From bottle caps to appliances
He Xiangjian's fortune rests on his stake in Midea Group, the appliance maker he started in Beijiao, a town in the Shunde district of Foshan in southern China. In 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, he and a group of local residents pooled small savings to set up a workshop making plastic bottle caps and other simple parts. For years the collective took whatever work it could find, including components for vehicles and medical equipment.
The turning point came in 1980, when the workshop began making electric fans. Demand for consumer appliances was rising as China opened its economy, and the business adopted the Midea name and moved into air conditioners in the middle of the decade. It was one of the first township enterprises in China to adopt a shareholding structure, and in 1993 it listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.
The listing gave the company access to capital and gave He a large personal stake as the collective was restructured. Midea then grew into a broad appliance maker, producing air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, microwaves and small kitchen devices, and it became a major supplier to other brands as well as selling under its own name.
Midea today and its acquisitions
Midea is now a global manufacturer with factories in China and in many other countries. Its products are sold under several brands, and it also makes compressors, motors and parts used by other appliance companies.
Two foreign deals in 2016 marked a shift in strategy. Midea bought a majority of Toshiba's home appliance business in Japan, gaining a respected brand and engineering staff, and it launched a takeover of KUKA, the German maker of industrial robots, completing it in 2017. The KUKA deal drew political attention in Germany because of concerns about Chinese ownership of advanced technology, but it went ahead.
In 2012 He stepped down as chairman and handed control of management to Paul Fang Hongbo, a professional executive who had worked his way up inside the company. This was unusual among Chinese founder-led companies, where leadership often passes to children. He kept his large shareholding through holding companies. In 2024 Midea added a listing in Hong Kong, raising money for overseas expansion. His son, He Jianfeng, runs a separate investment group and has served on Midea's board.
A self-taught founder from Shunde
He Xiangjian was born in 1942 in Shunde, Guangdong, into a farming family. He left school early and worked in a range of jobs, including as a worker and a clerk in local collective enterprises, before he organized the bottle cap workshop.
He had no formal training in engineering or business. People who worked with him describe a pragmatic manager who learned through trial and error, who was willing to switch products when a market looked more promising, and who pushed the company to adopt modern management structures early. Shunde, with its tradition of small manufacturers, later became a center of China's appliance industry, home to other brands as well.
He has kept a low public profile, rarely giving interviews or appearing at events, and in later years has spent much of his time on philanthropy rather than business.
Charitable foundations
He is one of the most active philanthropists in mainland China. In 2017 he pledged a large donation of Midea shares and cash to charity, one of the biggest personal gifts announced in the country at the time. Much of it went to the He Foundation and to a charitable trust set up to fund poverty relief, education, health care, elderly care and cultural projects, especially in Shunde and the wider Guangdong province.
The family has supported schools, a hospital and social services for older residents in Beijiao, and it has funded a museum, the He Art Museum, which opened in Shunde in 2020 in a building designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando.
He has also supported Chinese efforts to encourage charitable trusts, a legal form that only became widely available after a charity law was passed in 2016. His gifts were among the first large ones to use it.