Few car manufacturers have risen so far in such a short space of time as Geely. The Chinese brand’s name can be translated from Mandarin as ‘auspicious’ and ‘lucky’. Both are entirely appropriate terms for a company founded as recently as 1986 that is now breathing down the necks of the world’s top 10 car makers.  Its origins were understandably humble. China was a vastly different country in the early 1980s when founder Li Shufu graduated from university; a hard-line communist state where free enterprise was largely banned and the small number of cars were almost entirely imported. As late as 1985, China’s domestic manufacturers produced just 5200 cars, the entire market for passenger vehicles being around 100,000 a year.  Small beginnings Li didn’t start with cars. After making money by taking photographs for tourists, he established a small company in Zhejiang to make fridge parts, then complete units. Politics intervened: Geely missed out on a licence to sell fridges so diversified into motor scooters, quickly becoming one of China’s biggest makers. But what he really wanted to do was build cars.  The first four-wheeled Geely was a strange beast. It was built in around 1995 and was clearly inspired by the contemporary round-headlight W210 Mercedes E-Class, featuring a near-identical front end but sitting on the far shorter wheelbase of the First Automobile Works-built Audi 100. It was a one-off creation using fibreglass, but it won Li attention and people wanted to order something similar. Soon afterwards he bought a majority stake in a small truck company (which had the all-important production licence) and launched the Geely HQ, a Daihatsu Charade copy wearing a very Mercedes-like radiator grille, in 1998.  Geely expanded rapidly as China’s mobility revolution triggered a huge expansion in car ownership, but it was still a minnow compared with the country’s larger car makers – in 2003, total production was just 76,274 units. While other manufacturers were expanding through joint ventures with overseas firms, bringing expertise and helping to produce cars that Chinese buyers wanted, Li vowed to grow Geely differently, saying such arrangements created complacency and stifled innovation.  Joining the world stage The 2005 Frankfurt motor show was packed with premieres that fought for attention, the list of debutants including the Audi Q7, Porsche Cayman S, Mercedes-Benz R-Class, five-cylinder Ford Focus ST and Volkswagen Eos. It also marked Geely’s European debut, the company taking a small stand and introducing the little, lumpy CD coupé, surrounded by characters from the Beijing opera. This was just a year after Geely’s annual production had broken through the 100,000 barrier and the company’s products looked cheap and joyless to European eyes. (Build quality wasn’t great at the time either; in 2008, JD Power ranked Geely 36th and last among Chinese brands.)  But being the first independent Chinese car maker to attend an overseas show played well at home, making Geely look like more than just the regional manufacturer it pretty much was at the time. It was a lesson echoed in the later decision to launch the deliberately European LynkCo brand in China first. The company’s international outlook was growing, and it formed a joint venture with Manganese Bronze, then owners of the LTI taxi company, to make cars in Shanghai. The big league Outside China, only keen motor industry watchers were likely to have heard of Geely before late 2009. That changed when the company admitted it was in negotiations with Ford to buy Volvo. The sale concluded the following year, with parent company Zhejiang Geely Holding Group taking control. This means that Volvo Car Group is on the same level as Geely Auto within the corporate hierarchy, not subsidiary to it.  Despite recession-hit Ford’s enthusiasm to offload Volvo, Li had to work hard to be taken seriously as a bidder. Geely generated barely a sixth of Volvo’s revenue at the time, but it had major backing from Chinese banks and managed to land the Swedish marque for $1.8 billion, barely a quarter of what Ford had paid for it 11 years earlier.  Few industry watchers understood the logic behind the deal. Automotive mergers are normally between companies with significant overlap looking to reduce costs. Geely and Volvo had almost nothing obvious in common, and many predicted that attempts to merge operations would be disastrous. But Li didn’t want a merger, promising at the time that “Volvo is Volvo and Geely is Geely”. As it soon became clear, Geely had effectively purchased a hugely experienced European brand to become its own joint venture partner.  Swedish powerhouse  Geely’s gamble on Volvo would only work if the Swedish company’s fading fortunes could be turned around. The brand’s sales were sliding and it had been starved of investment during the last years of Ford ownership. A Volvo engineer admitted later that if a light bulb
Origin: Year of the underdog: Geely’s rise from obscurity to the top