Geely went from fridge parts to China's first private carmaker in a decade
Li Shufu borrowed money from his family in 1986 to make refrigerator parts. Eleven years later his company, Geely, became the first privately owned carmaker in China. Its first attempt at a car was a one-off Mercedes lookalike built from spare parts, meant to prove a Chinese firm could make luxury cars.
The name Geely is a phonetic rendering of Jili, meaning auspicious. After fridges, the company moved into motorcycles in 1994 by buying a state firm and produced China's first scooter. The 1996 Geely Number 01 was a single prototype copying the Mercedes-Benz E-Class, sitting on a chassis borrowed from a Hongqi sedan that was itself based on the Audi 100. The first production car, the Haoqing, resembled a Daihatsu Charade and used a Daihatsu three-cylinder engine; it rolled off the line in Linhai on 8 August 1998. Yet Geely had no national production licence until November 2001, so mass production waited until 2002.
Early models showed some cheek. One was called King Kong, and another, the Uliou, was a pun meaning better than two rival small cars. The company also drew criticism; a 2012 Reuters report described how an engineering partner reverse engineered a Toyota Aygo in 2005 to develop the similar Geely LC. After a market slump in 2003, Geely invested heavily in its own research, and in 2007 to 2008 it pledged in its Ningbo Declaration to compete on technology, quality and service rather than price. It began making its own turbocharged engines in 2008.
Exports grew quickly, starting with kits for assembly in Ukraine in 2007; by 2012 Geely was China's second-largest car exporter, shipping 100,300 vehicles. After sagging sales around 2013, it merged several sub-brands into one Geely brand in 2014 and hired former Volvo designer Peter Horbury. His Borui sedan opened what Li Shufu calls the 3.0 era of intelligence, following eras of machinery and electronics. In 2016 it launched Lynk & Co in Berlin, positioned between Geely and Volvo.
Today Geely Auto is listed in Hong Kong and is the largest unit of its parent group, producing over 2.17 million of the group's 3.33 million vehicles in 2024, around 888,000 of them plug-in hybrids or fully electric. It also owns stakes in Zeekr, Lynk & Co and Malaysia's Proton.
Source: Geely Auto
