Midea Headquarters Visit: Inside the Beijiao Showroom, Five Businesses and the KUKA Robotics Arm

A Midea headquarters visit starts an hour outside Guangzhou, in Beijiao, a town in Shunde District, Foshan, where a large share of the buildings belong to one company. Midea Group reported total revenue of 458.5 billion yuan for 2025, up 12% year on year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 43.95 billion yuan, up 14%. It employs 198,570 people and does business in more than 200 countries and regions, and on the 2026 Fortune Global 500 it ranked 231st. What a visiting delegation actually sees is narrower and more useful than that: the headquarters showroom, themed sessions run by Midea's own teams, and where the host agrees and the schedule allows, a manufacturing site. This page describes the visit as it is arranged in practice, including what cannot be photographed and what has to be requested weeks ahead.

Key takeaways

The programme takes place at Midea's global headquarters in Beijiao, Shunde District, Foshan, Guangdong. Road transfer from central Guangzhou takes about an hour, which makes the visit work as a morning-and-afternoon day trip, or as the first stop of a manufacturing itinerary through the Pearl River Delta. The core of any visit is the headquarters showroom, which combines a history gallery and a product gallery, plus briefing rooms where Midea's own teams run themed sessions. Visits are organised for groups, not individual walk-ins.

The scale is the reason to come, and the numbers are current. Alongside 458.5 billion yuan of 2025 revenue and 43.95 billion yuan of net profit, Midea recorded overseas revenue of 195.9 billion yuan, up 16%, and revenue from its business-to-business activities of 122.8 billion yuan, up 17.5%. Its locally operated overseas businesses now cover 50 countries, up from 27 a year earlier, and it runs 29 R&D centres and 43 major manufacturing bases outside China.

Five businesses sit under one group, and the 2025 annual report gives each a number: smart home at 299.9 billion yuan, building technologies at 35.8 billion yuan, robotics and automation at 31.0 billion yuan, industrial technology at 27.2 billion yuan, and other innovation businesses at 28.7 billion yuan. The fastest-growing of those in 2025 were other innovation businesses, up 26.9%, and building technologies, up 25.7%. For an industrial delegation the interesting point is that the consumer brand that most visitors know is now the largest but slowest-growing part of the portfolio.

Manufacturing is the other reason. As of early 2026 Midea had eight factories recognised by the World Economic Forum as lighthouses, including one in Thailand that became the first overseas lighthouse in China's home appliance industry in September 2025, and a kitchen and water-heating plant in Wuhu recognised in January 2026 as the group's eighth and as the world's first fully AI-enabled water heater factory. Visits to production areas are not automatic: they are arranged case by case, at the host's discretion, and usually away from the Beijiao headquarters.

Key visit details

Where the visit is held

The visit is held at Midea Group's global headquarters in Beijiao, Shunde District, Foshan, Guangdong Province. Beijiao is a town of roughly half an hour's drive from Guangzhou South Railway Station and about an hour from central Guangzhou depending on traffic, which is why most delegations treat this as a Guangzhou-based day rather than an overnight trip. The campus holds the headquarters showroom, meeting and briefing rooms, and the offices of the group's central functions. It is not a factory site, and a showroom visit does not include a production line.

Format and duration

The standard shape is a half-day to a full day. A half-day covers orientation, the history gallery, the product gallery and one themed session. A full day adds a second themed session after lunch and a longer closing discussion. Two themes are the usual choice: digital transformation and manufacturing, and Midea's business structure and global operations. The themes are fixed during planning because they determine which of Midea's own teams sends a speaker.

Who the programme suits

The programme suits manufacturing and operations teams, supply chain and procurement groups, industrial automation and robotics buyers, building technologies and HVAC companies, and investment or strategy delegations that want to understand how a Chinese manufacturer moves from domestic appliances into industrial and business-to-business markets. It also works for distributor and partner delegations that need the product breadth in one place before negotiating. It suits general-interest tourists less well: the content is operational, the sessions assume a professional audience, and there is no public retail element.

Booking, group size and site rules

The programme is best suited to groups of 10–20 participants, and a realistic lead time is around 30 days. We charge per group, so larger groups usually offer better value per person. Individuals and smaller groups are welcome to enquire at a higher per-person rate. Requests involving a production site, a named executive, or an unusual group size need more time, because the host reviews them before confirming. The visitor list is submitted in advance with the names delegations want on it, and changes on the day are difficult to accommodate.

Site rules are straightforward and worth repeating to anyone joining. Photography and video are not permitted inside the showroom or on the production side without the host's permission, and this is enforced. Sessions follow the agenda agreed in advance; ad hoc requests for additional areas or speakers are rarely granted on the day. A session with senior management can be requested, and is subject to review by Midea headquarters rather than guaranteed. Recording of the themed sessions follows the same rule as photography: ask first, assume the answer is no.

Why a Midea headquarters visit is worth the journey from Guangzhou

Guangzhou has drones, biotech and automotive plants, all easier to reach than Foshan. The reason to cross into Shunde is that Midea is one of the few Chinese industrial groups where the consumer business, the industrial business and the global manufacturing footprint are legible in a single visit. A delegation can see the appliance brand it knows, the robotics arm it probably associates with Germany, and the building technologies and industrial technology units in the same building, and then ask one room of people how those parts are run together.

The second reason is that Midea is unusually far along the transition that most Chinese manufacturers are attempting now: from exporting products made at home to operating local businesses abroad. Overseas revenue reached 195.9 billion yuan in 2025, and the number of countries with a locally operated Midea business rose from 27 to 50 in a year. Own-brand products now account for more than 45% of the overseas revenue of the smart home business. Those are exactly the questions a visiting manufacturer wants answered, and the answers are better in person than in a report.

Inside the Beijiao headquarters

A Midea headquarters visit is not a tour of a plant. It is a visit to a corporate campus whose showroom is designed to explain a 58-year-old company in about ninety minutes, followed by sessions in a briefing room. Delegations that arrive expecting a factory floor and leave having seen galleries are usually disappointed only because nobody set the expectation first, so it is worth being explicit about what each part of the campus offers.

The history gallery

The history gallery is the part visitors remember. Midea's story starts in 1968, when He Xiangjian and 23 residents of Beijiao pooled 5,000 yuan to start a production team making bottle caps and plastic parts; the company moved into fans in 1980, registered the Midea trademark in 1981, entered air conditioning in 1985, and listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 1993. The gallery lays this out with the artefacts and documents a company museum accumulates, and it does the useful job of explaining why a town in Shunde became the base of a global manufacturer.

For professional delegations the history is not nostalgia, it is context for the operating model. Midea adopted a business-division structure in 1997, which is the origin of the decentralised way the group still runs, and the gallery's later panels cover the 2012 handover in which He Xiangjian stepped back from the board and Fang Hongbo, who had joined the company in 1992 and risen through the air-conditioning division, became chairman. The move from founder-led to manager-led is the single most asked-about fact about Midea, and it is better raised here than in the briefing room.

The product gallery

The product gallery is where the five businesses become concrete: appliances and whole-home scenarios from the smart home business, compressors and motors from industrial technology, HVAC and elevator systems from building technologies, and robots and automation cells from the robotics and automation business, which is where KUKA sits. Because Midea sells into more than 200 countries and regions and runs own-brand, licensed and manufacturing-for-others models in parallel, the gallery also shows how much of the range exists only for particular markets.

Guides tailor the route to the delegation. An automation delegation spends its time at the robotics and automation end and the industrial technology components; a building delegation spends it on the iBUILDING platform and the HVAC and elevator range; a retail or distribution delegation stays with smart home. Saying which of these you are, before the visit, changes what is brought out and who answers questions, and it is the single highest-leverage piece of information to give the host.

The briefing room and themed sessions

After the galleries, the visit moves to a briefing room for one or two themed sessions with Midea's own teams. The two standard themes are digital transformation and manufacturing, and business structure and global operations. Digital transformation covers the group's decade-long push to put its end-to-end value chain onto data, the factory brain and home brain architecture it has described publicly, and how lighthouse-factory practice is replicated across bases. Business structure covers the business-division model, the four strategic axes of technology leadership, direct-to-user, digital and intelligent drive, and global breakthrough, and how the industrial and consumer halves are managed together.

The sessions are the part of the visit that can be shaped, and they are worth preparing for. Send questions in advance. A delegation that submits ten specific questions on, for example, overseas localisation, own-brand economics, or how automation projects are justified internally, gets answers from the relevant business unit. A delegation that arrives with no questions gets a competent general presentation. Sessions with senior management can be requested, and are subject to review by Midea headquarters.

The production side, and what can and cannot be arranged

Access to production is the most common request and the most frequently disappointed. The Beijiao campus is not a factory, and a showroom visit does not include a line. Manufacturing visits are possible, at the host's discretion, to separate sites, and they depend on the plant's production schedule, on which areas are open to visitors, and on the delegation's profile. Requests should be made at the planning stage with a clear statement of what the delegation wants to see and why.

From 5,000 yuan in 1968 to a global manufacturer

Midea's milestones read as a compressed history of Chinese manufacturing. The 1968 starting point — 23 people, 5,000 yuan, a bottle-cap and plastics workshop in Beijiao — gave way to fans, then air conditioners, then a Shenzhen listing in 1993 and a group-level listing in 2013. The business division structure introduced in 1997 is the organisational decision that most shaped what followed, because it created semi-autonomous units with their own product and commercial accountability.

The 2012 handover is the second decision that outsiders ask about. He Xiangjian, the founder, left the board and Fang Hongbo became chairman. Fang had joined in 1992 and moved up through the air-conditioning business. The pattern — founder to professional manager, with the managerial system rather than family succession carrying the company forward — is studied widely inside China and is a standing subject in the sessions.

The international moves came next, and they are what changed the company's shape: Toshiba's home appliance business and an 80% stake in Italy's Clivet in 2016, then roughly 94.55% of KUKA in 2017, followed by a Hong Kong listing in 2024 and, in 2025, acquisitions including Arbonia's climate business, Toshiba Elevator's China operations and the international business of Carestream's medical imaging arm. The through-line for a visitor is that each acquisition added an industrial capability rather than a consumer brand.

Five businesses under one operating system

Midea describes itself as a group covering smart home, industrial technology, building technologies, robotics and automation, and innovation businesses; its 2025 annual report also lists newer units in new energy, healthcare and smart logistics alongside them. The 2025 revenue split is the clearest way to see the balance: smart home 299.9 billion yuan, up 11.3%; building technologies 35.8 billion yuan, up 25.7%; robotics and automation 31.0 billion yuan, up 8.1%; industrial technology 27.2 billion yuan, up 10.2%; other innovation businesses 28.7 billion yuan, up 26.9%.

Smart home is the consumer business and the largest unit, covering appliances, whole-home scenarios and the surrounding ecosystem. Inside China it runs a strategy of leading share across online and offline channels; outside China the emphasis has shifted to own-brand products, which reached more than 45% of the overseas revenue of the smart home business in 2025, sold mainly under the Midea, Toshiba and Comfee names.

Industrial technology focuses on components: compressors and motors for HVAC and appliances, and parts for new energy vehicles and robot actuators, under brands including GMCC, Welling and Meiren. Building technologies is built around the iBUILDING digital platform and covers HVAC, elevators, energy and building controls; it has 16 product manufacturing bases and seven innovation and R&D centres, nine of those bases and four of the centres outside China.

KUKA and the robotics and automation business

KUKA is the part of Midea that most overseas visitors already know, and the ownership question is the first one asked. Midea acquired roughly 94.55% of KUKA in 2017. KUKA continues to operate as a company in its own right, headquartered in Augsburg, Germany, and describes itself as part of the Midea Group. Its own materials put it at around 15,000 employees across more than 100 locations in over 50 countries, with annual sales of roughly 3.9 billion euros, and more than 500,000 KUKA robots in service worldwide.

The business recovered in 2025. KUKA's revenue returned to growth, with China performing particularly strongly and the Chinese business contributing close to 30% of KUKA's revenue. Product work continued in parallel: the KMP 250P autonomous mobile robot platform with a 250 kg payload, built for cleanroom and electronics logistics, and a set of five AI agents presented at the 25th China International Industry Fair in 2025, covering machine vision, engineering software, equipment operations, an assistant and fleet management. Swisslog Healthcare's Box Picker automated pharmacy storage system won a MedTech Breakthrough Award in May 2025.

For visitors the useful angle is not the robots but the integration: KUKA robots, Midea's own industrial software, and the group's manufacturing bases are used together, and the lighthouse factories are where that combination is visible. A dedicated KUKA robotics visit is the right companion stop for a delegation whose interest is specifically robotics rather than the group.

Digital Midea: lighthouse factories, the factory brain and AI on the line

Midea has been digitising its operations for more than a decade, and the results are published in enough detail to be examined. As of early 2026 it had eight factories recognised by the World Economic Forum, 39 national-level green factories, 13 green supply chain factories, ten 5G factories and three factories recognised at the highest national smart-manufacturing tier. The Thailand air-conditioner plant became a Supply Chain Resilience Lighthouse in September 2025, the first overseas lighthouse for Midea's air-conditioning business and the first overseas lighthouse in China's home appliance industry.

The Thailand numbers are the ones operations teams write down. Across 72 digital and AI applications, end-to-end order delivery lead time fell 43% and employee certification time fell 62%, against output of more than five million units in 2025 and an average of one unit assembled every six seconds, with energy per unit down 40.2% and carbon per unit down 68.3%. In January 2026 the kitchen and water-heating plant in Wuhu became the group's eighth lighthouse and the world's first fully AI-enabled water heater factory.

Underneath the certifications is an architecture Midea describes publicly as a home brain and a factory brain. The most concrete example on show in 2025 was the washing machine plant in Jingzhou, where a humanoid robot known as Meirobot went to work on the line under the factory brain's scheduling, carrying out 3D quality inspection; in August 2025 the plant received WRCA recognition as the world's first multi-scenario agent factory. Research sits behind this: 41 R&D centres in 12 countries under a two-plus-four-plus-N network, and a four-tier R&D system linking a central research institute with the divisions' own development units.

What different teams take away

Manufacturing and operations teams come for the lighthouse practice and leave with the replication question: what transfers to a plant with different volumes, different labour costs and different supplier depth. The honest answer from Midea's side is that some of it does and some of it does not, and hearing which is which is worth more than the tour. These delegations should ask for the digital transformation and manufacturing theme and submit plant-level questions in advance.

Automation and robotics buyers come for KUKA and usually leave with a broader view: KUKA's position as an independent company inside a manufacturer that is also one of its customers, and the way robotics, software and logistics are deployed together inside Midea's own plants. Building technologies and HVAC delegations find the most directly transferable material in iBUILDING and in the overseas manufacturing footprint of the building technologies unit.

Sample visit programme

This is the shape of a standard full day starting from Guangzhou, and it is a template rather than a commitment: times shift with traffic, the host's schedule and whether a production site is part of the programme. Shorter versions drop the second themed session and end after lunch.

The interesting part of Midea is not that it makes appliances and robots. It is that the same operating system is asked to run both, and a visit is the only place where you can watch people explain how.

Two variations change this shape most often. Automation delegations replace the second theme with a KUKA and robotics session. Delegations that have secured production access drop one session and use the afternoon for the plant, which means a later finish and a longer return transfer. Both are settled during planning rather than on the day.

Where a Midea headquarters visit can be arranged

Beijiao sits in Shunde, Foshan, close enough to Guangzhou to work as a day trip and far enough to need its own transport. It fits naturally inside a Guangzhou tech tour, as the manufacturing counterweight to the city's drone, automotive and biotech stops, and most delegations pair it with one other visit rather than trying to compress two into a day.

The pairing depends on the agenda. A robotics and automation delegation gets the most from combining Beijiao with a dedicated KUKA robotics visit, which treats the robotics business on its own terms rather than as one unit inside a group. An industrial automation and drives delegation pairs it well with an Inovance Technology factory tour, which shows the component and control layer of the same industry from a different company. Either combination is easier if Midea is the morning and the second site is the afternoon.

Questions before a Midea headquarters visit

Can we visit a factory rather than the showroom? Production access is separate from the headquarters visit and is at the host's discretion. It depends on the plant's schedule and on the delegation's profile, and it is confirmed only after review. Ask during planning, state what you want to see, and have a fallback that does not depend on it.

How many people do we need? The programme is best suited to groups of 10–20 participants. We charge per group, so larger groups usually offer better value per person. Individuals and smaller groups are welcome to enquire at a higher per-person rate. Smaller delegations are possible in some circumstances but are harder to place, and the visitor list is submitted in advance, so late additions are difficult.

How far ahead should we book? Around 30 days is a workable lead time for a standard showroom and session programme. Requests involving a production site, a senior management session or a large group need longer, because the host reviews them before confirming.

Can we take photographs? Photography and video are not permitted inside the showroom or on the production side without the host's permission. Assume the default is no, ask in advance if it matters, and brief your delegation before arrival rather than at the door.

Can we meet senior management? A management session can be requested and is subject to review by Midea headquarters. It is not guaranteed, it is easier to arrange with a clear professional agenda and a substantial group, and it should be requested at the same time as the visit itself.

Is the visit conducted in English? Midea's international teams and the visit hosts work in Chinese and English. Interpretation for other languages can be arranged with notice, and delegations bringing their own interpreter should name that person on the visitor list in advance.

What should we prepare? Send the delegation profile, the two or three questions that matter most, and any industry-specific interest — robotics, building systems, components, overseas operations — as early as possible. This determines the route through the product gallery and which business unit sends a speaker.

How long does the visit take? A half-day covers orientation, both galleries and one themed session. A full day adds a second session after lunch and a longer closing discussion. Adding a production site extends the day further because of the transfer.

How do we get there from Guangzhou? By road, in about an hour from central Guangzhou depending on traffic, or roughly half an hour from Guangzhou South Railway Station. Transport is arranged with the visit, and the return leg should be planned against the afternoon session rather than the morning one.

Is this suitable for a mixed group with non-specialists? Yes, with preparation. The history gallery works for everyone, the product gallery is accessible, and the themed sessions assume a professional audience. Mixed groups should say so in advance so the sessions can be pitched accordingly.

Arranging your Midea headquarters visit

Tell us the size of your group, the dates you have in mind and the two things you most want to understand, and we will put a concrete programme in front of Midea's hosts: galleries, themed sessions, and any production access that can be arranged. Where a request cannot be met, we will say so early rather than on the day.

Send the brief with as much lead time as you have, ideally around 30 days or more, and include the questions you want answered. Start at chinatechvisits.com/company-visits