Li Shufu, the chairman of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, had been eying Volvo Cars for eight years before finalizing a deal last week to buy the Swedish carmaker from Ford Motor for $1.8 billion.

Li had been looking for a way to hasten his young company's technology development and improve its quality and image. "I wanted to buy BMW or Mercedes, but they wouldn't sell," Li joked to colleagues, according to his chief spokesman, Victor Young.

Volvo, on the other hand, was a luxury nameplate that Li figured would become available some day, once Ford realized it had too many brands to feed. It wasn't until the global economic crisis that Ford decided to sell Volvo, which it acquired for $6.5 billion in 1999, to focus on its namesake brand. The premium unit has been a money-loser for Ford for the past four years. In 2009, its pretax loss narrowed to $934 million from $1.7 billion the prior year.

"I see Volvo as a tiger: it belongs to the forest and shouldn't be contained in the zoo," Li said in Mandarin at a joint press conference with Ford in Volvo's hometown of Gothenberg, Sweden, according to Bloomberg. "The heart of the tiger is in Sweden and Belgium," he said, referring to the two countries where Volvo has its main plants. "Its paws should extend all across the world."

Li plans to return Volvo to profitability by expanding Volvo sales in China, adding a low-cost Chinese manufacturing plant and getting more production out of its existing European factories.

The deal, which would give Geely access to advanced safety and environmental technology and a recognized global luxury brand, is expected to close in the third quarter, pending regulatory approvals.

Li, who ranks No. 556 on Forbes' list of the world's richest people with an estimated net worth of $1.8 billion, is the son of a farmer from Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai. His first business was a photo studio in his village. He later made refrigerator components and then built a former state-owned enterprise into China's best-known motorcycle company. He started building autos in 1998.

Along the way, Li, 47, has defied the odds in a country where government-owned enterprises have distinct advantages when it comes to raising capital or winning approval for expansion. He founded Geely in 1998 without a government license, then bought out a Hong Kong-listed shell company, giving him access to capital markets and the flexibility to grow as he wished. He has built Geely into China's 10th largest automaker, eventually winning favor from the Chinese government and attracting a $334 million investment (worth a 15 per cent stake) from Goldman Sachs in 2009.

The Bank of China and its related conglomerates have agreed to provide Geely with at least $1 billion in loans for the Volvo purchase, according to the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly. Local governments in Zhejiang, Beijing and Tianjin are expected to provide at least $500,000 to Geely. Meanwhile, the governments of Sweden and Belgium are providing guarantees for Geely's local low-interest loans, Southern Weekly reported.

Today, Geely has 14,000 employees, nine manufacturing sites in China, plus kit assembly factories in several countries, including Russia, Ukraine and Malaysia.

Geely's 2009 results are due within a few weeks. For the six months ended June 2009, the company's publicly listed unit reported revenue of $871 million and pre-tax profit of $112 million. Geely said it had $217 million in bank borrowings, $124 million of which was due to be repaid within the next year.

Swallowing the larger Volvo isn't the least of Li's ambitions. His growth plans for his company: production capacity for 2 million vehicles by 2015, up from 400,000 today, and doubling the company's Chinese market share to 10%. He also plans for half of Geely's sales to be exports from China.

On the humbler side, Li acknowledges his company has much to learn from its global competitors. "We are an ant that is becoming a bigger ant." Those other guys, he says, are elephants.