Zhang Ruimin

Zhang Ruimin is the founder of Haier Group and honorary chairman of the board of Haier Group. According to a Caixin report in October 2014, his saying “there are no successful companies, only companies of their times” was repeatedly quoted by Vanke president Yu Liang at the time to stress the urgency of corporate transformation amid the changes of the era.

Zhang Ruimin recalled that when Haier Group was founded in 1984, it was a small collectively owned factory with only a few hundred people, insolvent and forced to borrow money to pay wages; today Haier Group has become an international multinational with more than 100,000 employees worldwide, the Haier brand has become a world-famous brand, and Haier Smart Home, one of its listed companies, has long been a Fortune Global 500 company. He attributed Haier Group’s growth to seizing the opportunity of reform and opening up, saying “without reform and opening up, there would be no Haier of today, and no Zhang Ruimin of today.”

On innovation, Zhang Ruimin said that Haier Group proposed the RenDanHeYi management model on September 20, 2005, and has been exploring it for more than 20 years. He explained that RenDanHeYi advocates the integration of employees and users; Haier Group accordingly abolished its middle management departments, with 12,000 managers transforming into independent makers; the model aims to maximise human value rather than to maximise shareholder value. According to him, an international certification body adopted the RenDanHeYi model as an international certification standard for business models, many companies internationally have been certified, and Haier Group became the first Chinese company to have its own original business model become an international certification standard.

On succession, Zhang Ruimin said that Haier Group’s ecosystem succession began in November 2021, when Zhou Yunjie succeeded him as chairman of the board of Haier Group. Zhou Yunjie joined Haier Group as a university graduate in 1988 and gained experience in various positions at Haier Group over more than 30 years. Zhang Ruimin said that when Zhou Yunjie took over, Haier Group had already turned into countless “Columbus ships” on which independent makers were exploring, and Zhou Yunjie has therefore devoted himself to innovating the ecosystem’s self-evolution mechanism.

On June 3, 2026, Zhang Ruimin delivered a speech at the Eighth National Young Entrepreneurs Conference held in Jinan, drawing on Haier Group’s more than forty years of development to share three business insights on opportunity, innovation and succession. He said that companies in the network era should tear down their walls and become self-evolving ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest; he proposed that “products will be replaced by scenarios, and industries will be covered by ecosystems,” arguing that companies either get a seat at the table or end up on the menu. In his speech he also expounded on the zero distance of RenDanHeYi 1.0 and the zero boundary of RenDanHeYi 2.0, the latter embodied at Haier Group in the EMC (ecosystem micro-community) contract, namely small micro-groups, generally of no more than 10 people, formed voluntarily and autonomously by makers around user value, embodying autonomous people rather than instrumental people, self-organisation rather than organisation by others, and self-evolution rather than self-reinforcement.