An Conghui

Li Shufu (李书福) spotted him running laps on a university sports field in Hubei province in 1996 and hired him as an auditor at a motorcycle factory. An Conghui (安聪慧) had no automotive background. Thirty years later, he runs the entire Geely Holding Group — Volvo, Polestar, Lotus, and the premium electric vehicle brand he built himself from zero.

An extreme product — are you worried it won't have a market?

The runner who stayed #

An Conghui’s career is worth studying not because of any single breakthrough, but because it illustrates a pattern almost never seen in the Chinese automotive industry: a professional executive who accumulated three decades of institutional authority and then chose to surrender it. In March 2021, still in his early fifties, An voluntarily gave up the CEO title of Geely Holding — the most powerful operational position in China’s largest private automaker — to lead Zeekr, a brand that did not yet have a single customer, a single showroom, or a single delivered car. The Chinese term used across multiple sources is 主动请缨: he volunteered. It was his idea, not his chairman’s directive.

The decision is unusual enough to require explanation. Corporate executives at An’s level do not typically abandon proven empires for blank pages. They protect what they have built, delegate risk downward, and manage their legacies. An did the opposite. He understood, perhaps better than anyone inside Geely, that the platform he had spent five years and more than RMB 20 billion developing in secret — the Sustainable Experience Architecture, or SEA — needed an operator who would stake personal credibility on its success. He became that operator. The bet was not financial in the entrepreneurial sense; An held a 2.68 percent equity stake in Zeekr, meaningful but not existential. The bet was reputational. If Zeekr failed, twenty-five years of institutional authority would dissolve into a cautionary tale about an executive who overreached.

From auditor to architect #

The origin story has become corporate legend within Geely, repeated across Chinese business media with the consistency of a founding myth. In 1996, Li Shufu visited a university in Hubei and noticed a student running laps on the sports field. He learned the runner was the student union president, invited him for an interview, and offered him a position as an auditor at Geely’s motorcycle factory. An accepted. He was an economics graduate with no engineering training and no particular reason to join a small manufacturer in Zhejiang province.

Within months, the auditor had been transferred to oversee construction of Geely’s Linhai automobile base — a facility secretly designed for car production while officially approved for motorcycle manufacturing. When the first Haoqing (豪情) rolled off the line in 1998, the cars were, in a sense, contraband. An had built the factory that produced them. The assignment revealed something about him that track running had already suggested: he was built for endurance, not sprints, and he could be trusted with bets so audacious they required concealment.

By 1999, three years after arriving with a degree in economics, An was leading Geely’s most technically demanding project — the development of the MR479QA engine, China’s first independently developed CVVT (Continuously Variable Valve Timing) engine. The project broke Geely’s dependence on Toyota-sourced powertrains and established An as the company’s indispensable technical executor.

The pattern repeated itself across the next decade. Each time Li Shufu conceived an ambitious strategic vision, An was the one who built it. He rose to Vice President by 2003. In December 2011, he was appointed CEO and President of Geely Holding Group, replacing Yang Jian. For the next ten years, An led what would become the most consequential period in the company’s history: integrating the Volvo acquisition, establishing CEVT (China Euro Vehicle Technology) in Gothenburg, co-developing the CMA architecture with Volvo, and creating the Lynk & Co brand in 2016. Under his leadership, Geely Auto won the Chinese brand passenger car sales championship for four consecutive years.

“I’m not starting a business only now at Zeekr,” An told AutoHome in 2024. “I’ve been starting a business since my first day at Geely.”

The secret and the step-down #

The most significant decision of An’s tenure as Geely CEO was also the least visible. In 2014, he initiated a project codenamed PMA — a modular electric vehicle platform that would consume more than RMB 20 billion over five years, developed almost entirely out of public view. When the platform was unveiled in September 2020 under the name SEA, it was immediately clear that An had been preparing Geely’s electric future while the rest of the industry was still debating whether electric vehicles would reach cost parity with internal combustion.

SEA now underpins vehicles from Zeekr, Volvo, Smart, Lotus, and Waymo. It is the architecture on which America’s leading robotaxi company builds its sixth-generation vehicles. An has called it his proudest achievement. But the platform alone was not enough. It needed a brand that would prove — to customers, to investors, to the industry — that a Chinese automaker could compete at the premium tier without discounting its way to relevance.

On March 23, 2021, An volunteered to be that proof. He stepped down as Geely Holding CEO and took the helm of Zeekr. He retained the title of Chairman of Geely Auto Group, signaling that the move was an elevation in ambition if not in hierarchy. But the institutional safety net was thinner than it appeared. The Chinese EV market in 2021 was already the most competitive automotive landscape on earth. More than 500 companies had registered to build electric vehicles in China. The majority would not survive the decade.

An chose to enter this arena not as a well-resourced corporate parent launching a sub-brand, but as an operator who would personally own the outcome. When the Zeekr 001 was unveiled on April 15, 2021, the specification sheet read like a provocation: air suspension as standard, 800-volt architecture, a performance-oriented shooting brake body style in a market dominated by sedans and SUVs. Internal cost engineers had pushed back on the air suspension. An overruled them. “An extreme product — are you worried it won’t have a market?” he asked. The question was rhetorical. He was not worried.

The first deliveries began in October 2021. By year-end, roughly 6,000 units had reached customers. The product was validated. The business model was not. In 2022, Zeekr’s gross margin collapsed to 7.7 percent as production scaled amid raw material cost spikes. The net loss reached RMB 7.66 billion. Then, in January 2023, Tesla slashed prices on the Model 3 and Model Y by up to 13.5 percent. BYD followed. More than forty brands joined the price war. Industry average profit margins fell to 5 percent — a decade low.

An had staked his personal credibility on a premium positioning strategy. The price war was a direct assault on that credibility. Competitors with deeper pockets — BYD with its vertical integration, Xiaomi with its consumer electronics margins — could absorb losses that would be fatal to Zeekr. The pressure to cut prices and chase volume was enormous. An’s crisis was primarily reputational rather than financial — he was not a founder risking personal ruin, but a corporate executive risking the one currency that matters inside a Chinese conglomerate: the chairman’s confidence. If Li Shufu concluded that Zeekr’s premium model was a vanity project burning cash, An’s authority across the entire group would evaporate. He refused to cut prices.

The margin as vindication #

Instead of joining the price race, An executed a sequence that combined engineering discipline with financial opportunism. He launched technology-loaded new models — the 007 sedan, the 7X family SUV, the MIX minivan — at price points that were aggressive but never discounted. He developed the Golden Battery, Zeekr’s in-house 800-volt lithium iron phosphate cell that charges to 80 percent in 10.5 minutes and costs 14.8 percent less per watt-hour than comparable nickel manganese cobalt alternatives. He merged Zeekr with Lynk & Co in one hundred days, creating a combined entity targeting more than 700,000 vehicles and shared R&D savings of 10 to 20 percent.

And on May 10, 2024 — less than three years after the first Zeekr 001 rolled off the production line — An took the company public on the New York Stock Exchange. The IPO priced at $21 per ADS, at the top of the marketed range, valuing the company at approximately $5.5 billion USD. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America underwrote the deal. Orders closed a day early.

The numbers told the story An had wagered his reputation on. Zeekr delivered 222,123 vehicles in 2024, an 87 percent increase over the prior year. Revenue reached RMB 75.9 billion. The Zeekr brand alone turned a RMB 214 million profit. Vehicle margins climbed from 7.7 percent in 2022 to 21.2 percent by the first quarter of 2025. The price war, rather than destroying Zeekr, had forced it to optimize.

The arc was not without stumbles. In August 2024, Zeekr launched 2025 model-year versions of the 001 and 007 just six months after the 2024 models, with incompatible chip architectures that left earlier buyers unable to receive certain software updates. Customer protests erupted on Weibo and Douyin. An publicly acknowledged the failure: “Due to eagerness to advance, Zeekr’s product iteration was not perfect. We received criticism. A profound internal reflection has taken place.” The admission — rare among Chinese auto executives — preserved his credibility with Zeekr’s core user community. But it also revealed the tension between the iteration speed that the market demanded and the trust that premium positioning required.

The return #

In January 2026, Geely announced that An Conghui would replace Li Donghui as CEO and Legal Representative of Geely Holding Group. The appointment completed the personal arc that had begun five years earlier. The man who had volunteered to step down from the group CEO chair was restored to it — and given more authority than he had held before. He now serves simultaneously as CEO of Geely Holding, Chairman of Geely Auto Group, Chairman of Polestar, and Chairman of Lynk & Co. Li Shufu retains the Chairman role. An runs the empire.

The lesson of An Conghui’s career is not about vision or strategy, though he has demonstrated both. It is about the willingness to abandon the position you have earned in order to prove something that your position alone cannot prove. At the moment of his greatest institutional authority, An chose to return to the starting line — to build a brand from nothing, to defend a pricing model against the most ferocious price war in automotive history, and to stake his personal credibility on an outcome he could not guarantee. The most effective leaders, it turns out, are not the ones who protect what they have built. They are the ones who recognize when the race that matters most is the one they have not yet run.

Last updated: March 15, 2026