Abstract
Chinese manufacturing companies are facing challenges under severe global competition and wage rising in domestic market. They have to transform their organizations from low cost operation to higher quality and the more advanced technologies. Through the interview at Geely Automobile in Hang Zhou, China, we could identify a series of efforts for their transformation. The company executed strategic change in 2007 and quality management improvement in 2010. It has formulated a new corporate vision and strategy to provide the higher value to the customer, without participating into the cost competition in the market. In order to realize the strategy, the company has begun technical improvement instead of mimicking other companies' products. It started to focus on in-house R&D, learning from world-top class company. M&A with Volvo is considered to be a typical learning example. As for quality management, the company aggressively brought competitors' management essence into it, such as Toyota Production System. To facilitate such transformation, Mr. Li, the founder of Geely, played an essential leadership with foresight and logicality after all. Geely's transformation is not yet popular for all Chinese manufacturing companies, but some companies have already begun such a commitment to strategic change or quality improvement. However, our research is exploratory and we are not sure how much the spirit of quality management and improvement is penetrated in the actual workers.
