China a pasture for Wuerth's global expansion

Appreciation of employees and distributors gives them higher motivation, he said. Wuerth said that employees must have fun in their profession. He compared that with sports clubs. The top ones always have players with strong willingness to achieve their goals.

"You have to act, fight and be optimistic, positive and a little bit aggressive," Wuerth said. "If you observe the companies in the world who are very successful, they are managed and led by people like that."

Wuerth also said his company's success is due to management techniques in business, such as bookkeeping, warehousing and manufacturing, as well as research and development.

"The most important part is that we are offering the best quality in the market and only exclusively in the upper level. This strategy is very successful," he said.

In the last 65 years, The Wuerth Group had a compound annual growth rate of 22 percent.

When he was a young merchant in the 1950s and 1960s, Wuerth led the company to grow at 60 percent to 100 percent annually and was often short on liquidity. He increased the stock of his warehouses and had many accounts receivable.

One day, a manager of the local bank asked him to come in, then blamed him for taking too much money out his account. The manager said he would not accept any check from the young entrepreneur.

"This was for me a very good example, because I learnt that growth without profit was fatal. From that time on, I was looking to increase sales but also profitability," Wuerth said.

From 1999 to 2000, Wuerth taught students at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. He delivered 32 lectures over two semesters and said at the final lecture: "Maybe you have now heard 32 lectures from me. If you hold in your mind only one idea, 'growth without profitability is fatal', and then it was a good investment in time for you and also for me as a professor."

"But on principle, I am an expansionist," Wuerth said. "I want to grow the company, improve things and see development and inventions, so it must be of fun every day."

The Wuerth Group has sought mergers and acquisitions over decades. It acquired some German companies, such as HAHN+KOLB Werkzeuge GmbH, an over-110-year-old tool dealership and distributor. In Shenyang, they have a screw factory, Arnold, which was a member of The Wuerth Group, but they are still named Arnold in the market.

"What we do is acquire companies here and there, leave them under their own names and partly under their own management," Wuerth said. "What we give is some influence of our ideas and some money to invest."

Now, about 40 percent of The Wuerth Group's sales are not under its own name, but from allied companies.

"We will continue this way and acquire companies if we can," Wuerth said. "I don't comply with the idea not to diversify. My experience is that if it is done in the clever way, you can be very successful."