Midea Group (000333.SZ, hereinafter referred to as "the United States") spent about 4 billion yuan to buy back shares at the general meeting of shareholders today (July 23). In response to questions from investors, Fang Hongbo, chairman and president of Midea Group, said that there will be no adjustments in the number of future employees in the United States, but the staff structure will be further optimized to increase the proportion of R&D and technical personnel.
Earlier, Midea Group announced on the evening of July 4 that it planned to repurchase with no more than 4 billion yuan. If fully implemented, it will become the largest repurchase in the history of A shares.
On July 5, Midea Group issued an update announcement stating that it intends to repurchase the company's shares with its own funds of no more than RMB 4 billion, and the repurchase price does not exceed RMB 50/share. According to the announcement, according to the upper limit of the repurchase amount, it is estimated that the number of repurchased shares is not less than 80 million shares, accounting for more than 1.2% of the company's current issued total share capital. At the same time, the repurchase method is a centralized bidding transaction, and the repurchase period is within 12 months from the date of review and approval of the share repurchase plan by the shareholders' meeting.

According to public information, in 1980, the predecessor of “Beauty” officially entered the home appliance industry. In 1981, the registered beauty brand was officially marketed. Up to now, Midea Group's products involve air-conditioning, kitchen appliances, ice washing and other home appliance industries. It has a relatively complete set of small household electrical appliances and kitchen appliances. It has beautiful, Little Swan, Welling, Hualing, Ande, More than ten brands such as Meizhi.
Since 1980, Midea Group has developed into a giant in the white goods industry after 38 years of ups and downs in the field of Chinese household appliances. According to the latest financial report of Midea Group, Midea Group achieved operating income of 240.712 billion yuan in 2017, up 51.35% year-on-year; net profit was 17.284 billion yuan, up 17.70% year-on-year; net profit after deduction was 15.614 billion yuan, up year-on-year 15.72%. In the first quarter of 2018, Midea Group achieved operating income of 69.738 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16.70%; net profit of 5.256 billion yuan, an increase of 20.76%; net profit after deduction was 5.078 billion yuan, an increase of 19.11%.

Midea Group said that the repurchase is based on the confidence of the company's future development prospects, taking into account the company's recent stock secondary market performance, and based on the company's operating conditions, the main business development prospects, the company's financial status and future profitability. . According to Midea Group's operation, finance and future development, the company believes that the amount of 4 billion yuan of share repurchase will not have a major impact on operations, finance and future development.
In response to the investor's question, Fang Hongbo said that although the profit of the US robot business is not high compared to the original home appliance business, the profit rate is not low compared to other robot companies. This reflects the fact that Midea Group's layout in the field of intelligent manufacturing is further accelerated. In 2016, Midea Group's acquisition of KUKA Group, one of the world's four largest robotics companies, enabled Midea Group to complement the robotics industry segment. At the Midea Group's annual strategy conference on March 7, 2018, Midea Group released its 2018 annual strategy to create a beautiful version of the Industrial Internet driven by digital and artificial intelligence. And launched a new "human-machine new generation" strategy, and introduced robots, build smart factories, focus on big data-based analysis and open up, so that all business interconnection, and greater efforts to create an industrial Internet ecosystem. Three months later, from June 12th to 13th, Midea Group exhibited the latest developments in the company's intelligent manufacturing and production line for the first time, including the smart equipment of its robot manufacturing company KUKA and the intelligent logistics business of cleaning appliances.

For the application of robots, Fang Hongbo believes that the future automotive industry will gradually become saturated, and the Chinese robot market has the advantage of diversified business structure, and the robot penetration rate is low, so the beautiful robot business will have a large market space in the future. As mentioned at the beginning, in order to realize the "human-machine new generation" strategy, Fang Hongbo revealed that "the future number of employees in the United States will not be adjusted, but the staff structure will be further optimized to increase the proportion of R&D and technical personnel."

(Source: China National Power)