Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 134: Stand Up to Go In and Lie Down to Come Out
Ji Chenghe reported to Xu Shenxue on Zhiyun Technology's sales and revenue in recent months, with the focus naturally on the mobile phone hardware business.

Ji Chenghe said: "The growth rate of our software value-added business is very obvious at present, but the base is still a bit small, so the total amount is limited."

"The value-added services of Zhiyun Technology mainly consist of three parts. One is the APP built-in fee, which is actually not much, because our Zhiyun mobile phone is a mid-to-high-end mobile phone, and we are relatively restrained in the built-in software. The built-in software we choose are some tool software with strong demand, and the fee is not high. But I heard from Lao Bai that their built-in income at Weiku Electronics is very good."

"The second revenue source comes from the channel share of the APP store. This is the biggest part. When users download software through our official channels and then make payments, Zhiyun APP will charge a channel fee..."

Hearing this, Xu Shenxue recalled some recent discussions on the Internet, saying that Zhiyun Technology was a robber, setting up a system APP mall and charging fees... just like a highway toll station.

You know what, Xu Shenxue thinks the netizens’ description is particularly accurate. The system APP mall is originally a toll station for selling traffic...

Of course, many people criticized this as a smart cloud tax... Xu Shenxue took it as a compliment.

However, these people cursed Zhiyun APP as Zhiyun tax, and it sounded like they were gnashing their teeth in hatred.

But after scolding, he turned around and went to lick the operations staff of Zhiyun Mall Company... hoping to get traffic support... It's also quite interesting.

Ji Chenghe continued, "In our channel fee revenue, the gaming category accounts for the majority, about 75%, of which the Asia-Pacific region contributes the most. Relatively speaking, the gaming category accounts for a relatively high proportion of the channel revenue in Europe and the United States, but not so exaggerated!"

"Based on this situation, we have asked Zhiyun Mall to adjust its operating strategy to support different types of developers in different regions!"

"At the same time, our Zhiyun Mall has also spawned a large number of small and medium-sized software developers in China, allowing these small and medium-sized software developers to not only enter the domestic mobile Internet market quickly and easily, but also enter the overseas market through Zhiyun Mall to earn US dollars, thus driving a large number of jobs."

"From this perspective, I feel like we are doing a charity project..."

Ji Chenghe is even more shameless than Xu Shenxue when he speaks... He can even say that making money without doing anything is a public welfare project.

However, Xu Shenxue still agreed: "We can talk about these when we go back to promote, emphasize our positive role for domestic software developers, our role in solving employment problems, and package and beautify it a little bit, so that they don't keep saying we are some kind of Zhiyun tax all day long!"

Ji Chenghe said: "That's the reason. The existence of our Zhiyun Mall has helped many domestic software development companies and even individuals make money. The most typical example is Yihai Network."

"Yihai Network has rapidly risen in the gaming industry in the past few months. Its three free-to-download games, Fruit Wars, Candy Crush, and Fish Fight, have become popular around the world, with monthly revenue reaching an astonishing hundreds of millions."

"I think we can use this company to promote it!"

However, Xu Shenxue shook his head after hearing this and said, "Forget it. This is my gaming company and it's not suitable to be promoted. If it is promoted, it will have the opposite effect!"

After hearing this, Ji Chenghe thought about it and said, "It was my mistake. I will go back and look for third-party game companies and find some typical ones to promote!"

The achievements of Yihai Network cannot be regarded as universal because it is Xu Shenxue’s private investment company.

In order to promote the games of this game company, Xu Shenxue used Yihai Network's small games as demonstration games at the S9 and C2 press conferences. Even Bai Qiwen of WeCool Electronics used Yihai Network's small games for demonstration at his press conference.

These are all huge advertisements, especially when the S9 mobile phone was first released, it attracted global attention, and countless people learned about the game Fruit Wars because of this press conference.

In addition, no matter how ignorant the people in Zhiyun Mall are, they will quietly provide a lot of traffic support, and put them on all the rankings, best game recommendations, etc.

With such huge traffic support, even a rubbish game can make it to the top, not to mention Yihai Network’s several small games, which are of pretty good quality.

Therefore, the achievements made by Yihai Network are relatively special and cannot be promoted as a universal example.

Ji Chenghe continued, "Finally, there are some value-added services provided by Zhiyun itself, such as paid upgrades and expansions of cloud storage. Users can pay to purchase more cloud storage capacity in addition to the free 1GB of cloud storage space."

"Then we also created a music app, a reading app, and a film and television app."

"Of course, we at Zhiyun don't produce content ourselves. Instead, we adopt a cooperative approach to introduce content providers and collect commissions."

"As for the reading apps in Greater China, we have cooperated with Qidian in accordance with your instructions, President Xu. Qidian provides the content, and the two parties share the profits."

"We are still discussing cooperation on English online articles with them. If possible, we would like them to provide some translated online articles or original English content, and then promote them through our reading apps in overseas markets. This kind of continuous cultural penetration will be more conducive to our future global strategic development."

Xu Shenxue nodded. It was his suggestion to cooperate with Qidian in the field of reading... Otherwise, a high-ranking business tycoon like Ji Chenghe would never care about such a tiny market like online literature.

The main reason Xu Shenxue did this was because he used to like reading online articles, and he also knew that online articles were an important usage scenario for smartphones... He didn't expect to make money from this, but he had to provide users with this part of the ecological content.

In addition, he has another ambition, which is to selectively promote some excellent online articles to the world...

Hollywood can export culture through movies, Japan can export culture through anime, and even South Korea can export culture through shit like Korean dramas... There's no reason why the Chinese can't do that!

Domestic film and television dramas are too bad, and the so-called traditional culture is something that is self-contained and difficult to promote, but online literature is relatively easier.

This stuff belongs to popular culture, and many things in it are common to all human beings, so it is relatively easy for even foreigners to accept it.

Moreover, literature is easier to export culture... After all, literature, from the story background to the character's behavior patterns, is actually a highly reflected cultural model.

When running a large enterprise, especially a multinational enterprise, there are many things to consider...sometimes you will do things that seem unrelated, such as cultural output!

Just imagine, when the world generally recognizes the greatness and advancement of Chinese culture, will Zhiyun phones sell better? Will its high-end brand positioning be more solid?

This subtle influence is actually very important... Ordinary companies only need to consider the product itself, but super-large multinational companies like Zhiyun Technology often need to consider more things, and cultural influence is only part of it.

We also need to take into account the global situation, regional situation, economic conditions, income levels and even cultural aspects.

The chairman of Zhiyun Technology directly reports to an organization called the "International Market Research Institute" and the "Strategic Analysis Headquarters," which are pure think tanks that conduct extensive and in-depth research and analysis.

It can even be said that Zhiyun Technology's research on the economic and social aspects of major global markets is larger and more in-depth than related research led by most countries.

Only in this way can Zhiyun Technology be provided with the most basic decision-making basis for entering various national or regional markets... rather than just rushing in without thinking, and then dying without knowing how you died.

For example, recently someone in India said that they want to invite world-class large mobile phone manufacturers, such as Apple and Zhiyun, to invest in India... The various preferential measures offered are very attractive.

Some voices within Zhiyun Technology want to take advantage of this opportunity to enter India, an emerging market with a large population and a considerable economic growth rate, in advance. By investing and building factories locally, they want to gain a more favorable competitive position and occupy the future mid-to-high-end smartphone market in India.

In response to this proposal, researchers from the International Market Research Institute conducted a detailed analysis of the Indian market, starting from the local culture, national characteristics, and modern historical changes, and then analyzed the investment situation of dozens of foreign companies investing in India, and finally issued a report.

The report details the miserable situation of major multinational companies entering the Indian market, but leaving with difficulty...

No one will have a good ending!

Experts at the institute strongly recommend that large-scale investments in India should be avoided as much as possible. Otherwise, it is hard to say whether you can make money, but you will definitely not get your money back. The place is too unstable, and changing orders every day is just a small matter. In addition, today's laws are often used to impose fines for the past... and all kinds of tricks such as forced sales are waiting for large foreign companies.

When it comes to killing pigs, no matter whether you are Chinese pigs or European and American pigs, they will kill them all without mercy... After killing them, they will complain that you didn't send enough pigs...

Xu Shenxue also remembered how a number of international giants had bad luck in India in later generations, and decisively asked the company to terminate this unreliable plan... Forget about investing, just selling mobile phones would be enough.

Unfortunately, the fruit company was also highly synchronized with Zhiyun... Faced with such a huge potential market in India, it had no intention of investing at all.

Fruit is also eyeing Zhiyun... As each other's biggest competitor, if you can find the reason why your opponent doesn't do something, that would be the best. If you can't find the reason, just don't do it...

Otherwise, I don’t know how I died.

Then the two high-end mobile phone brands are just selling mobile phones in India... You can add tariffs if you want, I only make money from the offshore wholesale price, so you can add any local taxes you want...

As for sales, there are only two high-end brands in the world, which seems to mean that Indians have a lot of choices... They will still buy them even if they are a few hundred dollars more expensive or a few hundred dollars less.

The investment plan for the Indian market was terminated before it even started, which was the role of detailed strategic research.

Of course, things like cultural exports are still far away, and at present the reading field is only being promoted as a usage scenario for Zhiyun mobile phones.

What about smartphones? Apart from traditional communication needs, they can be used to play games, watch TV and movies, read, and watch interesting news and short videos.

Reading is a relatively widespread and frequent category in mobile phone usage scenarios.

This move also opened up the mobile Internet era for online literature, an extremely niche industry. Relying on the huge shipment volume of Zhiyun mobile phones, Qidian's paying users increased significantly, further strengthening its position as the industry leader in online literature.

After all, users who can afford Zhiyun phones these days actually have decent financial conditions. At the same time, Zhiyun Technology also provides mature and convenient recharge channels, so their consumption capacity is still quite considerable.

With the advent of the mobile Internet era, the cooperation between Qidian and Zhiyun has enabled many authors who were starving to death to receive meager royalties to barely fill their stomachs...

The same is true for games, videos, and music... Zhiyun Technology does this not to make money from these contents, but more to provide users with richer mobile ecosystem content and increase the functionality and playability of the mobile phone.

In order to obtain more and better content, Zhiyun Technology will select different content partners according to different regions.

Zhiyun Technology does not produce content, it only provides traffic entrances and then makes some profit from it!
It’s really just a few hundred million…

Ji Chenghe said: "Through the above-mentioned built-in APP, Zhiyun Mall channel revenue, Internet value-added services, etc., plus some other miscellaneous software and Internet revenue, according to this scale, it is about more than 1 billion US dollars a year. It is not much, but the growth rate is good, and the future is promising!"
What does it mean to have an annual revenue of more than 09 billion US dollars? Tencent, a BTA company, only had a revenue of billion US dollars in .

However, if this annual revenue of more than 1 billion US dollars is placed in the estimated annual revenue of Zhiyun Technology, it really has no sense of existence... According to the current situation of Zhiyun Technology in all aspects, the annual revenue is at least more than 30 billion US dollars, and the gross profit reaches an astonishing 10 billion US dollars...

However, Zhiyun Technology is good at making money, and even better at spending money. In addition to its own huge R&D expenses, it also makes strategic investments and acquisitions worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

Just to build Weiyun Microelectronics, they plan to spend more than 1 billion US dollars within a year.

In order to support domestic screen manufacturers, Zhiyun Technology is negotiating a strategic investment plan with BOE, which is another huge strategic investment of more than one billion US dollars.

Such huge expenditure, in addition to relying on the early pre-IPO strategic investment funds, is also heavily dependent on the profits of Zhiyun Technology's existing mobile terminal hardware business.

As for a series of software and Internet businesses, they are either incidental or serve the hardware business... They do not play a decisive role...

The software and Internet business has an annual revenue of more than one billion US dollars, but all the revenue is not enough to cover the expenses of Zhiyun Microelectronics, a chip foundry.

Working in semiconductors is so expensive!

(End of this chapter)