In 1968, twenty-three villagers in Beijiao pooled about ¥5,000 to make plastic bottle caps. That workshop is now Midea — the world's largest appliance maker, which has bought German robots, Japanese heritage and a Spanish kitchen brand, and earns some forty percent of its money abroad. This is the story of how a Shunde firm took the world.
Midea begins in 1968, when He Xiangjian and twenty-three residents of Beijiao town, in Shunde, put together about five thousand yuan to make plastic bottle caps. Through the lean years He kept the business alive by riding trains across China selling caps. When the reform era opened the door, the workshop moved into electric fans in 1980, registered the Midea trademark in 1981, and built its first air conditioner in 1985 — still the heart of the company today — before fanning out into refrigerators, washing machines and microwaves. A village workshop had become a national brand.
Midea did not grow huge on fame; it grew on scale. The engine was a willingness to build appliances cheaply and in enormous volume — for its own label, and for everyone else's. Many of the microwaves, fans and air-conditioners sold abroad under names like Toshiba, Whirlpool and Black+Decker come off Midea's lines, fed by the dense Shunde supply cluster around it. Midea Electric listed in Shenzhen in 1993; the group merged and relisted there in 2013. By volume it became the largest maker of white goods on Earth.
Then it went shopping. In 2008 it took control of Little Swan, the Wuxi laundry maker. In 2016–17 came the leap abroad: Toshiba's home-appliance business in Japan (about $477m), the Italian air-conditioning firm Clivet, and — the headline — KUKA, one of the world's four great industrial-robot makers, in Augsburg, Germany (a deal valued near €4.5bn, taken to full ownership by 2022), alongside the Israeli motion-control firm Servotronix and the American floor-care brand Eureka. And it has kept buying: a controlling stake in Toshiba Elevator China (2024), Spain's century-old kitchen brand Teka (2025), and ARBONIA's European HVAC division (2025). A bottle-cap workshop now owns German robots and Japanese heritage.
The buying changed what Midea is. KUKA made it a serious robotics and automation company — its heavy-duty robots rank second worldwide. It set up a chip arm, MR Semiconductor, in 2018 to design the ICs inside its own appliances; its compressor business (GMCC) is the world's largest, with roughly a third of the market; it makes automotive parts through Welling. Midea now describes itself not as an appliance maker but as six businesses — smart home, industrial technology, building technology, robotics, medical and logistics.
Today Midea employs around 190,000 people across forty-plus production bases, serves half a billion customers in over two hundred countries, and sits on the Fortune Global 500 (number 277, its ninth year running). In September 2024 it added a Hong Kong listing — the city's biggest of the year — to fund going global, and now earns about forty percent of its revenue abroad, increasingly under its own brands. The risk it names in its own reports is a saturating, ageing home market as China's birth rate falls, plus trade tensions — which is precisely why it keeps buying its way into Europe. Founder He Xiangjian handed the company to professional managers in 2012. Set against the atlas, Midea is what a Shunde appliance firm becomes when it wins.