20 years of restarting life

Chapter 3637 Negotiation
Sven-Kee's words caused a stir in the conference room. Ericsson and his colleagues, as well as Mina and Raimondi, the heads of RIM's European office, all wore expressions of agreement.

Apart from Ke Dechuan, who is currently the president of Ericsson and has become somewhat isolated from the mobile phone industry, the other six people have always been engaged in the mobile phone terminal industry and are all elite senior middle managers in it.

Naturally, they understand how complicated it is to build a complete mobile phone factory and architecture, and how many uncertainties exist in the future sales market.

This uncertainty stems not only from whether the phone's features meet market demands and whether it can be used smoothly without quality defects, but also from the phone's marketing and promotion, as well as the competition for market share among rival models.

Just like Ericsson's T-series phones, they have never been able to solve many problems such as frequent automatic shutdowns, crashes, automatic restarts, button malfunctions, and motherboard failures.

In particular, the T28 saw long queues of users waiting for repairs at Ericsson's various service centers in the Chinese market, with some requiring two, three, or even more repairs. This attracted extensive media coverage, and many users filed lawsuits in court demanding compensation.

Even so, Ericsson stubbornly maintained that the T-series phones had no quality issues, and that any problems with the phones were either isolated incidents or caused by human error. He refused to admit any wrongdoing, apologize, or compensate phone users for their losses.

However, similar mobile phone problems subsequently occurred in Star City and the South Pacific region. Ericsson only chose to apologize to Star City users and provide compensation.

This behavior angered Chinese users, resulting in a sharp drop in Ericsson phone sales in China and a decline in Ericsson's market share in the global mobile phone market.

Meanwhile, due to a fire at the Philips chip factory, Ericsson mobile phones significantly simplified its supply chain and eliminated backup suppliers in order to save costs from the mid-1990s.

The fire at the chip factory caused Ericsson to be unable to meet market demand for mobile phone chips, resulting in a loss of more than $400 million in sales. Moreover, this loss allowed Nokia and Motorola to widen the gap in their rankings with Ericsson.

In 01, Ericsson suffered losses for all four quarters, which only added fuel to the fire.

In this situation, Ericsson first made the drastic decision to cut off mobile phone manufacturing plants outside of the Chinese market and outsource production to Flextronics. This allowed them to continue streamlining costs while avoiding repeating the mistakes of the Philips chip factory fire.

However, issues with the phone's design and component supply still cannot resolve these quality problems.

That's why they had no choice but to bring in Sony, hoping to use the craftsmanship and technology of the Japanese to smooth out these quality defects.

Therefore, creating a completely new architecture model from scratch is never an easy task, especially for a newly established company. Such a delusional idea of ​​achieving instant success and building castles in the air is seen as a ridiculous joke by the elites in the mobile phone industry.

The safest option is to directly import mature mobile phone production lines and models, as Siwenkai suggested.

Then, only after accumulating sufficient technology and R&D capabilities can we talk about the next step of independent innovation. Ke Dechuan and Si Wenkai sat together and whispered a few words. In the somewhat noisy conference room, even the Ericsson staff sitting next to them couldn't hear them. However, Zhao Chang'an, a man of ancient martial arts and integrity, was able to keenly detect the clear sounds.

"You mean a joint venture with equity? Even if it's a 50% joint venture, Ericsson's equivalent share would only be 25%. Besides, even if this requires negotiation, it's Tesco's decision. I understand your idea that Pro should use the mobile company's standard license, but Ericsson has no right to dictate how a separate joint venture should operate."

"It doesn't need to go through Sony Ericsson; it's an independent investment by Ericsson. The licenses for models like the T600 and T608 are still with Ericsson's headquarters; they haven't been transferred, they're just licensed to Sony Ericsson. However, we haven't signed an exclusive contract with Sony Ericsson."

The Sony-Ericsson joint venture has only been established for a few months. Although the two parties completed most of the mobile phone manufacturing capacity when they signed the contract, many detailed contracts are still held by each other's headquarters due to reasons such as price. This also includes Ericsson's T-series mobile phones.

Ericsson's idea was to package all the phone series into the joint venture. However, Sony was not stupid and was naturally unwilling to pay for the failed models. These models and the various new technologies they derived had been the result of huge investments over the years. Ericsson was certainly unwilling to let the joint venture reap the rewards and leave a loss-making mess for the parent company.

Sven-Kai's idea was to re-engineer some details of the T-series models, re-architect them, and have Pro manufacture them. At the same time, he would invest a small amount of money, while most of the investment could be converted into shares through technology licenses. This would also tie Pro to Ericsson's mobile platform 2.5 and 3G patent licenses.

This is the kind of cooperation that maximizes Ericsson's interests.

Once the meeting room quieted down, Ke Dechuan looked at Zhao Chang'an, who was sitting opposite him with an expressionless face, and said, "Since RIM holds shares in Pro, Ericsson can also explore similar collaborations with you. Then, we can introduce Ericsson's next-generation models, such as the T608, and make some adaptive adjustments. This would be the best option for both Ericsson and Pro."

Zhao Chang'an looked at the group of people opposite him with some surprise. He roughly understood that in addition to wanting Pro to use their patent license, they also wanted to bypass Sony Ericsson and negotiate a joint venture for mobile phone manufacturing with Pro alone.

Indeed, the business world is like a battlefield. After suffering a major setback in the mobile phone terminal industry, Ericsson sold off its mobile phone manufacturing plants and outsourced production to OEMs. At the same time, it also formed joint ventures to offload its original mobile phone terminal companies. However, it wanted to start afresh here and let Pro take the lead in testing the market.

But other people in this world aren't stupid; they don't expect you to get so many freebies.

Zhao Chang'an explicitly refused in English: "Currently, Pro is not considering introducing new joint venture partners, nor does it intend to introduce mature models. For your company, we can discuss 2.5 and 3G patent licensing, as well as your Bluetooth technology, baseband chips, and even Symbian OS v6.x."

"Symbian OS v6.x requires you to talk to Psion, but I don't think the chances of success are high."

Sivenkai laughed when he heard this, and the other four, including Ericsson, as well as Mina and Raimondi, all showed embarrassed expressions.

Because Psion's Symbian OS is a smartphone operating system jointly developed by Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, and Psion, the company's investments cover the top three giants in the global mobile phone manufacturing industry. Its purpose is to use its technological advantages to exclusively monopolize the future smartphone sales market.

The young man in front of him now actually wanted to use Symbian OS, and even acted as if he was doing them a favor by using their operating system. This kind of behavior made Siwen Kai find it quite ridiculous.