On November 8th, 2011, ’Pursuit of Excellence’, a gala marking GEELY’s 25th birthday, was held in the Hangzhou Bay Factory of GEELY Holding Group. GEELY’s senior management and staff representatives attended the celebration event, where ‘Merit Award’ and ‘Shufu Award’ were presented to employees who have made significant contributions to GEELY’s development.

Over the 25 years, hard-working, persistent, and intelligent GEELY employees have made every effort to build GEELY into a vibrant and competitive auto brand. Starting as a small refrigerator manufacturer, GEELY has made continuous and substantial progress and successfully evolved into China’s first multinational automaker that owns world-famous auto brands such as Volvo Cars and MBH.

In 1994, GEELY entered the auto industry as a manufacturer of mopeds. By the mid-1990s, GEELY had achieved production and sales of over 200,000 mopeds, an extremely popular product in the market. After achieving the great success in the two-wheeler market, GEELY started to focus on the more promising auto market. In 1997, GEELY built its first automobile manufacturing plant in Linhai, Zhejiang Province; on August 8th, 1998, the first GEELY car went offline, not only marking the birth of China’s first private automaker but laying solid groundwork for the future development of GEELY. From then on, ’building affordable cars’ became GEELY’s primary goal.

At the very beginning of the new millennium, GEELY had gained a steady foothold in the auto market and was fully aware of the vital importance of ‘skilled and qualified employees’ and ‘technology innovation’ to the future development of China’s proprietary brands. Due to this reason, GEELY determined to build its own training and R & D systems. To date, GEELY has established five schools that have trained and prepared tens of thousands of professional workers and management personnel for China’s auto industry. As for R & D, GEELY has patented 3,200 inventions and has independently designed and produced the very first proprietary MR479Q engine as well as China’s first Z automatic transmission, thus breaking the monopoly of foreign companies in this field.

Currently, GEELY has established car and powertrain manufacturing bases in Linhai, Ningbo and Luqiao of Zhejiang Province, Shanghai, Lanzhou, Xiangtan, and Jinan with an annual production capacity of 600,000 cars, 600,000 engines, and 600,000 transmissions. Thanks to the breakthrough made in its R & D, GEELY announced a new goal of ‘building the safest, most energy-saving, and environmental-friendly GEELY vehicles’ in 2007, marking its all-round strategic transformation from producing affordable cars to producing ‘quality GEELY cars’.

After becoming a car export company in 2003, GEELY made great strides in globalization. It acquired renowned automaker MBH and the world’s second largest independent automatic transmission maker DSI in 2006 and 2009 respectively, thereby highly boosting its R & D strength and product quality. Now, GEELY is proud to own many quality models including EC7, LC, SC7, MK and CK and has established its global presence through nearly 200 overseas dealerships.

In 2010, GEELY surprised the world once again. It acquired the world luxury car brand—Volvo Cars. It is through the acquisition that GEELY became China’s first multinational automaker and one of the leading automakers in the world. 

Within the 25 years, GEELY has evolved from a company with only one auto brand into a company with a product series of over 30 new models, 8 engines and 15 transmission models. While emerging as a Chinese proprietary auto brand, GEELY has successfully introduced the concept of ‘quality GEELY’ to all over the world.