Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 237: 12 Billion in Five Days and S Prototype
Xu Shenxue has been engaged in various businesses since 08, and has successively launched global sensational mobile phones, ultra-thin notebooks, tablets and other electronic consumer products, as well as drones and now rockets and electric cars.

The driving force behind this series of products is not marketing or anything else. It simply relies on technology to break out of the circle, leaving a group of competitors helpless.

Moreover, many of these things are groundbreaking in history. Before Xu Shenxue did this, these things did not exist at all, or they were being developed but had not yet been produced.

For example, the repeating rocket was previously being developed by Musk's Space Exploration Company, but Musk did not have enough money to afford it. So when Xu Shenxue started working on this thing, he blew up a test rocket every few days, thus beating the Space Exploration Company in the process and shocking the world.

The video of the successful recovery of the first-stage rocket of the Nanmen Tian-5 rocket has been played an astonishing number of times on major video sites around the world and is still widely discussed today.

There are also drones that are very niche but of great significance and may even play a huge role in the future. Xiaojiang Technology's technology in this field is unrivaled in the world and it has no competitors at all... Before Xiaojiang Technology developed consumer-grade drones, there was no such thing as large-scale consumer-grade drones in the world.

Other manufacturers also want to follow suit and make drones, but they can’t even see the taillights of Xiaojiang Technology... It’s not that they can’t make it, but they can’t make it so cheaply and with good performance.

Do you have the nerve to compare a drone worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars with one that only costs a few hundred dollars?
There are also a series of electronic consumer products such as mobile phones, notebooks, tablets, etc., which also include a large number of high-tech products first developed by Zhiyun Technology, including aluminum alloy bodies that were developed in the early days but no mobile phone manufacturers are capable of following up until now.

The key technology that has driven Zhiyun phones to sweep the world in the past two years is fingerprint recognition technology. Before Zhiyun Technology started working on this, no mobile phone manufacturer was interested in capacitive fingerprint recognition. After Zhiyun Technology developed it and launched it on the market, a group of mobile phone manufacturers started to work on it in a hurry, but they still have no idea about it.

Then there was the introduction of artificial intelligence technology, and the voice assistant as its embodiment. This may seem useless and just a cool feature, but it represents the cutting-edge direction of technological development.

You can look down on the voice assistant Xiaoyun and criticize it for being flashy and useless, but you cannot ignore the artificial intelligence technology behind it.

Zhiyun Technology has already carried out large-scale expansion and application of the artificial intelligence technology developed based on deep learning, including smart home AI, drone AI, robot dog AI and the current AI in automatic assisted driving that are currently under development but not yet released and are only used in Xu Shenjia's home.

These are all extensions of Zhiyun Technology’s core technology, artificial intelligence.

The above are just consumer-level AI for the general public. In fact, many key projects in Zhiyun Technology’s Intelligent Research Institute are not these consumer-level AI.

For example, the extremely special 'super-large mobile device AI management system' and the matching 'distributed mobile device AI management system' and various 'mobile device terminal AI systems'.

The outside world doesn’t even know about these AI research and development projects, and has never even heard of their names. They are all top-secret research and development projects.

What are the above systems used for?

For example, the mobile device terminal AI system is used in various drones and driverless cars. Of course, it is not universal at this stage and can only be used for different specialized training on different similar devices.

As for distributed AI management systems and super-large AI systems, these things are even more complicated. Specifically in the civilian field, they are urban traffic management systems, unmanned factory management systems, and so on.

The focus of Zhiyun Technology's artificial intelligence research is not on anthropomorphism, that is, superficial applications such as humanoid robots and voice assistants. Zhiyun Technology's artificial intelligence research has always focused on industrial applications.

Specifically, it is aimed at various unmanned mobile devices and unmanned factories. It also targets the R&D field to reduce R&D costs, such as replacing manual repetitive and inefficient R&D work, such as writing some basic codes, conducting a large number of experiments, etc.

As for the AI ​​currently installed on Zhiyun phones, it is really just a voice assistant and has no practical use.

These artificial intelligence technologies involving the industrial field are the focus of artificial intelligence technology, and are also important areas that can promote productivity and technological progress.

Such an important thing, not to mention that Zhiyun Technology treats it as a top corporate secret and keeps it strictly confidential, even the higher-ups attach great importance to it and without saying a word, directly banned the export of related technologies, especially core algorithms and equipment.

Therefore, even if Zhiyun Technology wants to release the underlying core technology of artificial intelligence technology now, it cannot do so.

Other companies naturally want to get such an important thing, so a large number of high-tech companies have invested huge sums of money in research and development since last year.

Unfortunately, there have been no results so far.

In the field of artificial intelligence, Zhiyun Technology is still far ahead and has no competitors at all!

Now, Zhiyun Technology has applied this technology to electric vehicles and launched the "automatic assisted driving" technology, which has been portrayed by the media as autonomous driving technology.

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The Hailansike electric car has attracted huge attention around the world even before it was put into mass production, especially among practitioners in related high-tech industries. Many of them placed pre-orders at once in an attempt to experience the technology first.

At the same time, HaiLan Automobile Company's direct flagship stores in major cities across the country have also opened one after another, welcoming consumers to experience the cars and accepting pre-orders.

But what’s interesting is that the first wave of guests who came were not consumers, but many media reporters. In addition to regular media reporters, there were also some new media personnel who have only recently emerged.

They all rush to these Hailan direct flagship stores because these direct flagship stores have sample cars. Everyone wants to experience the sample cars in time and make various reports to attract traffic.

However, it is not easy to experience it. There are too many people who want to experience it, but too few cars to experience it.

Hailan Automobile's SEC model has not yet entered mass production. The dozens of existing experience cars are all hand-produced on a small scale in the factory. The quantity is extremely limited. There is at least one in a flagship store, and no more than two.

In response to this situation, HaiLan Auto’s measure is that users who have already placed an order can experience it first, while users who have not placed an order can wait in line.

When some people who are not short of money see this measure, they have no hesitation at all. It's just a deposit of 10,000 or 20,000 yuan, no big deal.

Many people place orders on the spot and then experience it!
This can be regarded as a special phenomenon in automobile sales.

The test drive experience of other models is to allow potential customers to place an order after being satisfied with the experience, but it is the opposite for Hailan Automobile. You have to place an order first before you can experience it.

If you don’t want to, forget it!
Anyway, the production of the Aquamarine model this year will be very low, estimated to be only tens of thousands of units at most. With such a small production volume in the huge Chinese market, it will be snatched up by the rich in minutes.

There is even a joke on the Internet: people who drive BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes may not be rich, but those who place an order to buy Aquamarine are definitely not short of money.

This is an excellent demonstration of economic strength.

If you want to buy the Aquamarine, considering its practicality, price and the fact that there are almost no public charging stations at present, it will be very troublesome to travel long distances and it can only be used for short-distance driving.

This means it's not very suitable as a first car for a family.

In fact, this is true. Those who buy Hailan SEC are almost all high-net-worth individuals. They often own one or even two family cars, and Hailan SEC is the second or third car in the family.

At the same time, early customers are mainly concentrated in high-tech practitioners and rich second-generations. Ordinary local bosses are not interested in this thing for the time being.

According to a new media report, Hailan Automobile officially announced on the fifth day after opening pre-orders that the pre-order orders had reached 30,000 vehicles.

He also said that due to the limited production capacity of the factory, orders after 13 vehicles will not be delivered until January 1.

As soon as this news came out, it caused a sensation in the automotive industry and even the entire high-tech circle. Thirty thousand vehicles!
This thing is a high-end luxury car with an average price of more than 600,000 yuan... Quite a number of customers who buy Aquamarine are often not short of money, and basically buy the performance version or even the luxury version. The standard order volume is only about 10%!

At the same time, many of them are rushing for advanced automatic assisted driving technology. Almost all pre-order orders are equipped with the advanced automatic assisted driving enhancement option package, and the price of this option package has reached 100,000 yuan. At the same time, many car owners will make personalized options, such as star sand color, customized wheels, car interior, speakers, etc.

These options cost from a few thousand to tens of thousands.

Various options, especially the advanced automatic assisted driving option package, have significantly raised the average selling price of Hailan cars, so that this electric car with a bare car price of only 450,000 yuan has an average selling price of more than 600,000 yuan!
Thirty thousand pre-order orders and an average selling price of six hundred thousand, what does this combination of two mean?
Pre-sale amount of 18 billion in five days!
This is Xu Shenxue, the answer that Hailan Automobile has given to people!
The most important thing is that these are only the pre-order orders for the first five days. Although there won’t be so many orders in the future, they will still come in continuously.

This scared a lot of car manufacturers and also greatly stimulated their confidence in entering the electric vehicle industry.

If advanced automatic assisted driving is not possible, then just make an ordinary electric car, and then put a big screen on it, and make some other exterior designs and details more sci-fi.

Who knows, there might be someone who will pay for it.

As for autonomous driving, we can work on it later!

These external changes have no effect on the rapid rise of Hailan Automobile. With 30,000 pre-orders, Hailan Automobile has reached loan agreements with several banks, lending more than 10 billion yuan in cash for factory construction and charging pile installation.

Along with the launch of electric vehicles, Hailan Automobile is also simultaneously building charging piles. Only this kind of fast charging pile can match the fast charging technology on Hailan Automobile, providing the possibility of full charging in one hour.

As for the home charging piles provided to car owners at the same time, they are just slow charging using household electricity.

HaiLan Auto is currently negotiating with some highway operators and local power grids to install HaiLan fast charging stations in highway service stations.

At the same time, we are also negotiating with some shopping malls and office buildings on the operating fees of parking lots to install fast charging stations.

Xu Shenxue personally also considers that charging piles will be a kind of infrastructure in the future. In order to avoid electric car manufacturers doing their own thing in the future, he recommends to the higher authorities to unify the charging pile standards and require the use of the same type of charging technology standards so that all electric vehicles can use charging piles from any manufacturer.

As for what standards!
Naturally, it is the technical standard of HaiLan Automobile. Now, apart from HaiLan Automobile, no other manufacturer in China is doing this.

There is a technical standard for Tesla overseas, but we can’t use their technical standard!

At the same time, HaiLan Automobile has authorized limited fast charging technology to other electric vehicle manufacturers. If other electric vehicle manufacturers want to use HaiLan Automobile's technical standards, they can do so by paying patent fees. When Xu Shenxue was interviewed, he made it clear that there is no threshold for charging technology standards, and anyone can use it as long as they pay the patent fees.

If the technology is kept to oneself, and everyone then develops their own technology, the charging piles will not be universal, delaying the popularization of electric vehicles.

Xu Shenxue felt that it would be better to just release the technology and then expand the entire electric vehicle market.

----

However, unifying the standards for charging piles is certainly not an easy task. It cannot be done simply by talking about it. We have to take it step by step.

However, HaiLan Automobile took a step ahead. On the one hand, it built its own charging piles, and on the other hand, it released the relevant technology to the power grid, so that the power grid could also use HaiLan Automobile's fast charging technology standards when building charging piles.

Once the scale effect is formed at the beginning, subsequent automobile manufacturers will not be able to develop their own technical standards even if they want to.

----

While the outside world continued to discuss HaiLan SEC's autonomous driving technology, Xu Shenxue had already shifted his attention away from the electric vehicle field.

Electric cars are important, but they are the future!

According to the current level of technology, it is impossible to talk about large-scale popularization within three or four years.

Today's lithium batteries are still too expensive, and a series of hardware equipment used for assisted driving, such as lidar, are also very expensive. The low-end bare car version of the Aquamarine costs more than 400,000 yuan, which means that ordinary families simply cannot afford it.

In addition, the energy density of current lithium batteries is still lacking, and a range of three or four hundred kilometers cannot alleviate people’s mileage anxiety.

Also, the number of public charging stations is almost zero, which makes long-distance travel very inconvenient.

These problems will take time to be gradually solved, and it is not that Hailan Automobile can solve them by coming up with some high-tech technology.

In fact, Hailan Automobile also launched a variety of charging equipment at the same time. In addition to its own public fast charging piles, it also launched fixed home charging piles and portable mobile chargers.

However, even with all three measures, it is still not possible to alleviate the power anxiety of trams.

All this takes time!
Therefore, in the short term, the entire electric vehicle market is still relatively limited and it is difficult to popularize it on a large scale.

For Xu Shenxue, electric cars are the future, but for now, electronic consumer products are more important!

Especially the new generation flagship S series mobile phones that will be released at the press conference in June are of utmost importance!
----

On April 19th, as the wedding was approaching, Xu Shenxue was still busy.

On this day, he came to the S series project team in the mobile phone business department of Zhiyun Technology.

I saw the new generation of S series mobile phone S12!

Xie Jianyong held a new mobile phone in his hand and introduced it to Xu Shenxue: "This is the prototype of the S12 mobile phone we are going to launch on the market. The overall design continues the style and many technologies of the S11!"

"In this series, our S12 series standard, the entire series will use a 11-inch retina screen, which is the screen used on the S Pro last year. After a year of large-scale mass production, the cost of this screen has dropped significantly. The quotations given by the two partners have been greatly reduced, enough to be used on the standard version of the new phone!"

"According to our information, Samsung's new flagship Galaxy S3 will also use a -inch large screen. Other domestic manufacturers represented by Vico Electronics are also launching large-screen mobile phones one after another. This year has already entered the era of large screens!"

“For the S12 Pro version, we use a larger -inch retina display to maintain the screen advantage!”

At this time, Xie Jianyong pressed the power button of the S12 prototype in his hand, and introduced to Xu Shenxue: "For the first time, we have achieved full autonomy in the core components of this mobile phone. From SOC to running memory and flash memory, they are all self-developed products of our group Zhiyun Semiconductor, and most of these products are even self-produced products of Zhiyun Microelectronics under our group!"

"The SOC uses the S303 chip from Zhiyun Semiconductor, which has a powerful dual-core CPU 1.8GHZ performance, and is equipped with four 450MHZ GPU cores, as well as a coprocessor core, 4G full network communication baseband, security function core, imaging core, power management core and other cores!"

"This chip is definitely the most integrated mobile phone SOC in the contemporary era. It has the most powerful performance, and its high main frequency is also very suitable for our exclusive Yun OS system, making the system smoother during daily operations and the gaming performance more powerful!"

"In terms of RAM, other manufacturers have already achieved 1GB of RAM, and even this level of memory has become the standard for mid-range phones. We will equip the S12 phones with 2GB of self-developed 2nm LPDDR RAM as standard to maintain our leading edge. Even if the cost is slightly higher, it is within a controllable range!"

"For mobile phone cameras, we will continue to use the 12-megapixel rear camera and the 3-megapixel mature solution, which will better control costs. At the same time, this camera solution is still first-class at the moment."

"The flash memory uses self-developed high-performance 3D flash memory, and the starting memory is still 16GB, with a maximum of 64GB."

"The S303 chip plus 2GB of high-performance RAM and high-performance 3D flash memory, combined with our Yun OS system, will give our phones a significant performance advantage, significantly outperforming our competitors in terms of system fluency, and the same is true for gaming performance!"

"In order to reduce costs, we will continue to use the production line and spare parts of the S11 Pro. Our S12 standard body design will continue to use the overall design of the S11 Pro. However, the S12 Pro has a large 5.5-inch screen and the body and other related production lines will have to be rebuilt!"

"In terms of hardware configuration, our S12 is still far ahead of its competitors, not to mention the unique experience brought by our exclusive technologies of fingerprint recognition and artificial intelligence Xiaoyun!"

"At the system level, we plan to launch Yun OS 5.0 at the same time, which mainly improves the 4.0 system, optimizes some security performance configurations, and supports more gesture operations."

Xu Shenxue said: "Gesture operation must continue to be taken seriously. As screens get bigger and bigger, gesture operation has become an important means of mobile phone interaction in the future."

Xie Jianyong said: "We are also aware of this trend. In the past two years, we have been increasing our research and development and layout in gesture operation. I heard that the patent department has built a lot of patents in gesture operation. It is not easy for other manufacturers to use gesture operation like us."

Xu Shenxue said: "They can still use it if they want to, it's just more complicated and awkward!"

Xu Shenxue had people start planning gesture operations a long time ago. Not to mention the underlying technical patents, even the surface operation gestures have been registered for various patents. If other mobile phones want to use gesture operations, they need to avoid Zhiyun Technology's many patent layouts for gesture operations, which will make it very awkward.

Now it is only a large-screen mobile phone, and other mobile phone manufacturers can still use various buttons to solve the problem, but when it comes to the full-screen era, Xu Shenxue wants to see how they solve the interaction problem.

Xie Jianyong continued: "The current prototype has completed various tests, and is preparing to hand over the technical data to Weiku Industrial for improvement and integration of the production line, and hand over the technical data to various supply chain manufacturers to set up the production line of spare parts!"

"We will be able to conduct small-scale test production this month, and enter full-speed production in May to prepare for global sales after the launch in June!"

While listening, Xu Shenxue personally used the S12 mobile phone. The standard version is actually not much different from the S11 Pro he is using now, at least in appearance. The main changes are the internal chips and other core components.

But the changes in the S12 Pro are very big, this phone is quite "big"!
At least for the current generation, the 5.5-inch screen really seems "very large", so it is troublesome to use buttons, and it is more convenient to use gestures.

Xu Shenxue had already predicted that after this phone was launched on the market, people would once again start discussing large-screen phones.

(End of this chapter)