It's normal to develop some black technology in the future, right?

Chapter 364 Lion City Strategy
Were there any dissenting voices within Adidas? Of course there were.

Not only are there opposing voices within Adidas, but there are also many opposing voices within many giants that have built factories in Johor Bahru.

The main objection comes from the fact that Hornbill helps users choose products, which is the result of artificial intelligence thinking, not the result of user thinking.

In the past, these international brands built a complete marketing system to implant brand concepts in users’ brains, shape brand image, and manipulate users’ minds.

But now that Hornbill helps users make choices, the giants can manipulate the human mind through various propaganda methods. How can the giants manipulate people's minds when Hornbill can make decisions entirely based on data?

In China or America, the development of the re-skinned version of Hornbill is not so smooth. After all, there are still resistance forces in these places, and the government still needs to keep the jobs of the former giants, so it is also cautious about the promotion of the re-skinned version of Hornbill.

But in Southeast Asia, Hornbill is almost unconventional.

The e-commerce giants in these places have not built up strong enough local power.

Shopee, Amazon, shein, Temu, etc., have not established sufficiently deep alliances with local forces in Southeast Asia, and their interest ties are still at a very shallow level.

This resulted in Hornbill not encountering corresponding resistance during its expansion in Southeast Asia.

The price advantage brought by Hornbill's unique mechanism is incomparable even to TEMU.

As mentioned earlier, many giants have set up factories in Johor Bahru, and the products of these factories are directly sold throughout Southeast Asia through Hornbill.

It can be said that the terminal system built by Alpha from production to sales is an enhanced version of shein. Moreover, unlike shein which focuses on women's clothing, Alpha's coverage is much higher than shein.

The Alpha mentioned above can compress the cargo turnover rate to less than 7 days, which gives Hornbill higher bargaining power when selling goods to users.

The higher the turnover days, the slower the company recovers its funds and the lower its rate of return, which means it needs a higher profit margin and sets a higher initial price.

The turnover days are within 7 days, which means that as long as the company has income higher than the bank interest based on the cost, it will make a profit.

Of course, it is not just the costs of labor, water, electricity, warehousing, and transportation, but also includes equipment depreciation, land fees, etc.

The existence of Hornbill has overshadowed all brands and even caused a sharp drop in advertising revenue for TV programs across Southeast Asia.

In a region where more and more people are using Hornbill to make purchases, advertising is becoming less effective.

Therefore, many giants believe that cooperating with Alpha Technology is courting disaster. Under Hornbill's control, the brand will die sooner or later. Consumers only know about Hornbill and will not care whether you are backed by Adidas, Nike, Anta or Li Ning.

Among them, Nike only wants to build a factory in Johor Bahru and limit this cooperation model to Southeast Asia because they are doing well and do not need to make a comeback in this way.

Adidas is in a different situation. Even if it means selling its soul, Adidas is determined to cooperate with Alpha on a global scale.

Oraz shook his head and said, "Gao, you know very well that I don't have the final say over Alpha Technology. I certainly think we should expand rapidly and expand our scale globally.

Quickly replicate the Johor Bahru model around the world.

But Mr. Samad doesn't think so. He believes that we should only manage Johor Bahru well. As for places outside Malaysia, he doesn't care.

Our ability to transfer Hornbill technology to Tencent and Microsoft speaks volumes about Mr. Samad’s strategic vision; he is not interested in the global market.

Therefore, Gao, you might as well consider our proposal.”

Adidas' choice to cooperate with Alpha Technologies, as the first giant partner of Alpha's artificial intelligence factory, is closely related to its Asia-Pacific CEO Gao Jiali.

Gao Jiali was the president of Adidas Greater China in the past. In 2015, when he was in charge of Greater China, the sales of the entire Greater China region doubled, and the Asia-Pacific market quickly became Adidas' largest, fastest-growing and most profitable market. By the first half of 2020, for every 3 euros in revenue earned by Adidas, 1 euro came from Greater China.

In 2020, Gao Jiali suddenly resigned because he was dissatisfied with the limited authority in his business scope and hoped to be responsible for the entire Asia-Pacific region, but he could not reach an agreement with Adidas headquarters and finally chose to leave.

It is obvious that Adidas later invited Gao Jiali back to be responsible for the entire Asia-Pacific business, and after he returned, he personally facilitated the cooperation between Adidas and Alpha Technology.

This has also become another great achievement of his within Adidas. Since the Johor Bahru factory went into production, the benefits brought by the entire Johor Bahru factory have grown so fast that it even exceeded the growth of market share in Greater China in 2015.

With such achievements, Gao Jiali wanted to further promote the global cooperation between Adidas and Alpha Technology, and naturally obtained permission from the German headquarters, even if it meant selling his soul.

This is just like SAIC saying that cooperating with Huawei means losing its soul. GAC obviously does not want to lose its soul. It originally signed a cooperation agreement with Huawei but then terminated it. Later, it couldn't bear it anymore and decided to sell its soul after thinking about it.

In order to find a suitable rhetoric, some people even put forward the view that "in the past few years, autonomous driving was crucial to the competition of the whole vehicle. It is no exaggeration to say that it is the soul of the enterprise. But today, at least some technologies have opened the veil of mystery, and now autonomous driving technology can be achieved through the supply model."

In short, there is nothing wrong with selling your soul when it comes to profit.

Gao Jiali's face suddenly changed after hearing this: "That's absolutely not possible. We don't have such plans for the time being." What kind of cooperation model is unacceptable to Gao Jiali? It is that Adidas is further selling its soul.

In the past, the production side adopted an automated model with only a very small number of employees. There were less than 10 employees in charge of production in the entire Johor Bahru factory, and there were more employees in charge of transportation.

The marketing department mentioned above has been replaced by Hornbill, and Adidas' marketing expenses in the entire Southeast Asia region have been reduced to less than 10 million US dollars. Gao Jiali is even considering directly eliminating the entire Southeast Asian marketing department.

For clothing companies, production and marketing have been eliminated, so only design remains.

Alpha Technology hopes that the design end will also be done by artificial intelligence, and Adidas will only charge a fee.

This is equivalent to Adidas licensing its brand to Alpha, which then takes over the Johor Bahru factory in full and pays Adidas headquarters 120% of Adidas' investment cost multiplied by the profit margin of other regions of the Adidas Group.

For example, the investment in the Johor Bahru factory is US$2 million, and Adidas's full-year net profit margin is 5.3%, so Alpha Technologies will pay Adidas US$1272 million.

This is equivalent to Adidas becoming a completely hands-off boss in Southeast Asia, only collecting brand licensing fees.

This is not selling the soul, this is selling everything to Alpha Technology.

Only Antarctic people can accept such a cooperation model.

"Please submit this bill to Congress. Please check the email for the specific proposal."

A line of words flashed across Berian's glasses, and the entire line of words remained on his glasses without fading away. Sitting in the congressional seat, Berian felt a little uneasy, thinking that what was coming would come.

Two years ago, he inexplicably received an email, which contained only a video and a link.

The video shows him having dinner with another woman and kissing intimately. Both he and the other woman are married, which is a serious sex scandal.

The timing is very clever. Just a few days ago, more than one congressman voluntarily resigned due to sex scandals.

But who is this email from?
Berian thought hard, but he couldn't think of anyone who had the ability to know the action plan so clearly, get his cheating video, and help him deal with it.

In Bellian's opinion, even he himself couldn't do this.

Before 24 hours had passed, he received another email. This time it was a recording, which made him break out in a cold sweat.

This time I was really scared because the recording itself even involved the safety of the entire worker group.

This is an old story.

Berian suddenly yelled like crazy: "Who are you!

who are you! "

He always felt like someone in the room was watching him.

Suddenly he tore off the sticker on the front camera of his Apple laptop and stared straight into the camera: "Are you spying on me from across the street?"

But no one responded. After calming down, Berian had to click on the cooperation link in the email. After clicking, the interface that popped up had an eye the same size as a real person's eye, which then rotated and grew larger and finally disappeared from the screen.

This made Berian, who thought he would have to fill out information to join a mysterious organization, a little disappointed. He thought, is that it?

Of course not.

The next day, when he opened the door, he almost tripped over a cardboard box on the floor. He picked up the box and found that the LOGO printed on it was exactly the same as the eyes on yesterday's page.

He picked up the cardboard box with trepidation and went home. After opening it, he found a pair of glasses inside that were exactly the same shape as the ones he was wearing now.

Then and a note that said "Wear It" on it.

After Berian put on his glasses, he saw a line of words flash across them: "Happy cooperation."

The entire line of words lasted for five seconds and then disappeared.

Although it was brief, it allowed Bellian to confirm that this was not an illusion.

(End of this chapter)