Haier Headquarters Visit and Factory Tour in Qingdao: Culture Halls, COSMOPlat and a Lighthouse Factory

A Haier headquarters visit is a day in Qingdao that starts on a factory floor and ends in a management seminar. The group dates itself to 1984 and to a winter morning in 1985, when its young director Zhang Ruimin had 76 defective refrigerators smashed with sledgehammers in the yard. The hammer is now an exhibit. Four decades later the group reported global revenue of 426.8 billion yuan for 2025, up 6.3%, with global profit of 32.2 billion yuan and 146,000 employees. What a delegation gets is three things: the exhibition floors at the Haier Sci-Tech Innovation Eco-Park in Laoshan, where the culture exhibition and the COSMOPlat industrial internet exhibition share one building; an hour inside the Jiaozhou air-conditioner plant, one of the group's lighthouse factories; and a three-hour session, usually at Qianyuan, on the RenDanHeYi management model run since 2005.

Key takeaways

The programme runs across two sites in Qingdao. The headquarters side is the Haier Sci-Tech Innovation Eco-Park at 1 Haier Road in Laoshan District. The manufacturing side is the Jiaozhou air-conditioner plant, Haier's seventh interconnected factory, in the Haier industrial park in Jiaozhou. The standard shape is a full day, roughly 08:00 to 17:00: the plant, the exhibition floors, Qianyuan, then a management session. The sites take organised groups by appointment, not individual visitors.

The company is two entities, and it is worth knowing which is which before arriving. Haier Group, founded in 1984, is the unlisted parent: 426.8 billion yuan of global revenue in 2025, 146,000 employees, eight listed subsidiaries, 35 industrial parks and 173 manufacturing centres. Haier Smart Home, listed in Shanghai and Frankfurt, is the appliance arm: revenue of 302.35 billion yuan for 2025, up 5.71%, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 19.55 billion yuan, up 4.39%. Euromonitor has ranked Haier first in global large-appliance brand sales volume for 17 consecutive years.

Three things occupy the day, and delegations rate them in the same order. The Jiaozhou plant first, because a lighthouse factory is where the manufacturing claims can be checked rather than asserted. The culture exhibition second, because it lays out the 1985 hammer and six strategy stages as one argument. And the session third, because RenDanHeYi is what most visitors came to interrogate.

RenDanHeYi is not a slogan, and the visit is a better place to test it than a book. Zhang Ruimin proposed it in September 2005. The first version removed hierarchy and, by the group's own account, more than 12,000 middle-management positions with it; the second, set out in 2025, moves to a zero-boundary ecosystem. The group says 410,000 enterprises in 75 countries have studied the model and 82,000 have replicated it, and in March 2025 an ISO standard built on it, ISO 56012, passed with 98% of the vote.

Two constraints shape the day. Around 30 days is the realistic lead time, and the programme starts at 10 participants. English interpretation on site is part of how we run it, and it matters most in the session, where the vocabulary — micro-enterprise, chain-group contract, value sharing, zero boundary — carries meanings a dictionary does not.

Key visit details

Where the visit is held

Two sites, roughly an hour apart by road. The headquarters side is the Haier Sci-Tech Innovation Eco-Park at 1 Haier Road in Laoshan District, holding the ecosystem experience centre of about 16,000 square metres across three floors, the Central Research Institute, and Qianyuan. The manufacturing side is the Jiaozhou air-conditioner plant. Qingdao Jiaodong International Airport is in Jiaozhou, so the plant sits on the airport side of the city; the two sites are about an hour apart in normal traffic, longer at peak.

Format and duration

A full day, and the travel is why it cannot be compressed into a morning. The standard sequence is the plant first, then the transfer, then the exhibition floors and Qianyuan before lunch, then a management session. Half-day variants exist for delegations that want only the exhibitions and a session.

The session has to be specified in advance. Standard themes are the RenDanHeYi model, the COSMOPlat platform and how a lighthouse factory is built, or the globalisation path since the 2016 acquisition of GE Appliances. The theme determines who speaks, so it is settled during planning.

Who the programme suits

Five groups get proportionally more from it. Chief executives and boards working on organisational design, because RenDanHeYi is a live answer to how a large company keeps small-company behaviour. Manufacturing and operations leaders, because a lighthouse factory network is a claim checkable on a floor. Appliance and consumer-electronics distributors and competitors, because the brand portfolio and the China retail shares drive their own strategy. Industrial software and automation vendors, because COSMOPlat is both a platform and a competitor. And business schools, because the culture exhibition is built as a teaching case.

Booking, group size and site rules

Around 30 days is the practical lead time, and the programme starts at 10 participants. Confirmed groups submit a visitor list in advance. Foreign visitors need passport details registered ahead of the visit, which takes longer than for a domestic group. Photography inside the plant and contact with equipment are at the host's discretion; access to the factory floor is subject to the host's schedule and should not be built into the agenda as a certainty.

Why a Haier headquarters visit is worth a delegation's day

Three questions bring most delegations to Qingdao, and Haier is unusually well equipped to answer all three without flattering itself. What does a manufacturer that has been globally first in large appliances for 17 years do differently inside the factory? Can a management model built in one culture be transplanted into another through acquisitions? And what does a company that has reorganised itself continuously since 2005 look like from the inside on an ordinary weekday?

The first is answered in Jiaozhou, and the answer has less to do with robots than with traceability. The plant runs 15 air-conditioner lines in a single building of about 100,000 square metres, with outdoor-unit output of roughly 26,000 units a day and annual capacity above three million sets. What to look for is not the automation but the order: a customer order indexed end to end, from configuration through assembly, test and dispatch, visible on screens the operators themselves read.

The second is answered by the acquisition record. Haier bought Sanyo's appliance business in Japan in 2011, GE Appliances in the United States in 2016, Candy in Italy in 2019, and Carrier's commercial refrigeration business in 2024. The claim is that it does not send in a management team; it sends in RenDanHeYi. GE Appliances roughly doubled revenue within about five years and became the largest United States appliance company by scale in 2023. Asking which of that is causal and which coincided with a cycle is the right question, and the host can usually answer it.

The third is answered in the culture exhibition, built around a claim rather than a chronology: that Haier has passed through six strategy stages — brand building, diversification, internationalisation, global branding, networking and now ecosystem — each made before the previous one stopped working. Two installations do the work: the refrigeration section carries the 1985 sledgehammer, and the organisation section fills a pyramid with identical blue figures and then releases them.

Most delegations pair it with one or two other stops, though Qingdao has no second technology anchor of comparable weight, so pairing usually happens elsewhere. A Dreame Technology factory tour in Suzhou suits an appliance or motor-driven hardware group: a younger Chinese consumer-hardware company with the same export ambition and a different manufacturing culture. An Ecovacs visit suits delegations whose interest is the smart home rather than the factory.

Inside the Haier ecosystem experience centre

The ecosystem experience centre is one building of about 16,000 square metres on three floors at the Laoshan campus: the COSMOPlat ecosystem exhibition on the first floor, the culture exhibition on the second, the smart living exhibition on the third. An hour and a half covers all three; forty minutes means choosing two, and manufacturing delegations should not be the ones dropping the ground floor.

The COSMOPlat ecosystem exhibition

The ground floor is the industrial internet floor, and it is the one manufacturing delegations should not short-change. It presents the platform as a stack rather than a product: connectivity and data acquisition at the bottom, the industrial model layer above, industry applications on top, with mass-customisation logic running through all three. The exhibits worth stopping at are the industry cases — chemical, automotive and electronics lines where the platform has been applied outside Haier's own factories — rather than the architecture diagram.

The Haier culture exhibition

The culture exhibition covers 3,645 square metres on the second floor, was rebuilt at the end of 2021 and reopened in January 2022, and was designed by a team from the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University. It runs 62 exhibits along the six strategy stages under the thread of maximising the value of the individual. Visitors remember the thirteen factory rules from the 1980s, the refrigerator sledgehammer, the salad-bowl culture-integration piece on how acquired brands keep their identity, and the installations for smashing the hierarchy and smashing the label. It receives roughly 400,000 visitors a year.

The smart living exhibition

The third floor is the consumer floor: connected appliances, the Three-Winged Bird scenario brand, and the UHome model behind them. The numbers are worth noting before the session, because they set up the argument about where the margin is. Three-Winged Bird reported more than 13 million monthly active users and more than 52 million connected devices in the third quarter of 2025, with more than 6,600 ecosystem partners. Haier Smart Home counts smart-home invention patents as first in the world for 13 consecutive years.

Qianyuan: the learning and exchange centre

Qianyuan is the low building in the park that used to be called Haier University. It opened on 26 December 1999, occupies about 12,000 square metres of ground with 3,600 square metres of floor space, has 17 classrooms and seats around 800. The faculty is drawn from roughly 100 serving Haier middle and senior managers rather than professional trainers, which is the point: the session is taught by people currently running the thing they describe. Most afternoon sessions are held here.

RenDanHeYi: the management model behind the visit

RenDanHeYi translates roughly as binding the person to the user's value, and the visit is the only place where the translation stops being the point. Zhang Ruimin proposed it on 20 September 2005. Employees become micro-enterprises with their own profit and loss, pay is tied to the value they create for a user rather than to their position, and the hierarchy above them is dismantled rather than streamlined.

The first version was about zero distance: removing the layers between an employee and a user. The group says more than 12,000 middle-management positions went over roughly a decade. The second, set out in 2025, is about zero boundary: extending the logic past the company's walls so suppliers, ecosystem partners and users create value inside one system. The distinction changes what can be asked: a first-version question is how a micro-enterprise is measured, a second-version question is what changes when a supplier and a customer are both inside the boundary.

The external validation is real and worth interrogating rather than accepting. Fifteen research centres have been set up around the model by outside scholars, and the group says 410,000 enterprises across 75 countries have studied it and 82,000 have replicated it. Harvard Business School holds 35 Haier cases, and nine of the ten leading business schools teach the model. In March 2025 an ISO proposal built on it, ISO 56012, passed with 98% of the vote.

One framing helps. Zhang Ruimin has described Haier's history as three smashings: in 1985 the refrigerators, creating a zero-defect brand; in 2005 the hierarchy, creating a zero-distance organisation; in 2025 the label, creating the zero-boundary ecosystem. It is a useful way to read the culture exhibition and it gives the afternoon a spine.

COSMOPlat: from a refrigerator plant to an industrial internet platform

COSMOPlat began inside Haier's own refrigerator plants and was spun out as a platform, which is why its credibility with manufacturing visitors exceeds that of a software company selling the same ideas. It runs the mass-customisation model: the user is involved from specification, the order drives the line, and the factory is reorganised around the order rather than a forecast.

The scale claims are specific and, being contested, worth stating with their source. The platform's own site says it has helped enable 20 lighthouse factories worldwide across more than ten industries. Chinese reporting in November 2025 put enterprises served above 160,000 across about 20 industries, with around 900,000 enterprises linked and a brand value of 126.17 billion yuan. The ministry-level evaluation of cross-industry, cross-domain platforms in China has ranked it first for seven consecutive years.

The technical layer worth pressing on is the industrial model. COSMOPlat's Tianzhi industrial large model carries more than 4,700 mechanism models and more than 200 expert algorithms, built industry by industry rather than as one general model. The use cases are unglamorous, and more convincing for it: fault-diagnosis assistants on a refrigerator line, process-optimisation agents built with a petrochemical partner, energy microgrids on factory roofs.

This is also where a manufacturing delegation should decide what it is comparing against. If the interest is the platform and automation stack, an Inovance Technology factory tour in Suzhou is the sharper second visit, because it shows the component layer — servo drives, inverters, robot joints — underneath the software Haier is demonstrating. If it is the factory itself, stay in Qingdao and spend the extra hour in Jiaozhou.

The Jiaozhou air-conditioner plant and the lighthouse factory network

The Jiaozhou plant is why the day starts early. It is Haier's seventh interconnected factory, in the Haier industrial park, and appears on the World Economic Forum's global lighthouse network. It runs 15 intelligent air-conditioner lines in a single building of about 100,000 square metres, with outdoor-unit output of roughly 26,000 units a day and annual capacity above three million sets, shipped to more than 130 countries and regions.

What to look for is the flexibility claim rather than the automation. Air conditioners are seasonal and high-mix, and the plant's argument is that a line built for customisation absorbs small batches without the usual cost penalty. The eight technologies in the site's own briefing are worth asking about individually: flexible cell assembly, an intelligent three-dimensional distribution system, automated high-bay storage, and five systems integrated around one order index.

The digital thread is the part that transfers. An order is indexed at configuration and stays indexed through procurement, assembly, test and dispatch, with its state visible to the operators working on it. For a visiting operations team the useful question is not whether the screens are impressive but what an operator may decide when the screen disagrees with the physical line.

The lighthouse factory context matters and is worth getting right. Haier Group said in February 2026 that it operates 13 lighthouse factories, alongside 18 national-level green factories and nine zero-waste factories. Independent counts published during 2025 put the figure at 12, all in appliance categories, which is more than any other appliance group in the world. The gap between the two numbers is a fair question.

Practical constraints: the plant segment runs about an hour, photography inside is at the host's discretion, and floor access is subject to the host's schedule. Delegations wanting a deeper manufacturing segment should say so when booking, because the plant is a working factory and the schedule is set around production.

What the 2025 results actually show

The headline numbers are what a delegation should have before arriving, because they shape every question in the room. Haier Smart Home: revenue of 302.35 billion yuan for 2025, up 5.71%; net profit attributable to shareholders of 19.55 billion yuan, up 4.39%; adjusted net profit of 18.60 billion yuan, up 4.49%; operating cash flow of 26.00 billion yuan. Headcount at the end of 2025 was 134,995, up 9.99%.

The segment detail explains the strategy better than the total. Refrigeration brought in 84.17 billion yuan, up 1.11%; laundry 64.99 billion yuan, up 3.1%; air conditioning 53.74 billion yuan, up 9.55%; kitchen appliances 41.32 billion yuan, up 0.51%; equipment parts and channel services 38.89 billion yuan, up 19.93%. The last is the fastest-growing line, and the one carrying platform and services revenue rather than hardware.

The geographic detail is where the current argument lives. In 2025 overseas revenue grew 8.3%, with Europe up 19.9%, Japan up 10.3%, South East Asia up 13.4%, South Asia up 23.2% and the Middle East and Africa up 55.8%. By the first half of 2026, overseas revenue was 78.78 billion yuan, or 51.8% of the total. That half-year saw revenue fall 2.79% to 152.11 billion yuan and net profit attributable fall 14.27% to 10.32 billion yuan, with the company attributing the profit decline largely to foreign-exchange losses.

Read together, revenue has moved offshore faster than profit has, and the company is exposed to exactly the tariff, currency and housing-cycle pressures a 2026 visitor will ask about. Domestically it is a share story rather than a volume story: in China in 2025 refrigerators held 47.7% offline share, washing machines 47.4% and water heaters 32.5%, while the direct-to-consumer channel reached 57% of fulfilled volume and 24-hour delivery covered 1,944 districts, 357 more than at the start of the year.

What different teams take away

For chief executives and boards — whether an organisational model built for one culture survives contact with another, what it costs to remove a management layer of 12,000 people, and how capital is allocated once that layer is gone.

For manufacturing and operations leaders — what a lighthouse factory does differently on a high-mix seasonal product, how far the order index reaches into procurement and dispatch, and what an operator may decide when data and line disagree.

For appliance and consumer-electronics distributors and competitors — the brand portfolio of Haier, Casarte, Leader, GE Appliances, Candy, Fisher and Paykel and AQUA across more than 200 countries and regions, and how a 47.7% offline refrigerator share is defended as demand softens.

For industrial software and automation vendors — the platform stack, the industry-by-industry model approach, and where the boundary sits between what COSMOPlat sells to a third party and what it keeps for Haier's own plants.

For business schools and researchers — the culture exhibition as a teaching artefact, the acquisition record as evidence, and the model's failure modes as the research question. The same day should produce a different debrief for each of those five groups.

Sample visit programme

This is the shape of a standard day and the order the sites work to, assuming a morning start at the Jiaozhou plant. A delegation beginning at the Laoshan campus instead reverses the first two segments, often the better option after a late arrival the previous evening.

There is no successful company, only companies that belong to their era — the line Haier's founder Zhang Ruimin is known for repeating, and the one the culture exhibition is built around.

Two variations change this shape. A delegation with no manufacturing agenda drops the plant and spends the morning on the exhibitions plus a longer session. A delegation studying RenDanHeYi specifically usually trades part of the smart living floor for a second hour with the same speaker.

Practical notes for the day

Bring someone with organisational authority. The exhibitions are legible to any executive; the part that repays attention — how a micro-enterprise is measured, who closes one down, how capital is allocated without the layer that used to do it — needs someone who has run a profit-and-loss unit. A delegation of observers spends the session nodding at a case study.

Plan for interpretation and for terminology. RenDanHeYi vocabulary does not translate cleanly: micro-enterprise, chain-group contract, value sharing, zero boundary. Professional English interpretation is part of how we run the programme, and a glossary goes out with the pre-visit material.

Questions before a Haier headquarters visit

Where is the visit held? Across two sites in Qingdao: the Haier Sci-Tech Innovation Eco-Park at 1 Haier Road in Laoshan District, holding the exhibition floors and Qianyuan, and the Jiaozhou air-conditioner plant, roughly an hour away by road.

Is this a factory tour? Partly. The Jiaozhou segment is a working factory and one of the group's lighthouse factories. The rest of the day is a headquarters, exhibition and management-session programme rather than a manufacturing tour.

Can we go onto the production floor? Not as a matter of course. The plant segment is a guided route through a working factory, and how close the group gets to the line is at the host's discretion and subject to the host's schedule on the day.

Can we take photographs? Photography inside the plant is at the host's discretion and is confirmed during planning. The exhibition floors are generally less restricted, but the rule is set by the host rather than by us.

Who should be in the room? Someone with real organisational authority alongside the commercial decision-makers. The session assumes at least one participant has run a profit-and-loss unit, because the questions worth asking are about measurement, capital allocation and winding a micro-enterprise down.

Can the session topic be tailored to our team? Yes. The standard themes are the RenDanHeYi model, the COSMOPlat platform and how a lighthouse factory is built, and the globalisation path since the 2016 GE Appliances acquisition. The theme is confirmed before the visit because it determines the speaker.

Is English interpretation provided? Yes. English interpretation on site is part of how we run the programme, and it matters most in the afternoon session, where the management vocabulary carries the meaning. A glossary goes out with the pre-visit material.

How long is the programme, and can it be shortened? The standard shape is a full day, roughly 08:00 to 17:00, because the plant and the campus are about an hour apart. A half-day variant covering the exhibitions and a session is possible for delegations that do not need the factory.

How far in advance should we book? Around 30 days is the practical lead time. Foreign visitors need passport details registered in advance, speakers are drawn from active management teams, and the plant runs around production, so the date is usually the binding constraint rather than the group size.

What is the minimum group size? The programme starts at 10 participants. Larger delegations are workable and we plan the room, the route split and the transport around the number you bring.

Arranging your Haier headquarters visit

We arrange the visit for you end to end: the introduction to the host, the scheduling on the Chinese side, the session theme, visitor registration, transport from your hotel and back, and English interpretation on the day. Tell us your dates, your delegation size and which theme your team needs, and we will confirm what can be arranged. Start at chinatechvisits.com/company-visits.