买下沃尔沃的那个人交班了：他把公司交给了一个不姓李的人

On the seventeenth of August this year, Geely Auto issued a flatly worded announcement.

Founder Li Shufu was stepping down as chairman of the board and executive director.

The announcement is short, but what it deals with is a problem Chinese private companies generally cannot avoid and generally handle badly: succession.

To judge the weight of this, you first have to put Li Shufu back on a timeline.

He is sixty-three this year.

The company began in 1986, with no connection to cars at all.

First fridge parts, then fridges and freezers, then building decoration materials, then motorcycles.

The motorcycle stretch was profitable in the fullest sense.

People familiar with that period recall buyers driving to the factory gate and queuing for stock.

The company took in more cash each day than it could get into the bank, so the bank simply opened a service point next door.

In other words, before he decided to build cars, this business no longer required him to take any risk at all.

Li Shufu's personal wealth had already passed a hundred million.

So when he proposed building cars, a considerable number of people could not understand the decision.

Building cars needed money on an entirely different order, and the chance of failure was not small.

In 1997, he went ahead regardless.

What actually stood in his way was not money but the licence.

At the time, building cars required state approval, and Geely could not obtain that permit.

Without it, a car could be built but not sold.

He set out to persuade the official responsible, and left behind a line that has been quoted ever since.

He said: please give me one chance to fail.

In 2001, he got his ticket.

If you had to pick a single turning point in Geely's history, it would have to be 2010.

That year, Geely acquired Volvo Cars from Ford at a cost of one point eight billion dollars.

Observers described the deal as a snake swallowing an elephant, and the phrase carried obvious scepticism.

A Chinese private carmaker barely a decade old, buying a European brand with nearly a century behind it.

From first proposal to signature, had Li Shufu not insisted on pushing it, the acquisition would most likely never have completed.

In hindsight, the real value of the deal was that it lifted Geely as a whole by a level, not merely that it acquired an asset.

Leaning on Volvo, Geely improved both product quality and brand image at the same time.

In 2017, Geely took the top spot for sales among Chinese domestic brands.

Revenue that year was two hundred and seventy-eight point two billion yuan, up thirty-three per cent; net profit rose sixty-one per cent to eighteen point eight billion.

After that, Li Shufu moved abroad repeatedly and at a fairly dense pace.

In June 2017 he took a forty-nine point nine per cent stake in Malaysia's national brand Proton.

That September he completed the acquisition of fifty-one per cent of the British sports car brand Lotus.

Three months later he acquired eight point two per cent of the commercial vehicle company Volvo Group.

The February 2018 deal drew the most attention of all.

Geely announced the acquisition of nine point six nine per cent of Daimler, becoming its largest single shareholder.

Daimler was then the parent of Mercedes-Benz, and the stake was worth nine billion dollars.

How the money was assembled became, for a time, a topic discussed jointly across the car industry and the financial industry.

Now back to succession, and let's set it inside the general situation of Chinese private companies.

In that context, the successor is usually the son.

Cao Dewang, known as the king of automotive glass, announced his retirement in October 2025 and handed the business to his eldest son, Cao Hui.

At Wanxiang Group, which began in car components, founder Lu Guanqiu died in 2017 and was succeeded by his son, Lu Weiding.

This is the default option for this generation of private entrepreneurs, not an isolated case.

The successor Li Shufu chose is An Conghui.

An Conghui is not a member of the Li family; he is a professional manager who came up inside Geely step by step.

The presidency of Geely Auto goes to the younger Gan Jiayue.

People inside Geely were not surprised by the outcome, because the thread had been laid for more than twenty years.

When Li Shufu first went into business, he did it alongside his brothers.

But after entering the car industry, he deliberately changed the family-style organisational structure.

He did not permit his brothers to hold management positions in the company.

In May 2002 he brought in professional managers from outside to serve as general managers of both Geely Holding and Geely Auto.

In research and development and in manufacturing, the proportion of outside hires was higher still.

During the Volvo acquisition he hired several executives with overseas M&A or foreign-firm experience.

Over more than twenty years, professional managers came and went at Geely, and all of them influenced him to some degree.

Listing and acquiring were the two things that showed him, very directly, how much corporate governance matters.

In a 2006 interview with Fortune, he said one sentence.

He said: this company cannot be run by me alone.

In the same interview, he proposed that Geely should become a hundred-year carmaker.

Read those two sentences side by side and this departure is the end point of a route twenty years long, not a temporary arrangement.

Geely Auto vice-chairman Gui Shengyue expressed it as a declaration of de-familyisation for Geely Auto, rather than a simple personnel change.

It must be said that Li Shufu has not retired.

He remains chairman of the controlling shareholder, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group.

By his own plan, he will increasingly lean toward that controlling-shareholder role and hand the running of the business over.

The comparison of ages is also worth mentioning.

Li Shufu is sixty-three, BYD's Wang Chuanfu is sixty, Great Wall's Wei Jianjun is sixty-two.

The latter two remain hands-on; only Li Shufu has deliberately stepped back at this point.

One industry figure's assessment is quite accurate.

He said succession is a threshold every company must cross to become a hundred-year company, and that plenty of outstandingly successful businesses fall precisely there.

Li Shufu wants to cross it.

And the answer he has given is to hand the company to a man surnamed An.

Now put yourself in this position.

You have a company you have run for forty years, you are old, and your child is willing to take it on.

Do you hand it to your child, or to someone who has been with you for twenty years?