Rebirth 2010: I taught Mr. Lei how to make a mobile phone

Chapter 119 Hardware Breakthrough
At Tencent's Guangzhou R&D Center, Zhang Xiaolong, who was presiding over a meeting, was startled by a series of thunders outside the window.

He looked at the dark clouds outside the window, which were filled with lightning and thunder, but there was no sign of rain. He cursed the weather, saying, "Wasn't the forecast for today cloudy to sunny?"

After a while, the wind started to pick up, Zhang Xiaolong immediately stood up and closed all the windows in the conference room, and then continued the meeting.
In fact, Zhang Xiaolong has a similar background to Lei Jun, both are programmers, but one later became a product manager, while the other became a marketing genius and internet celebrity anchor. This shows that no matter how awesome a programmer's skills are, he will have to change careers when he gets older (dog head).

In the late 90s, Zhang Xiaolong, who was regarded by the outside world as the representative of the second generation of software engineers after Qiu Bojun, independently developed an email system called "Foxmail".

Within one year, the number of users of the Chinese version of Foxmail reached 400 million, and the English version was spread in more than 20 countries. It was listed as one of the "Top Ten Domestic Software" and became famous overnight. Later, Zhang Xiaolong sold "Foxmail" to Broad Group for 1200 million yuan, and joined Broad Group as technical director and vice president, becoming a company executive.

Later, Tencent Mail failed to develop. Pony Ma took a fancy to the most popular foxmail on the market at that time. After some inquiries, he also took a fancy to Zhang Xiaolong, a talent.

At first, Zhang Xiaolong was a little bit against it, but Pony Ma didn't waste any time and sent out two generals, Zeng Liqing and Liu Chih-ping, and used their financial power to directly acquire Broad Group and then break it up, retaining Zhang Xiaolong's technical team and Foxmail, thus obtaining both the products and the people.

Later, Ma Huateng and Zhang Xiaolong, who were both programmers, developed a mutual admiration for each other. At that time, Zhang Xiaolong was unwilling to work at the Shenzhen headquarters.

Ma Huateng specially set up a research and development center for him in Guangzhou, with Zhang Xiaolong as the general manager. Zhang Xiaolong only needed to go to Shenzhen to attend the president's meeting once every two weeks.

With the support of the Guangyan Center led by Zhang Xiaolong, QQ Mail has been constantly improving and extracting the essence of everything. After several years of development, it is now quite complete. In the domestic email market, it is known as Tencent's twin products together with Foxmail.

Now, as QQ Mail becomes more and more perfect, Foxmail is also developing iteratively step by step.

Zhang Xiaolong believes in a saying: "When everything seems calm and smooth, it is precisely the most dangerous time!"

For this reason, he began to prepare for the future and plan the strategic deployment for the next stage, which is also the reason for holding this meeting today.

According to his judgment, mobile Internet will be the general trend in the future, while currently only email has clients.

Therefore, under his leadership, this meeting clarified the product matrix with email as the core, divided into four parts, namely email, reading, storage, and notepad, and turned them into apps. Since email already has a client, the focus will be on the other three products, and corresponding client development plans have been made for them.

However, since most of the technical team members of the Guangyan Center were traditional PC developers and there was a serious shortage of mobile development engineers, most of the mobile development team were working on the Symbian system. For this reason, Zhang Xiaolong transferred two WinPhone engineers from the headquarters to form the iOS team, while the Android development team took an engineer from the Symbian team and brought two interns to start working.

Zhang Xiaolong knew that only by expanding his business widely enough could he have a greater say in Tencent.

At this time, he had not yet awakened his product talent, and the awakening potion was still in its infancy.

In a more distant country, in Waterloo, Canada, founder and CEO Ted once interned at BlackBerry for a while, and then he and several of his college classmates started Kik on their own, and their first product was the new mobile chat application Kik.

This is an address book based on the user's mobile phone, which allows users to chat with contacts directly via free text messages. Its biggest core competitiveness is building relationships through the address book, and the fact that text messages use data traffic and are therefore free.

These students never thought that in the far east, there was a team doing the same thing, and their products were faster and more mature than theirs.
That's right, we are talking about Hong Konger Guo Bingxin and his six entrepreneurial partners. In order to facilitate the blind to send and receive voice text messages while driving and answer calls, they are developing a voice IM software called TalkBox.

The cicadas are aware of autumn before the wind blows. These are just a few of the waves in the mobile Internet era. The wheel of history is rolling forward.
Back to Xiaomi.

Although Chen Mo didn't know much about the specific hardware technology, he felt that since Lei Jun was in trouble, he should be able to play a certain role.

He has this confidence, and Lei Jun also has this confidence in him.

After Lei Jun had a long talk with Chen Mo, the latter finally understood the specific situation of the company's hardware at this time.

Since Xiaomi wanted to go the high-end route from the beginning, other supply chains were also looking for top suppliers to discuss cooperation. Largan, Sharp, AUO, Inventec, Lite-On, and TPK were all supplier partners they were looking forward to cooperating with.

Recently, Dr. Zhou Guangping has been traveling around the world with his hardware team to negotiate and collaborate.

After all, Zhou Guangping has been immersed in the mobile phone industry for many years and has worked in Motorola for more than ten years, working his way up from core research and development to chairman of Motorola's mobile phone technology committee and Motorola's Global Technology Advisory Committee (SABA).

He was awarded the title of Outstanding Inventor by the Motorola headquarters and received Gold Card employee treatment. Over the years, he has developed deep personal relationships with many leading mobile phone suppliers.

When he first started looking for suppliers for Xiaomi, he was so familiar with the internal structure of the mobile phone that he knew every component had a corresponding supplier. He could locate the specific person in charge with whom he had a good relationship with just one phone call.

This is also the fundamental reason why Lei Jun brought Zhou Guangping in as a co-founder and gave him shares. In addition to his personal connections, he also brought several former Motorola colleagues to assist him in his work.

Zhou Guangping and his team enthusiastically chatted with the other party, and the atmosphere was very friendly. But in the end, the supplier often told him directly that there was no problem with eating and chatting, but no business was allowed.

At this time, he would use the installed capacity of MIOS to try to convince the other party, and give them a discount and guarantee: "You can make as much as you want, and you can make as much material as you want. If you are willing to make all of it, we can give it all to you." It can be seen that Xiaomi is already eager for suppliers.

But no one is optimistic about Xiaomi's model. Even though the installed volume does look very impressive, no one can say for sure how well Xiaomi will be recognized in the mobile phone market. No supplier will bet on a small, unknown company.

"Is Xiaomi okay? Don't let it end up where we can't get the payment back." This is the overall perception of Xiaomi among suppliers at that time.

I have talked to more than a dozen companies over the past half month and they all gave me the same answer.

What's worse, they directly sent representatives from their subordinates to come over. They were fine with having dinner and chatting, but they avoided the topic when it came to cooperation. Finally, under Zhou Guangping's repeated questioning, they revealed the truth. The company's superiors had no intention of cooperating with Xiaomi at all, but just came over to talk for the sake of Zhou Guangping's face.

This caused Zhou Guangping's team to have low morale. Before at Motorola, suppliers had always begged them, and they had never been so humble.

Two days later, in a remote telephone conference, Lei Jun, Lin Bin and Chen Mo, the three giants of Xiaomi headquarters, listened to Zhou Guangping's report and learned about the current situation.

Even though they had anticipated that things would not be smooth sailing and lowered their expectations, they did not expect it to be so difficult.
Through this meeting, the three people gained a deeper understanding of the supply chain relationships of mobile phone manufacturers, which is far more than a simple contractual relationship between Party A and Party B.

It doesn't mean that you can choose the suppliers you want to cooperate with at will just because you have enough cash.

As the most complex product in the consumer electronics field, the production of mobile phones is not just about purchasing a batch of components and then assembling them like assembling a computer. Instead, mobile phone manufacturers need to do a lot of research and development work, including customizing, debugging, and optimizing hundreds of components, and also consider how to design the antenna and how to stack the internal structure.
Mobile phone manufacturers need to conduct joint research and development, joint debugging, and even have special customized parts with core component manufacturers.

Component suppliers often have to invest money to conduct research and development together with the purchaser, so many components are exclusively customized, which requires a considerable investment, causing suppliers to be extremely cautious about cooperating with new purchasers.

Suppliers will have a higher chance of success if they choose partners with successful cases. Obviously, Xiaomi is not among them.

At this time, no one can really understand the meaning of Internet mobile phones. This situation is not because suppliers are conservative or arrogant, but because many suppliers have suffered from "copycat mobile phones" and are very resistant to new brands.

Some knockoff brands often place orders for goods worth hundreds of thousands of yuan, but sales are not guaranteed. When the payment is due, these manufacturers are unable to pay normally and become defaulters, and suppliers often lose all their money.

Therefore, many suppliers later asked the buyers to produce three years of financial statements before cooperation, otherwise it would be impossible to cooperate.

This has caused trouble for Xiaomi, which does not have any financial statements. After all, who knows whether Xiaomi is one of these copycat mobile phone brands?

Zhou Guangping said on the phone, "In the past few years, I have seen thousands of suppliers rise and fall. I have seen many ups and downs. Many stories that were beautiful at the beginning eventually turned into embarrassing accidents. So now everyone is extremely cautious. It really makes our work difficult."

The three people present looked at each other. Although Chen Mo had said something similar during the previous interview, they did not expect the situation to be so much worse and more complicated when it came true.

However, it is not without good news. Zhou Guangping still relied on his personal connections and credit to win over two parts suppliers, but it was a drop in the bucket.

However, he also brought a key piece of information, that is, although Xiaomi has accumulated a relatively large number of users through the MIOS operating system, it has not even negotiated the most important chip, let alone other components?
After some discussion, the few people finally set their sights on Qualcomm. As long as they could get Qualcomm's chips, they would have bargaining chips based on the installed base of MIOS, and the success rate of subsequent negotiations would be greatly improved.

Thanks to "I am a salted fish" for 200 points, and thanks to the two big guys "AI Learning Machine" for the tips. The boss is generous!

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(End of this chapter)