Li Shufu & Geely

Li Shufu started building refrigerators in rural China in 1986. By 2010, he owned Volvo. The journey from appliance maker to global automaker took 24 years of relentless acquisition at prices nobody else would pay. Gili bought Volvo from Ford for $1.8 billion in 2010. Ford had paid $6.4 billion for it 11 years earlier. Li saw what Ford missed. Volvo's brand carried 70 years of safety reputation and engineering capability that would cost $20 billion to build from scratch. The discount existed because American management could not make European labor economics work. Li kept Volvo's Swedish headquarters, retained the entire engineering team, and gave them a budget to build new platforms without quarterly earnings pressure.