65-year-old Hisense Group chairman Zhou Houjian retires: 30 years at the helm left "five treasures"
On the afternoon of March 12, Zhou Houjian, 65, who had been in charge of Hisense Group for 30 years, chose to retire in a low-key manner, and Lin Lan, the former vice chairman of Hisense Group, took over as chairman.
Hisense Group bid farewell to Zhou Houjian era.
"There are no flowers, no red carpet, no slogans, banners and grand conferences. There are only goodbyes and long-term tributes and applause." Hisense Group reported that on the afternoon of March 12, Zhou Houjian attended a meeting on the first floor of Hisense Building. The brief unveiling of the "Xinyin" logo expressed Hisense's supreme respect for "integrity". Then, before the group's monthly business review meeting, he announced that he had resigned as the chairman of Hisense Group and officially retired.
Then, he said goodbye to his colleagues and left Hisense.
Zhou Houjian is one of the veterans of China's home appliance industry. Hisense Group under his leadership has always adhered to the business philosophy of "establishing an enterprise with technology and operating steadily".
Zhou Houjian himself is also a technical background, and this founder gene has left a deep imprint on Hisense.
Zhou Houjian has two considerations for this transfer of chairmanship: First, Hisense is rapidly growing into a "world-class enterprise" and needs a leader with an international perspective. Second, according to the principle of continuous improvement in management, Hisense needs to change when it is time to do so. a management style.
However, after Zhou Houjian's retirement, he will remain as the "lifetime honorary chairman", which is also the wish of all the directors of Hisense Group.
"Technical man" Zhou Houjian
Zhou Houjian was born in 1957. He graduated from college in 1982 and joined Hisense's predecessor, Qingdao TV Factory. He served as the factory director in 1992 and retired in 2022. He has served Hisense for 40 years and has been in charge of Hisense for 30 years. Hisense has grown from a small company with a revenue of 400 million yuan. The factory has become a diversified home appliance group.
In 2021, Hisense Group's sales revenue will be 175.5 billion yuan, of which overseas revenue will account for 41.3%.
China's color TV industry has always been popular with various marketing concepts to drive product sales, but Hisense has always followed the "technology-based enterprise" route, which is relatively low-key and focuses on technology research and development.
The gene of Hisense can also be said to be the founder gene. Although Zhou Houjian was not the original founder of Hisense, he injected Hisense with a very low-level and powerful technology gene.
Relevant information shows that in the early 1980s, Li Dezhen, then the deputy director of Qingdao TV Factory, withstood the pressure and insisted on introducing world-class color TV production technology and equipment with more advanced technology, which established Hisense's "technology-oriented" development strategy. , and also deeply embedded the technology-first concept into Hisense's development strategy.
In 1992, Zhou Houjian served as the director of the Qingdao TV Factory, and continued to adhere to and strengthen this line. With a background in technology, he made bold adjustments to the organizational structure, renamed the Design Section as the Research Institute, focused on promoting technological innovation, and elevated the Research Institute to a Unprecedented status, it has become a "talent special zone" with inclined wages and salaries in the factory.
This "technology first" strategy has always been implemented.
Since then, every time Hisense has set foot in an industry, it has been fissioned after incubating sufficient talents, technologies and products in the R&D center, which has promoted the rapid development of Hisense's diversification.
Later, Hisense's business philosophy was summed up as "Technology to establish an enterprise and stable operation". No matter how complicated the environment and competition challenges are, the pursuit of technological leadership has always been one of Hisense's core secrets for surpassing industry technology iteration challenges and achieving scale growth.
Zhou Houjian also pointed out many times that technology is an important factor in the development of Hisense.
A major contribution of Zhou Houjian and Hisense to the Chinese business community is their consistent commitment to "establishing an enterprise with technology" and the wealth of experience accumulated by practicing "technology is the foundation of enterprise governance and enterprise establishment".
When Zhou Houjian was elected as one of the "2017 Top Ten Economic Persons of the Year", he summed up his past with Hisense on the stage and said, "I was assigned to Hisense after graduating from university. I have also been in this position for 27 years, and I have actually done one thing in these 27 years, that is, sticking to technology to establish an enterprise and promote the healthy and sustainable development of the enterprise.”
Due to its dedication to technology, Hisense is also the first Chinese home appliance company to enter the chip field.
In 1999, when the "color TV price war" was in full swing, Zhou Houjian reiterated the matter of making chips at an internal meeting: "How about the possibility of us getting involved in chips now?"
Since January 2001, Hisense has established a R&D team in Shanghai with an average age of 28 years. After 1,600 days and nights of tackling key problems, Hisense has finally successfully developed the first digital TV with independent intellectual property rights in my country's video field and realized industrialization. processing chip.
This chip named hi-view "Xinxin", whose structural design and key algorithm design have reached the international advanced level, can be widely used in digital high-definition color TV, and can completely replace similar foreign products.
At the end of 2015, Hisense released the Hi-View Pro image quality engine chip, making Hisense officially comparable to industry giants Samsung and Sony, becoming the only TV company in China with its own high-end image quality chip, and being shortlisted for the top three in the world.
Today, Hisense's image quality chip has been iterated to the fourth generation.
It has independently developed the first 8K+120hz ultra-high-definition image quality chip in China, which has been filmed and firstly applied to the whole machine. It is expected to achieve full mass production in November this year.
At the same time, Xinxin Micro's on-screen driver chip (TCON) products have covered the entire range from HD to 8K UHD. In 2020, the shipment of TCON chips will exceed 40 million, and the cumulative shipment has reached 100 million. At present, the global The market share exceeds 50%, ranking first, and a large number of panels have been shipped to domestic first-tier panel manufacturers, including mainstream panel companies such as BOE, CSOT, CLP Panda, Huike and Rainbow.
Saved "Five Treasures" for Hisense's family
As a family member who has been in charge of Hisense for 30 years, Zhou Houjian's retirement this time is on the one hand because he wants to retire on his own initiative, and on the other hand, he feels that it is the right time to start the shift.
As a state-owned enterprise, Hisense Group completed the mixed-ownership reform in 2021, and introduced strategic investors and employee management shares, making the new Hisense Group a non-state-owned holding company. This more flexible system is more flexible. Conducive to competition in the home appliance market.
Tianyancha shows that after the mixed reform, the major shareholders of Hisense Group are natural persons holding a total of 36.85% of the shares; the natural persons holding shares include most of Hisense's grassroots and above managers.
At the beginning of the share reform, Zhou Houjian and other senior executives unanimously gave up the "lifetime holding of shares", and designed the equity incentive principle of "people remain in shares, shares change with posts, leave posts and withdraw shares, and circular incentives".
This also means that after Zhou Houjian retires, the company's equity held by him will also be recovered.
Hisense Group officially concluded that Zhou Houjian left "five treasures" for the company.
First, as the actual founder, he founded Hisense Group, turning a small local factory into one of the world's largest home appliance companies, and the group is about to enter the world's top 500.
Second, as a technical paranoid, he has laid the engineer gene for Hisense, making innovation and R&D the surging blood of Hisense.
Third, as a long-termist, he has the courage to subvert traditional industries, leaving Hisense with an advanced industrial layout; today, Hisense has become a representative of the industrial transformation and upgrading of Chinese home appliance companies.
Fourth, as the founder of Hisense culture, Hisense has left an honest and upright corporate culture and a clean organizational atmosphere.
This is the greatest spiritual wealth that Zhou Houjian left to the enterprise.
Fifth, as a valiant sacrificer of vested interests, take the lead in giving up the shares that can be held for life, and create an equity incentive mechanism for Hisense of "people in the shares, people withdrew shares", so that the development of the enterprise can achieve long-term inexhaustible endogenous growth. driving force.
Zhou Houjian's successor, Lin Lan, was born in 1958 and graduated from the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Tennessee University of Science and Technology with a Ph.D. A hero with outstanding achievements in development and layout.