Companies in Qingdao, Shandong

Haier's transformation is a management legend: in 1985, new director Zhang Ruimin took a sledgehammer to 76 defective refrigerators and ordered his workers to destroy them — a dramatic declaration that quality, not quantity, would define the company. The Qingdao-based maker of refrigerators went on to become the world's largest home appliance brand, and Zhang's later experiments in management — breaking the company into thousands of self-managed micro-enterprises under the 'RenDanHeYi' (人单合一, 'people and orders integrated') model — made Haier a case study taught at Harvard. The group's portfolio spans refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, and kitchen appliances under the Haier brand, plus the GE Appliances business it acquired from General Electric in 2016 and the Fisher & Paykel brand from New Zealand. Its smart home ecosystem — appliances connected through its own operating system — is central to its strategy of selling solutions rather than boxes. With about 110,000 employees and annual revenue near RMB 260 billion (US$36 billion), Haier operates factories and research centers worldwide, and its founder's radical management model continues to attract global business scholars. For the appliance industry, Haier is the Chinese challenger that bought American and New Zealand heritage brands and turned them around — while reinventing how a giant company is organized.