SANY Group: how innovation is driving China’s best employer

SANY Group has been recognised by Forbes as China’s best employer.

The multinational equipment manufacturer is no stranger to such accolades, having secured China’s top employer status for the last three years.

Pretty impressive given the size of the Chinese multinational, which, as the third largest heavy equipment manufacturer in the world, has a presence in 140 countries, operates 18 regional headquarters, employs more than 90,000 workers, owns three listed companies, and has a sales turnover of US$21 billion. 

Even more impressive, the Beijing-headquartered company was crowned ‘China’s Best Employer in Innovative Practices’ for 2023.

This recognises not only the Group’s continued efforts in boosting the influence of employer brand, and for promoting employee development, social responsibility and sustainability development, but for its outstanding accomplishments in innovative practices.

Well-known for prioritising innovation as its primary driving force, SANY invests heavily in R&D and innovation – with around 5% of the company’s annual sales revenue dedicated to R&D efforts. The company also counts 25 R&D manufacturing facilities worldwide and more than 10,000 R&D professionals. 

Last year, the manufacturer won a number of ‘market-first and technology-first’ honours in the electrification industry, including SANY electric heavy trucks which achieved the highest sales in its category and took the lead in entering the era of electrification 2.0. The company also launched the world’s first fully battery-powered telehandler crawler crane.

Driving this innovation is SANY's talented workforce, a result of the firm's ongoing commitment to fostering talent and innovation through a variety of ongoing initiatives. The Future Leaders Innovation Competition and other training programmes are all designed to discover, nurture, and sustain talent and provide employees with digital technology training.

Led by a talent-driven strategy

Led by Chairman Liang Wengen, one of the group’s four co-founders, SANY has set an workforce blueprint – that by 2025, it will boost production value from 170 billion to 300 billion yuan, downsizing the industrial workers from 30,000 to 3,000 while increasing engineers from 5,000 to 30,000.

The corporation, which began life in 1989 as a small welding company, is also committed to providing employees with a platform to themselves innovate – advocating cross-departmental cooperation to promote the sharing of creative knowledge.

According to Forbes: “The Group is building an open, inclusive, and united corporate culture to encourage employees to try new things and break new ground, giving fully play to their talents and creativity.”

SANY’s talent-driven strategy includes new employee integration, global elite talent project, all-around skill camp, talent team building – all ways to motivate talent to innovate, be entrepreneurial, and create greater values.

Benefits also play a part in the recruitment, retention and motivation of employees, with the listed company recently rolling out its employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) for the fourth consecutive year.

SANY’s ESOP, which aims to share the fruits of the Group’s achievements with employees, is is seeing the number of employees awarded with stock ownership incentives growing annually – and the proportion of mid-level and key position employees increase YoY.

The 2023 ESOP has set up a fund size of around US$82 million with a share repurchase price planned at US$2.24.

Corporate social responsibility take centre stage too as the corporation looks to achieve sustainable development of the industry, society and individuals.

Among its many CSR programmes, SANY has been recognised for its long-running Blue Envelope pen-pal initiative which focuses on providing psychological support for left-behind children in remote rural areas. Volunteers maintain regular mail communication with the children, and in 15 years of running, SANY has supported children in 893 schools across China, with more than 1 million letters sent.