Haier Group

Haier Group is a large Chinese home appliance conglomerate, and is a separate entity from its listed subsidiary Haier Smart Home (Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd.). According to a speech by Zhang Ruimin, Haier’s founder and honorary chairman of the Haier Group board, at the 8th National Young Entrepreneurs Conference in June 2026, Haier was founded in 1984, when it was a small collectively owned factory with only a few hundred people, insolvent, and reliant on borrowed money to pay wages; today Haier has grown into an international multinational company with more than 100,000 employees worldwide, the Haier brand has become a world-famous brand, and Haier Smart Home, one of its listed companies, is a Fortune Global 500 company.

According to an October 2014 Caixin report, Haier Group board chairman Zhang Ruimin put forward the idea that “there are no successful companies, only companies of their time”, a saying that Vanke president Yu Liang repeatedly quoted at the time around Vanke’s 30th-anniversary media meeting to stress the urgency for companies to transform amid the changes of the era. On September 20, 2005, Haier introduced the RenDanHeYi management model. According to Zhang Ruimin’s account in the above-mentioned speech, the model advocates the integration of employees and users, and to this end Haier abolished its middle management departments, with 12,000 managers transforming into independent makers; he said an international certification body had designated the RenDanHeYi model as an international certification standard for business models, making Haier the first Chinese company whose own original business model became an international certification standard.

In 2016, Haier Group paid US$5.4 billion in cash to acquire General Electric’s appliance business assets; the deal also covered General Electric’s 48.4% stake in the appliance company Mabe. According to reports, the purpose of the acquisition was to open up the US high-end market, and it was also of great help in building Haier’s own domestic high-end product lines. In logistics real estate, a logistics fund set up by Haier Electronics and others also took part, joining traditional developers such as Greenland and R&F as well as companies such as Suning, JD.com and Alibaba in moving across sectors into logistics real estate.

In November 2021, Zhou Yunjie succeeded Zhang Ruimin as chairman of the Haier Group board, with Zhang Ruimin subsequently serving as honorary chairman of the board; according to Zhang Ruimin, Zhou Yunjie joined Haier in 1988 and gained experience in various positions at Haier over more than 30 years. In his June 2026 speech, Zhang Ruimin also argued that companies in the networked era should tear down their walls and become self-evolving ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest, and he introduced ideas such as the zero distance of RenDanHeYi 1.0 and the zero boundaries (ecosystem micro-community contracts) of RenDanHeYi 2.0.

Haier Smart Home is an important listed home appliance platform under Haier Group. According to Haier Smart Home’s letters to shareholders over the years, in 2020 Haier Smart Home completed its H-share listing on the Main Board in Hong Kong (6690.HK) and simultaneously privatised its subsidiary Haier Electronics, creating an integrated listing platform, with its major shareholder Haier Group supporting it in becoming a listed flagship for the smart home; that year its sales revenue was 209.7 billion yuan and net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company was 8.88 billion yuan. Thereafter its operating revenue grew from 227.556 billion yuan in 2021 to 261.428 billion yuan in 2023, and in 2025 exceeded 300 billion yuan for the first time, reaching 302.347 billion yuan, with net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company of 19.553 billion yuan. Haier Smart Home owns the high-end brand Casarte and the US subsidiary GE Appliances; in October 2024 it completed the acquisition of Carrier’s commercial refrigeration business, and in December of the same year it completed the acquisition of the South African water heater manufacturer Kwikot; in 2025 it reorganised its three businesses of household air conditioning, smart buildings and water internet into a broader HVAC business.