With more than $7 billion in annual sales and 13 overseas factories, including a South Carolina refrigerator plant and assembly lines in Italy, Pakistan and Iran, Haier is among the Chinese companies best-positioned to bid for global stature.[Photo: Haier]

Talking about China's home-made brands going to international market, appliance-maker Haier Group is an pioneer and successful model one cannot miss.

The USA has General Electric; Germany, Mercedes-Benz; Japan, Toyota. Fast-growing China, the 'world's factory', however, has yet to produce a comparable global competitor.

But with more than $7 billion in annual sales and 13 overseas factories, including a South Carolina refrigerator plant and assembly lines in Italy, Pakistan and Iran, Haier is among the Chinese companies best-positioned to bid for global stature.

The sprawling combine makes everything from cell phones and air conditioners to microwave ovens and electric razors. Haier ranks fifth in global appliance sales behind General Electric, Whirlpool, Electrolux and Siemens.

In the USA, Haier sells room air conditioners and laundry machines, as well as a series of "wine coolers," compact refrigerators for aspiring sommeliers that retail from $599 to $3,660.

Handicapped by decades of self-imposed isolation, China was generations behind Western rivals when it initiated economic reforms in 1979. Now, Chinese producers are seeking to leverage their domination of the world's largest market into global advantage. For companies such as Haier, China's World Trade Organization membership, which means increased competition at home from foreign companies, is a further spur to look abroad.

From a near-dead local refrigerator maker in the early 1980s, Haier grew into a conglomerate with more than 30,000 employees and 86 products.

The company's success lies in its unique strategies, which blends that of ancient Chinese philosophers and Western management gurus.

Constant Innovation

Leafing through the chronology of Haier, it is not difficult for us to come to realize that Haier's innovation is, in essence, the constant innovation of concepts.

The innovation of qualitative concept and of market concept directly accelerates the implementation of "name brand strategy". In 1984, the employees' conception was to divide products into grade-1, grade-2 and grade-3 and off-grade products, so long as products could be used, they could be delivered out of the factory and absolutely could be sold out. But Haier warned: "faulty products are waste products", so it wielded an iron hammer to smash all the 76 qualitatively faulty refrigerators, thus further enhancing workers' quality conception.