Background
Guo Zeli is a native of Xiamen, Fujian Province. He was born in 1955.
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Zeli Guo
Edit Profile则理 郭
Education
Guo Zeli was educated locally.
Career
During the Cultural Revolution he worked in the countryside for three years beginning in 1973, and in 1976 he joined the People’s Liberation Army. After discharge, he worked for the Xiamen Special Trade Company for several years during the 1980s, and then joined Xiahua Electronics in 1995.
In the fiercely competitive atmosphere of recent years, Guo has managed to adjust to drastic market changes and maneuver the business for future growth. During the price war, Guo was among a very few who realized that the price-cutting strategy would eventually destroy the business. Xiahua, under his leadership, did not become heavily involved in price-cutting measures. Guo was famous for pushing the company to apply modern business management approaches and driving business development via innovation.
Realizing that too great a focus on the TV product line would put the company in jeopardy, Guo decided to expand into other communication products and computers in order to pursue more balanced growth for the company. Consequently, Xiahua invested heavily in its own R&D institute in China and 16 other facilities around the world. Accordingly Xiahua’s innovation has held many top honors in China, including the first plasma TV, first HDTV, and the first GSM cell phone, for which it holds its own intellectual property rights, and so on. The company has successfully exported TVs into North American, European and African markets under its own PRIMA and ODM brand names, in addition to computer products and video systems for automobiles.
Achievements
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Guo was the first Chinese entrepreneur to respond to the anti-dumping lawsuit from the European Union in 1998. He has twice been named among the provincial most hon- orable entrepreneurs, in 1998 and 1999. With Guo’s dedication to modern management concepts and open-minded approach, Xiahua has become the third-largest flat-panel TV manufacturer in China and the eighth-largest in the world in 2005.
However, as a result of poor decisions on product structures, domestic market issues and financial strategies, Xiahua has experienced operational losses in the last few years. Although a domestic market leader in high-end electronics Xiahua is still a far cry from its global peers, such as Toshiba and Sony. Furthermore, television sets have already become consumable items as the result of increasing household income in China, but Guo and his team still followed the seasonal pattern to schedule their manufacturing activities, resulting in situations that they could not sufficiently meet the market needs. Finally, insufficient attention was paid to the company’s logistics system, resulting in high operations costs. Confronting the dilemma, Guo stepped down voluntarily in 2006 and became director of the board.
Career
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1976
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1999