How to get rich without really trying

Man who tops list of the wealthy in China reveals secret about how it is done

For anyone keen on being rich, Li Hejun has this brain-twisting advice: "If you want to make money, you need to stop thinking about making money."

Li knows a thing or two about the subject, having just been named the richest man in Chinese mainland.

"When I fought to build my career I did not expect to make a huge fortune from it," Li says. "The money was just a bonus."

On the Hurun Global Rich List 2015 published on Feb 3, Li, 48, with a fortune of 160 billion yuan ($25.6 billion; 22.7 billion euros), replaced Jack Ma Yun, chairman of Alibaba Group, to top the list of the richest person in China's mainland.

Li's ascendancy to the top of the list is all the more remarkable given its rapidity. He ranked 83 on the list in 2013, when his fortune was estimated to be 13 billion yuan. For that rise he can thank canny foresight and a technology called thin film solar power, a kind of mobile energy in the photovoltaic industry.

Li is the board chairman and CEO of Hanergy Holding Group of Beijing, the parent company of Hong Kong-listed Hanergy Thin Film Power. The stock price of the latter has risen almost 250 percent since November 2013, and Li's fortune is now more than 10 times what it was a year ago.

Previously, by dint of the roller-coaster ride China's photovoltaic industry had gone through over the previous three years, investors were decidedly wary of thin film power, an emerging technology in the industry.

China's photovoltaic industry emerged in 2002 and had developed into the world's largest five years later, making the likes of Shi Zhengrong, founder and former CEO of Suntech Power, one of the biggest photovoltaic companies in China, immensely rich.

Between 2007 and 2011, production continued to grow, but this resulted in overproduction of crystalline silicon solar cells.

Because of anti-dumping policies in the United States and the European Union that came into force in 2012, many photovoltaic companies went bankrupt. Three years earlier Li had started to invest in the immature but cleaner thin film solar cell.

"Transforming the business was risky," he says. "We budgeted 15 billion yuan for the solar energy project, but in the end I spent more than 40 billion yuan on it."

Hanergy Holdings, established in 1994, specialized in hydropower and wind power projects in its first 10 years and accumulated 6 gigawatts of installed capacity of hydropower and 131 mW of installed capacity of wind power.

With cash flow produced by installed hydroelectric stations and windmills, the company bought a variety of solar energy companies worldwide, including German battery producer Solibro and US thin film producers MiaSole, Global Solar Energy, and Alta Devices.

"I did not make those investments to make more money, because I already had enough money from the hydropower projects," Li says.

"I decided to enter the solar energy field only because I believed the technology would change the world. For me, entrepreneurship is about having the guts to do what you want to do, but to do it at your peril."

On the wall of Li's office in Beijing is carved what might be called a mission statement, 18 principles that guide what Hanergy does. The first of these says: "Changing the world with clean energy is our shared belief."

With ever-growing energy efficiency, thin film solar power is now used in architectural curtain walls, roof power generators and wearable devices, such as clothes and desks.

The courage Li talks of was no doubt inherited from his father, one of the earliest self-employed entrepreneurs in China.

Li recalls hearing a conversation between his parents in 1972, during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), when people were routinely jailed for the crime of speculation, or any trading outside the planned economy.

"My mother worried that my father would be arrested over his business dealings, but he told her to stop worrying because things would change one day.

"That's another business philosophy I learned from my father: to keep your eye on the current and swim with it."

Even though Li's father was a successful mine owner in Guangdong province, the young Li was determined to start his own business when he graduated from Beijing Jiaotong University in 1988.

He borrowed 50,000 yuan from a college professor to run a business with 17 partners. They sold toys and electronic devices in Zhongguancun, Beijing, and amassed nearly 80 million yuan in six years. They then bought a small hydropower station in Heyuan, Guangdong province, and entered the power industry.

A big breakthrough came in 2002 when Li won the tender to build six power plants in Yunnan province. However, he was not the only investor waiting to seize the opportunity, and no sooner had he and his company been awarded the contract than it was whipped away from them. The local government decided instead to award it to several state-owned companies, and Li then sued the local development and reform commission.

The case was settled when the local government awarded one of the six hydropower projects to Li's company, Jin'anqiao Hydropower Station, which has become world's largest hydropower station operated by a private company. Apart from generating power it generates more than 10 million yuan a day that goes straight into Li's company bank account.

Another one of the company's 18 guiding principles is: "The key to success is people, people and people."

"I am a hands-off guy," Li says. "I trust my staff."

He says he paid only six visits to the Jin'anqiao Hydropower Station in the eight years that it was being built.

Hanergy developed a dozen talent training programs targeting different staff levels. A senior manager who took part in one of the elite programs says Li gives them a lecture each month.

"He likes reading books, especially those about Chinese traditional culture," says the senior manager who asked not to be named. "In the latest lecture he told us about his understanding of a few books by Zhao Puchu, a late religious leader."

Hanergy's staff pay only one penny for their breakfast and lunch in canteens in their Beijing office. The company's headquarters, next to the Olympic Forest Park, consists of three four-story buildings, all of which have adopted the company's thin film solar technology to produce electricity.

"Now those facilities can produce 20 percent of the electricity we need," says Leon Liu, head of the company's external communications department. "When the second-phase program finishes in the first half year of this year, we will be totally energy self-reliant."

Successful entrepreneurs "take their chances", Li says.

"But they are not simply gamblers; they always prepare for the worst possible outcomes."

As Chinese companies rush into the crystalline silicon solar cell business, Li sees new opportunities in thin film solar cells, or what he calls "mobile energy".

"It's impossible to overlook the changes the mobile Internet has made in people's lives. I reckon that mobile energy is the technology of the future."

But even if shareholders put a lot of store by what the future holds, that does not necessarily translate into profits here and now. The Financial Times of London has said the vast majority of Hanergy Thin Film Power's products are sold to other companies under the same parent company, Hanergy Holding Group.

"We are running a whole industrial chain because at the moment very few companies anywhere in the world are in the thin film solar business," Li says. With more than 2,000 patents at home and abroad, Hanergy has few competitors in the field, he says.

The group will unveil five solar energy cars in October, he says, the first mass-produced solar energy cars of their kind. He gives no further details.

"I reckon 90 percent of the effort you put into anything produces 10 percent of your success, and that the very last 10 percent of effort produces 90 percent of your success. So wise entrepreneurs keep an eye on the current, have the courage to swim with it, and stick with it until it takes them where they had wanted to go."

Contact writers through huyuanyuan@chinadaily.com.cn