Will China’s stalling shopping spree regain its pace in 2018? Geely and Fosun offer a clue

When Geely Automobile’s first compact car, the CK, rolled off the assembly line at Li Shufu’s factory in Hangzhou, it was a lookalike of a Mercedes-Benz W203 C-Class sedan, featuring the German marque’s horizontal bar grille and round headlamps. The resemblance was close enough for Mercedes’ owner Daimler AG to issue a cease-and-desist letter to Li to stop the knock-off.

In his own defence, Li famously observed that a car is essentially the combination of four wheels, an engine with two sofas. “By taking down a car part by part, one gets a basic idea of how a car is put together,” he said during a 2009 interview with state broadcaster China Central Television.

Fast forward a decade from the CK model, Li is now Daimler’s largest single shareholder, after having paid an estimated US$9 billion to amass a 9.69 per cent stake from the open market. His company, which began life as a maker of refrigerator compressors in Zhejiang province, lavished an estimated US$4.3 billion last year alone in global acquisitions, buying 49.9 per cent of Malaysia’s largest carmaker Proton, 51 per cent of the UK sports car maker Lotus Cars, and 8.2 per cent of Swedish truck maker AB Volvo. For good measure, Geely also bought 51.1 per cent of Saxo Bank, the Danish online financial products trading platform.

In 2006, Geely paid US$1.9 billion to buy Volvo Cars as well as Manganese Bronze, the company that assembles the iconic London black taxi.

That’s no mean feat for a farmer’s son from Taizhou, a city of 6 million people in the hub of China’s private entrepreneurship. Wenzhou, the global factory for shoes and cigarette lighters, lies to the south, while the provincial capital Hangzhou - home to the world’s biggest online shopping platform Alibaba Group Holdings - lies further north.