HAIER is a Chinese company that is No. 1 in the household appliance market in the world and occupies 10.2 % of the retail market, employs 70,000 employees and consists of 4 000+ microbusinesses.
It is a platform-based business, and all employees are entrepreneurs united into a single network structure.
HAIER CEO Zhang Ruimin says that in the era of the Internet, “you either become a platform, or a platform owns you.”
In 1984, Mr. Zhang took over a company on the verge of bankruptcy where up to 20% of its products were coming out defective. Since then, he has implemented 5 stages of business transformation.
Here, the 5 transformation stages and the current operating model (RenDanHeYi) are briefly described. RenDanHeYi contains only 3 types of roles: Platform Owner, Microbusiness Owner, and Entrepreneur.
