepreneur that year. But he still didn’t want to give up. At that time, a company in Zhejiang Province wanted to buy Geely, and the two sides talked back and forth several times. In the end, Li Shufu did not sell it. "Geely is someone who wants to buy it, but I will not give it. I would rather fail and I will not sell it." "Please give me a chance to fail," he said to Zeng Peiyan, then director of the State Planning Commission, who came to inspect. This sentence is still widely circulated today.
Wu Xiaobo, a financial writer, talks about the biggest difference between a businessman and an entrepreneur. He thinks that "being good at discovering and tapping market opportunities, acting according to the situation, pursuing profits, and carefully calculating risks and benefits" is a necessary condition for a successful businessman, while entrepreneurs will concentrate more on a certain cause, persevere, and sometimes even do whatever it takes.
It sounds like Li Shufu had some "entrepreneur" potential at that time. In people’s eyes, Li Shufu, a "car madman", began to gradually transition from that arrogant layman to a very persistent and fanatical "dream catcher".
Geely finally got the production qualification on the eve of China’s entry into WTO, and Li Shufu was overjoyed. However, people at that time were pessimistic about the prospect of Geely building cars.
Liu Chuanzhi, founder of Lenovo Group, said when he participated in the CCTV program: "I think Li Shufu has not got cheese now, but he has only got the right to look for cheese." He added that having the right to look for it and being able to get it are two different things, and it’s really not possible that there may be eighteen layers of hell behind it.
More than ten years later, in 2017, Geely acquired the equity of Daimler Group and became the largest shareholder of the other party. Liu Chuanzhi, who was worried about his future at that time, felt that Li Shufu bought Volvo and became a major shareholder of Mercedes-Benz, which was "a shame for the parents of China enterprises".
According to Liu Chuanzhi’s standards, in just 20 years’ pioneering course, Li Shufu’s face for the parents of China enterprises is far more than buying Volvo and taking shares in Mercedes-Benz. Starting from zero, it took only 20 years, and Geely’s annual sales volume has exceeded 1.2 million vehicles, with sales approaching 300 billion yuan, making it the first private company. Through overseas mergers and acquisitions and cooperation, Geely has owned many brands such as Geely, Volvo, Link, Taxi to London, Proton and Lotus. There are four core R&D institutions in the world, with more than 10,000 R&D personnel. Besides having production bases in Britain and Malaysia, there are also ATLAS factories in Belarus, and the products have been sold in ASEAN and Russia, and will enter the European market in 2020.
Not long ago, Fortune Global 500 was released. Among the six China car companies on the list, Geely is not only the only private enterprise, but also the one with the highest profit rate. On Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people, Li Shufu became the richest man in China’s automobile industry.
Many people want to know, what is the secret of Li Shufu’s success? In a sharing activity held by Geely in November 2013, Li Shufu summed up his years of experience as 24 words of "truth": "pursuing ideals, grasping business opportunities, persisting in faith, not afraid of failure, making decisions with heart, and gathering strength" as the secret of his success.
So, can you replicate success by knowing the secret? After Geely completed the acquisition of Volvo, a reporter asked Li Shufu a similar question, and he replied: How to copy it? There is only one Volvo and only one Geely.
Because of love, "snake swallows elephant"
Although overseas mergers and acquisitions are nothing new in the automobile industry, successful cases are rare. It is rare that there are successful mergers and acquisitions, and then they can be as successful as Volvo today in the process of operation.
When Geely acquired Volvo, the latter sold only 370,000 vehicles worldwide, and by this year, Volvo’s global sales are expected to exceed 600,000 vehicles. Under Ford, Volvo faced huge losses in 2008. After being acquired by Geely, Volvo achieved the best performance in history in the first half of this year, with an operating profit of SEK 7.8 billion, or about RMB 5.9 billion. In fact, before the acquisition of Volvo, Geely also acquired Australia’s DSI automatic transmission company and completed the acquisition of London taxi company, but these two mergers and acquisitions did not bring an immediate leap to Geely’s development, and the attention aroused in the industry was far less than that of the acquisition of Volvo.
Geely’s acquisition of Volvo attracted wide attention, not only because it was the biggest overseas acquisition of China car companies at that time, but also because it reflected Geely’s forbearance and persistence in defying all difficulties, as well as Li Shufu’s keen sense of smell and management wisdom with oriental philosophy.
In 2002, Geely just got the qualification of car production. Li Shufu first talked about wanting to buy Volvo at an internal meeting. At that time, Yang Jian, An Conghui and other senior executives attending the meeting were shocked. Although Volvo was "committed" to Ford at that time, Volvo enjoyed the same brand reputation as BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi all over the world throughout the 20th century. Geely, a little-known China enterprise, wants to buy a world-famous luxury brand, which is tantamount to a fable.
But Li Shufu asserted at that time that both GM and Ford would go bankrupt, and Ford would eventually choose to sell Volvo. The "wild talk" that was recognized at that time was fulfilled one by one a few years later. Li Shufu was ready when Ford planned to slim down and began to find buyers for its assets including Volvo under the strategy of "one Ford".
Since 2007, Geely has started internal transformation in order to gain more points in the process of merger and acquisition. At first, Ford didn’t pay attention to this pursuer whose strength was far from Volvo, but Li Shufu was not discouraged, and went to the door again and again, and finally gained the goodwill and trust of the other party. Although it was recognized by Ford, at that time, Volvo employees and trade unions were still full of distrust about whether Geely, a China enterprise with little influence in the international market, could lead Volvo to the bright future.
At the end of the acquisition preparation, Li Shufu met with the trade union for the first time. A trade union representative asked him in slightly hostile words, can you explain why you want to buy Volvo in one sentence? Li Shufu said loudly: "I love you!" At that time, I won the favor of the other party. Later, when Li Shufu was interviewed by CCTV, the host asked him, was this answer prepared before? Li Shufu replied: "I have always thought so."
Li Shufu loved Volvo so much that he cried when the merger marathon, which lasted for several years, finally came to an end. On March 28, 2010, in London, England, he bowed his head and signed the documents half a meter high on the table one by one. He lay motionless on the table. After a long time, when it was time to connect with Hangzhou Geely headquarters, Li Shufu looked up. Yin Daqing, then CFO of Geely Holding Group, found that Li Shufu’s tears fell like broken beads.
At the beginning of 2010, when Geely’s acquisition of Volvo entered the most difficult negotiation stage, Li Shufu said in an interview with China Entrepreneur: "If I can choose again, I would like to choose a more free career: journalist, lawyer, poet, writer, painter and singer."
Li Shufu had a special hobby in his early years — — Write poems and lyrics. He once wrote: "People are on a journey, who knows how many roads there are ahead, and the ups and downs have long been left in the depths of memory. The sunshine and starlight guide me in the morning and evening, and hope is not far away in spring, summer, autumn and winter. Don’t bow your head, don’t admit defeat, dry your tears and stick to it. I will suffer the pain, and I know the way to go. " This passage was later set to music and sung by the singer Chen Lin.
"release the tiger to the mountain"
At that time, some people described this transnational merger as "snake swallowing elephant", but Li Shufu disagreed: "A snake is a snake, and an elephant is an elephant. A snake can never swallow an elephant." He doesn’t want to describe the relationship between Geely and Volvo with father and son, but chooses appropriate "alienation". Geely is Geely and Volvo is Volvo.
In a speech after purchasing Volvo, he said: "Under the new ownership framework, we need scientific management, and the best way is to put Volvo ‘ Release the tiger to the mountain ’ 。” Anders gustafson, then general manager of Volvo Car Sweden, was deeply impressed by this sentence, which was not only vivid, but more importantly, "this kind of words can’t be said by western entrepreneurs". He felt that Li Shufu talked more about philosophy than business. "He is a businessman with internal driving force, not limited to making money."
Although at that time, Li Shufu and Volvo’s management had differences in product positioning and other fields, Li Shufu still followed his promise. "I just want the general direction to be right." He said more than once, "They (Volvo’s management team) know more than me. If they don’t know how to pretend to know, it’s dangerous." In an interview with the outside world, he also mentioned many times, "Volvo is a big tree. We don’t want to move it. We just water it and loosen the soil."
Li Shufu’s humility and equality in dealing with Volvo, the acquired brand, and the good development of the latter completely dispelled Volvo’s "defense" and wait-and-see attitude towards Geely, and the cooperation between the two sides also entered the deep water area. Shortly after Geely’s acquisition of Volvo, Geely established the European R&D Center (CEVT) in Gothenburg, where Volvo’s Swedish headquarters is located, to jointly develop the CMA modular platform architecture for Geely’s upcoming brand Link and Volvo.
Li Shufu’s thinking is very simple. Cars are an industry that wins by scale. Volvo has many very advanced technologies that Geely can use, and Geely can bring advantages to Volvo in terms of cost control and localized procurement. In addition, the two can also cooperate in production capacity, such as Volvo’s European factory, and the next step will be to produce new cars for Geely Link to help Geely enter the European market.
Li Shufu has a strong sense of crisis and cooperation. At the same time, he has childlike interests and fantasies. He seems to be interested in every forward-looking automobile technology, such as autonomous driving and flying cars. Earlier, Geely announced the formal acquisition of the American flying car company. Li Shufu stated that he wanted to make "the dream of cars flying in the sky come true". At that time, some people laughed at him, but now Geely announced that its flying cars will be listed in 2019. He said that he wanted to build a car that was not available in the world. "You sit here, the car will come automatically; When you say go home, the car will automatically take you back … …”
He has predicted many times on different occasions that there may be only two or three traditional car companies left in the future. Geely wants to be not only a survivor, but also a great company. Whether it is the acquisition of Volvo, or Proton and its shareholding in Volvo Group and Daimler, the starting point is win-win cooperation. "In fact, we are under great pressure now, which is even greater than before. The automobile industry is undergoing changes, and what changes this change will bring to the automobile industry is still unknown. " He said. Therefore, Geely hopes to accelerate its pace in the field of new technologies and business models through the mode of "integrating Lian Heng".
"It is impossible to have a great car company in such a huge market as China." Lin Jie, vice president of Geely Group and general manager of the sales company, said that this has always been the view of the chairman (Li Shufu). His dream is that Geely will become such a great car company, not only hoping to enter the same camp with Volkswagen and Toyota in sales volume, but also becoming a "respected enterprise".
After 20 years in the business, with the tempering and tempering on the road of chasing dreams, Li Shufu has continuously gathered his edge and become more and more low-key. After purchasing Volvo, Swedish culture changed him. In an interview with CCTV, he said: "No matter how rich they are, they travel in economy class, and I don’t fly in business class now."
Wu Xiaobo once described Li Shufu like this: "His low-key, humble, and even a little polite and shy once gave me the illusion that I had met a ‘ Fake Li Shufu ’ . At the beginning, in the eyes of the media, it was a bit arrogant, paranoid, and even ‘ Acting talent ’ The car madman has disappeared; Standing in front of you is an automobile expert who talks about automobile manufacturing and can talk about Kan Kan from safety technology, green energy saving to car networking and intelligence. "
On the way from grassroots to international entrepreneurs, Li Shufu slowly cultivated. The era of "car madman" has passed. At present, he is keeping a low profile on the road of "dreaming".
