When Su Xiaoxi joined the fledgling Qingdao Refrigerator Co. fresh out of university in 1988, the enterprise was only four years into its attempt to transform a dilapidated state-run factory famous for shoddy workmanship into China’s leading maker of quality home appliances. China’s economy was in the early stages of opening to the West, so Qingdao’s managers looked abroad for help. A few years earlier, the company had signed a technology licensing agreement with Germany’s Liebherr Group, a major European appliance maker better known in the United States for its line of cranes and other heavy construction equipment.
But the deal required something of an intellectual great leap, Su recalls. “When we introduced the technologies from the German company, we had to pay it royalties,” Su says. “At the time, most Chinese companies couldn’t imagine paying money for something you could not see, that was invisible. But even then, we had this awareness of the value of intellectual property rights.”
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