Volvo's new chauffeur talks of buy-out challenges, looks to future

He ventured into a start-up business 26 years ago as the boss of a backyard assembly line of refrigerator parts in a non-descript east China county.

Years later, he led his friends in dismantling a Mercedes-Benz and trying to imitate its designs to make China's own luxury brand. In 1998, he was appointed the head of largely unknown domestic carmaker Geely Group.

Today, Li Shufu is no longer a nobody.

The tiny-eyed, sturdy-looking businessman caught the world's surprise by initiating and, on Aug. 2, eventually closing a 1.5-billion-U.S.-dollar deal to buy the Volvo unit of the U.S. auto giant Ford Motor Co..

Li is the first Chinese chairman of Volvo Cars in the Swedish carmaker's 85-year history. The privately-owned Geely Holdings Group Co. Ltd. also became China's first multi-national auto group to own a world-class brand name.

In an interview with Xinhua, Li recalled the arduous process and talked about his vision.

Compared with Volvo, the Geely brand is an infant in the auto market.

In 2009, Geely sold 325,400 vehicles with a turnover of 2.4 billion U.S. dollars, about a tenth of Volvo's sales that year.

"It was really difficult for Geely," Li said. "We first presented the acquisition deal to Ford in 2007, but it was completely ignored."

"It had been my dream to make China's world-class brand and to have a respected enterprise like Volvo."

Li said he started to ponder the acquisition as early as 2002.

"At the time, Geely just got the state's nod to produce sedans and had not yet generated a penny of return on the 2 billion yuan investment."

However, Li said, Geely benefited from a policy of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the state economic planner, that ensured domestic companies engaging in a single overseas acquisition were singled down to the best-placed firm in order to avoid infighting.

"When Geely's plan was already on the NDRC's desk, Volvo picked China -- it picked Geely."

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