Among China's private enterprises, CHINT Group is a model of innovation, transformation and upgrading, and green development. Among China's private entrepreneurs, Nan Cunhui, Chairman of CHINT Group, represents grassroots entrepreneurship. He started a small business and expand it into a global business with steady operation.

Over 40 years ago, Nan Cunhui came from a poor peasant family in a small town in southern Zhejiang. In order to make a living, he dropped out of school at the age of 13 and became a roadside cobbler like his father. Later, the breeze of reform awakened the entrepreneurial passion of Wenzhou people, and the market economy began to sprout.

However, at that time, disputes about "socialist or capitalist" never stopped, and no one knew exactly what to do. Then, the local Party committee and government promised to respect people's creativity, which gave the private business owners some reassurance. Nan Cunhui followed the trend of the times and used his own house as a workshop. He borrowed some money and became a self-employed businessman. In the 1980s, he started his own business.

In the early days, the low-voltage electrical appliance market was at the preliminary stage. Nan Cunhui was among the first to hire technical experts, set up laboratories, and apply for production licenses. He was determined to run the business with integrity and compete with quality. In 1991, he established the Sino-US joint venture ­— Wenzhou CHINT Electric Co., Ltd., introduced foreign investment, advanced technology and equipment, and determined to take a path of specialized operation. In 1992, in order to promote scale development of the private economy, Zhejiang Provincial Government sent a large number of experts to different private enterprises to provide guidance and introduce modern enterprise management techniques. In 1994, CHINT, a pioneer in China's business exploration,  established the first enterprise group in the industry. Later, by adopting the concept of value sharing, Nan Cunhui decided to reduce his own personal equity share and allowed for investment in forms of technology, management expertise or operation. In this way, he was one of the first to start a shareholding reform of private enterprises in China. His company was committed to scientific, globalized and intelligent development, so as to get integrated into the Yangtze River Delta, and finally go global and become a leader in low-voltage electrical appliances in Asia.

In the 21st century, the government began to promote transformation and upgrading of industrial economy and develop new energy. Nan Cunhui came to realize that due to the three major global problems of resource shortage, environmental pollution and climate change, it is an inevitable trend to optimize the energy pattern. Developing clean energy is not only the need of the global market and the need of transformation and upgrading, but also the responsibility of enterprises to participate in ecological conservation. He once imagined that if 1% of the world's area was equipped with solar panels, all electricity problems could be solved. This would be awesome!

Starting from 2006, CHINT entered the new photovoltaic energy field, forming a full industrial chain of power generation, energy storage, power transmission and transformation, distribution, and energy use. It has explored a series of new green development models with leading technologies and business types, including desert-photovoltaic complementation, agriculture-photovoltaic complementation, fishery-photovoltaic complementation, industrial and commercial roofs, household photovoltaics, multi-energy complementation, and integrated energy services. So far, CHINT has invested and built more than 6GW of photovoltaic power plants in the world, with an average annual power generation of about 6.4 billion kWh, which can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6.47 million tons per year. Every day, as the sun rises, CHINT carries out safety management and "butler-style" maintenance services for more than 300,000 roofs.

Looking back on its history of over 40 years, Nan Cunhui and CHINT have always followed the pulse of society and the times, adhered to the customer-centered, market-oriented, and technology-supported development concept, and created a model of integrated development of modern energy, advanced manufacturing and digital technology. With the digital upgrade of upstream and downstream industrial chains and strategic emerging industries, the group has globalized its production layout, marketing network, R&D system and talent team. With more than 37,000 employees, it has created more than 200,000 upstream and downstream jobs and provided products and services to more than 140 countries and regions around the world. During the pandemic, by leveraging its advantages in smart manufacturing and the global value of Chinese companies, CHINT worked with global customers from Italy, Spain, Dubai, and South Africa to fight the epidemic and tide over the difficulties.

In the future, CHINT will seize the major opportunities in industrial Internet and energy reforms, and take "One Cloud and Two Networks" (i.e., CHINT Cloud, CHINT Industrial IoT, and CHINT Energy IoT) as its strategic guidance. It will further play its role as a Chinese enterprise in stabilizing growth, promoting innovation, increasing employment, improving people's livelihood, and promoting "carbon peak and carbon neutrality", and continue to create new value for the evolution of global commercial civilization and the beautiful life of mankind with safer, cheaper, more environment-friendly and more convenient smart energy.