Wang Fengying, China’s only female motor industry CEO

October 22, 2013 Leave a comment

Wang Fengying, China’s only female motor industry CEO

Staff Reporter

2013-10-21

CFP420550083-103435_copy1

Wang Fengying at a Great Wall Motor product launch in Tianjin in August 2011. (Photo/CFP)

Wang Fengying, general manager and CEO of Great Wall Motor Company, is the only female CEO in China’s massive motor industry. Born in October 1970 in the city of Baoding in north China’s Hebei province, Wang obtained her bachelor’s degree from the Tianjin Institute of Finance and began working for Great Wall Motor in 1991. She later returned to her alma mater and completed a master’s degree in economics in 1999. Wang, who turns 43 this month, as spent her entire career at Great Wall Motor. After working at the company for 13 years, predominantly in sales and marketing, she was promoted to general manager and CEO, making her the first — and to date only — female chief executive of a motor vehicle manufacturer in China.Under Wang’s leadership, Great Wall Motor has become one of the top automakers in China and is now the country’s biggest manufacturer of pickup trucks and SUV models. In September 2011, the company was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, making it only the second private automaker in the country to go public in both Shanghai and Hong Kong.

In 2011, the company sold 487,000 vehicles, a growth rate of 22%, surging past the national average growth rate of 3%. Great Wall Motor is now also China’s largest car exporter, selling 3,000 units overseas in 2011, up 50% from the previous year. The company, the first Chinese carmaker to obtain EU quality certification, has 12 plants outside of China and is performing well in markets such as Australia, Russia and Italy, with plans to enter the US and Japanese markets by 2015.

Wang has been credited with much of the company’s success in the global market and is described as an excellent executive with a high degree of professionalism and ability to innovate, someone who knows how to apply creative marketing ideas and modern management methods while remaining practical. Though most of her male counterparts have been anxious to crack the international market, Wang is said more focused on patiently building a “made in China” product that is known for its superior quality.

She has won numerous awards throughout her career, including being named one of the 10 Outstanding Persons of Baoding in 1999 and receiving the Hebei Outstanding Young Entrepreneur and Outstanding Marketing General Manager Award in 2000. She was named a model worker of Hebei in 2004 and is now a regular on all the “most powerful businesswomen” lists in China. This year, she was selected as a representative of the National People’s Congress, the PRC’s unicameral legislative house.

Filed under Investing Process, Life, Macro Trends

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment