China Geely Group
2 min readToday Geely，the company Li Shufu founded 20 years ago，is getting ready to sell Americans a”high quality”family sedan for“less than ten thousand dollars.”
The number eight is lucky to the Chinese，hence 2008 will be Geely’s breakout yea on the American market，promises Li Shufu.America will get the fifth generation of Geely’s CK sedan，says Li.He’s hired John Harmer，a former US senator，as the CEO of the automaker’s US subsidiary.Geely wants to sell in the US by late 2008，but suddenly every privately owned Chinese automaker seems to want to get there too.
Auto impresario Malcolm Bricklin has set 2008 as the date Americans will drive Cherys，the Chinese sedans he’s been hired to lead into the US.A hardworking design team at Chery has come up with a seven-seater people carrier called the New Crossover.Hebei-based Great Wall Motors has also been throwing shapes with the Hover CUV，its latest sports utility vehicle.
Prices are kept low because Li has only recently begun to spend significantly on R&D.Up to now Geely has avoided investment by styling car bodies similarly to models produced at local joint venture companies and approaching the parts suppliers to those joint ventures.A new 400-person R&D center was opened last year to come up with better design and technology but on the firm’s Ningbo-based assembly line much of the work is done by hand，with forklifts and trolleys darting in and out tofeed the assembly line.Management zooming in and out on small pickup trucks add to a sense of productive chaos that hyper-kinetic Chinese executives like Shufu seem most comfortable in.
