A123 Systems' lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility in Livonia, Michigan. Wanxiang America bought the bankrupt company in 2013, spending $256.6 million.

Lesson learned

Ni learned the power of collaboration from his first client in the US.

Shortly after he launched Wanxiang America, Ni received an order from a dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. Days later, the client called complaining about a wrong shipment. Ni then drove nearly six hours to apologize face to face to the client and gave back the original payment check. The client was deeply moved and has since stayed with Wanxiang.

A few years later, after Ni gradually built Wanxiang's reputation in the auto parts world, including becoming the staple supplier to the Big Three (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler), he got another call from that client, asking him to take majority ownership of the company at no cost.

“He said to me: 'If I sell the product, I charge $1 more, you are going to have $1 less. If we can work together, there might be $2 or $3 that we can create on the table, which we can share,'" Ni recalled.

He has since taken this concept to heart. When Zeller Corporation, a leading American auto parts manufacturer and Wanxiang's first Western client, as well as some subsidiaries controlled by the Big Three, faced financial difficulties and turned to Ni for help, Wanxiang embraced them.

Wanxiang usually would keep the brand name of acquired companies and their executive teams and labor forces as intact as financially feasible. Ni likes to call them “partners" in cooperation. “Competition is just a reality, but the problem is that competition does not help you to expand your frontier, cooperation does," he said.

In Ni's theory of cooperation, transparency and compromise take central stage.

In Wanxiang America's early years, Ni had “more FBI visits than customer visits", almost once every quarter, then he had reviews by US Customs, Immigration, the Internal Revenue Service, and many other government agencies. “Frankly speaking, it helped us to learn to how to be transparent," said Ni.

Ni later realized that “transparency is also the most important way to communicate" with his partners. “Because we came from China, we have a different language and a different culture; being transparent is so critical," he said.

Ni's first challenge as spokesman for Wanxiang's products, which back then was mainly the universal joint auto part, was to explain that Wanxiang (pronounced Wahn-Shung) means “universal" in Chinese, so people would not think he was selling wax.

Ni didn't come to the US as an icebreaker for Wanxiang. He arrived as a doctoral student in economics at the University of Kentucky. Two years later, Guanqiu Lu, his father-in-law, the chairman of Wanxiang Group and a legendary figure in China, called him to chart a path for Wanxiang in the US.

Lu started a bicycle and farm tool repair shop in 1969 when China was still buried in “cultural revolution" (1966-76). He later made himself a household name after the country launched reforms in the 1980s, and he was among the first people to get rich. Newsweek magazine featured Lu on its cover in 1991. He was ranked the 13th wealthiest individual in China by Forbes magazine last year.

Ni also believes in one of his father-in-law's famous sayings: “Sharing the money is more important than making the money. If you know how to share money, you can make money pretty easily."

“If you give a little bit more, which is to compromise, then you gain the partnership, and you gain more," Ni added his own touch to the concept. “Transparency and compromise. With these two in your mind, you can communicate with anyone."

Ni's cooperation also includes a scholarship program that Wanxiang established with Delaware's state government. It gave $450,000 to send high school students to study Mandarin at Wanxiang's Hangzhou headquarters in 2015 and 2016. It is part of President Barack Obama's 100,000 Strong Initiative to encourage more American students to study in China.

The scholarship program is a continuing partnership between Ni and the state of Delaware, which gave Wanxiang essential support in its successful bid for Fisker in 2014, once a competitor for Tesla. Delaware provided Fisker seed money in 2009 to build an assembly line at a former General Motors plant.

Ni's management philosophy seems to also align with his streamlined and goodwill approach to partnerships, which if summarized in one word would be “incentivize".