Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 397: Impact of a $ Trillion Market Value

After the X14 smart drone was released and put on the market, it attracted considerable news attention.

Regarding the X14 intelligent drone, both the media and ordinary people still feel relatively unfamiliar with it. They think this thing is very advanced and that Xu Shenxue has come up with another black technology.

But just like Nanmen Aerospace's rocket, people are just watching for fun, but not many people really pay attention to it.

Because the X14 smart drone is still too far away from ordinary people, the X14 smart drone itself costs eight or nine million yuan. If you add the accessories, such as spare battery packs, charging stations, and remote control programming, the average price is actually around ten million yuan.

This not only includes large ground control centers and ground communication towers... If an enterprise operates a large number of X14 intelligent drones, ground control centers and communication towers are also necessary, and the smallest deployment unit of these things is million per set.

Such an expensive price means that the X14 smart drone is far away from being purchased by individuals.

Not to mention that there are still legal gaps in most parts of the country and even abroad... There are currently no targeted laws to manage it, and there is a great deal of ambiguity.

This ambiguity also increases the difficulty of purchasing and using the X14 smart drone.

Even corporate commercial use faces considerable trouble.

In order to officially enter the commercial market, Xiaojiang Technology is applying for various licenses for its X14 smart drone worldwide, and is trying not to get a traditional aircraft license... If it is really treated as an airplane, then there will be a lot of subsequent problems.

Xiaojiang Technology hopes that its X14 smart drone will be regarded as a consumer-grade drone...that individuals can easily purchase and use.

But this is extremely difficult... After all, when the X14 intelligent drone is unfolded, its diameter is several meters wide, its maximum take-off weight is more than kilograms, and its payload is kilograms.

You call this a consumer drone? You really think others are fools.

Due to numerous legal issues, Xiaojiang Technology’s X14 smart drone received very few commercial orders after it was officially launched on the market. Only one drone company invested by Xiaojiang Technology and its partner companies ordered a batch of X14 smart drones.

The company purchased these intelligent drones and will use them in areas such as cargo transportation and pesticide spraying in complex terrain, but the areas are strictly limited and can only be carried out in specific areas and altitudes.

As for overseas markets, the commercial market has not yet been opened, and many companies with ideas are still waiting and watching.

However, although the civilian market did not open up, the military market inexplicably became popular.

In a short period of time, Xiaojiang Technology received orders from shell companies from all over the world, totaling more than 300 million US dollars.

This also made Xu Shenxue speechless... This is a civilian product I made, which is for low-altitude economy, and it has a lot of backdoors.

You dare to use it?
But they really dare to do it... At worst, they can just remove the civilian communication module after buying it and install an internal dedicated communication network module themselves.

If they are from a small or medium-sized country that is far away, they don’t even bother to change the communication module... they can just connect to the Internet and don’t have to worry about Xiaojiang Technology controlling their drones through the back door.

If you want to buy some high-end intelligent equipment these days, you have to have this awareness.

The X14 smart drone just has some backdoors to prevent you from flying the drone to China, but Xiaojiang Technology does not restrict how you use it.

As for fighter jets like the F35 next door, if you want to take off for training, you need the authorization code from the Americans.

Therefore, many things that are unacceptable to people in big countries are actually commonplace in the eyes of people in many countries.

In any case, after the X14 intelligent drone was released to the market, it was met with a cold reception in the civilian market, but instead achieved initial sales in the military market, which left Xu Shenxue speechless.

In the end, he was too lazy to care.

Anyway, technology is constantly advancing, and he will continue to develop smart drones. Subsequent technology will become more and more advanced. At the same time, after the products are made, the laws of various countries will always slowly adapt.

It’s like this when new things come out, they need a process of popularization.

Compared with the X14 intelligent drone, Xu Shenxue boasted for a long time, but in the end he only received orders worth several hundred million dollars from shell companies from various countries.

Several models of Zhiyun robots released at the same press conference attracted huge market attention.

In particular, the newly released Yun Robot C type, including the C6 and C7 models, caused a huge sensation and even a buying spree because of its relatively low price.

The C6 wheeled platform only costs RMB , which is so cheap that it does not seem like a robot product of Zhiyun Group.

The main C7 bipedal model is priced at only yuan, which is much cheaper than the previous Zhiyun Robot's bipedal model priced at yuan, although the hardware performance in various aspects is much worse, such as poor battery life, bipedal movement speed, and explosive power. At the same time, there are differences in the accuracy of the robotic arms and the carrying capacity.

The C7 bipedal model is actually a hardware-reduced version of the previous bipedal B model.
However, the most core working capabilities, that is, the various working models of artificial intelligence are actually the same.

Because all robots use a unified robot artificial intelligence model, and are also equipped with a variety of working artificial intelligence models for users to pay for subscription.

After all, artificial intelligence is just software, and software does not require any additional costs, you just need to simply copy and paste it.

Of course, although the systems are the same, the computing power and sensors are different, so the performance differences are still very large.

However, you can buy a bipedal Zhiyun robot for 159,000 yuan. What is there to complain about? Just smile.

Some people say that in the field of robotics, Zhiyun Group first released robots priced at 300,000 and 400,000 yuan. According to usual practice, subsequent models may cost 500,000 or 600,000 yuan, or even millions.

After all, Zhiyun Group has always been engaged in the production of high-end products.

And in fact, this is indeed the case. In this summer conference, Zhiyun Group also released four-legged and six-legged models, which are more expensive than the two-legged ones, reaching five or six hundred thousand... These two models are relatively professional robots, aimed at operations and production in specific fields.

But Zhiyun Group also released a new bipedal flagship version.

Yun Robot B2 claims to use a new semi-solid-state battery, greater computing power, better hardware equipment, sensors, etc., which directly raises the price to more than yuan... and it is only user-customized.

Users can choose their favorite silicone shell body shape, hairstyle, etc. After all the options, the price can reach millions.

To be honest, this Yun Robot B2 is in line with people's consistent impression of Zhiyun Group's products: expensive, and getting more and more expensive.

However, the launch of the C6 and C7 cheap robots surprised people, and they rushed to buy these two models of robots, especially the C7 model, which was even called the most worthwhile Zhiyun product of the year.

The absolute king of cost-effectiveness.

Zhiyun's management must have been stupid to come up with a low-end phone. When they come to their senses, they will probably cancel this model.

That’s right, in the market, people have even called the Zhiyun robots that cost more than 7 yuan as low-end models... and they feel that they have gotten a great bargain by being able to buy a C model for yuan.

To be honest, the pricing system of the robot market has been distorted by Zhiyun Group from the very beginning... Zhiyun Group's robots are so powerful that they directly benchmark their robot business against cars, with prices set in tens of thousands... People think that such pricing is normal.

This has caused many robot startups or robot business departments of large companies to drool over the robot market.

A robot costs hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. If you buy tens of thousands of them, you will make a lot of money.

But while they were swallowing their saliva frantically, they felt helpless.

Because they cannot make such a robot... Zhiyun Group's robots are clearly displayed in front of them and are sold all over the world, but so far, there is still no company or research and development institution that can confidently say that they can replicate one within three or five years.

In fact, the hardware field can still be imitated. Given a few years, other domestic and foreign robot companies will be able to make or purchase similar robot hardware, even chips.

Even for chips, although Zhiyun Group's EYQ chip technology is very powerful, you can also use the PX computing power platform publicly sold by Zhiyun Semiconductor, which has quite good performance.

In addition, Tesla and other companies are also developing their own airborne computing chips, so even if the performance is a little worse, they will still be there.

But the artificial intelligence inside cannot be copied.

The most important thing is that the artificial intelligence of Zhiyun robot is quite special.

The core of the robot is the robot's master artificial intelligence, or data model.

In addition to this, there is also the human-computer interaction model in Zhiyun Group.

All of the above are artificial intelligence in robots in the conventional sense.

But in fact, the reason why Zhiyun robots can complete many highly professional tasks is that they also have many working models.

Every advanced function in the Zhiyun robot actually corresponds to a data model.

Zhiyun Robot is actually a hardware product that is a combination of multiple data models, not just a single model.

This is also the reason why Zhiyun Robotics’ R&D funding is so huge, because they need to train so many data models.

In addition, the training of existing functions must continue to be upgraded and iterated.

As strong as Zhiyun Group is, its artificial intelligence technology can be said to have been leading the world for ten or even fifteen years, but it is still being tossed around by many difficulties... There is no way. For artificial intelligence to learn, it must first have data. The data must be fed to the artificial intelligence so that it can learn autonomously. At the same time, this process still requires manual correction.

In the fields of text, pictures, etc., this kind of thing is easy to do, as there is a lot of various data on the Internet.

However, in the professional field, these data are difficult to obtain... This is why the Zhiyun Robotics team has set up many data factories. The main task of these data factories is to "produce data for artificial intelligence learning" and correct the learning process of artificial intelligence.

Few people know that the robot business team under Zhiyun Group has cooperated with many companies across the country. It currently has more than ten data factories and more than 50,000 data employees who are continuously providing Zhiyun robots with a variety of training data content and correcting the training process.

The cost of data collection and correction for this part alone is a very large number.

But there is no way. No matter how smart artificial intelligence is or how efficient it is in learning, it still needs samples to learn from.

Therefore, the robot's R&D team can only create such a primitive data factory.

These training data that simply imitate people's work are actually relatively easy to obtain, while data in other special fields are more difficult and more expensive to obtain.

For example, training data for AI fighter jets! In order to obtain enough training data, the X project team worked with relevant institutions to install data collection equipment on a large number of existing aircraft, and also built a large number of simulated flying aircraft for pilots to use for daily training and to collect data.

The entire data collection process is very complicated and costly.

Many pilots are actually teachers of Project X’s flight artificial intelligence… they just don’t know it yet.

This is the characteristic of artificial intelligence, or machine learning. No matter what kind of artificial intelligence or big data model you use, you need data for training.

It's difficult to deal with without data.

In order to develop robots, the robotics team set up a lot of data factories to collect data.

After collecting these data, how to conduct efficient learning is the core technology of Zhiyun Group in the field of artificial intelligence.

This involves the most basic core algorithm.

The gap in artificial intelligence technology between other artificial intelligence companies and Zhiyun Group is actually mainly reflected in the field of core algorithms.

As for training data, they can also collect it. They can do the same thing that Zhiyun Group can do.

But they can't copy the core algorithm.

This leads to huge differences in artificial intelligence technology, which will eventually be reflected in the performance of many hardware products.

Such as the automatic assisted driving performance of Hailan Automobile, the autonomous flight performance of X14 intelligent drone, the professional work assistance capabilities of Zhiyun Robot, and so on.

This is also a huge problem currently faced by many robot research and development teams, and it is even a problem that cannot be solved in a short period of time.

They have no control over artificial intelligence technology, and there are no third-party suppliers to provide it... They can only modify the open source AI models provided by Zhiyun Group.

In this case, it would be extremely difficult for them to make a usable robot.

Since they can’t even make this robot, they can only watch Zhiyun Group monopolize the field of robots.

Therefore, many startups in the robotics industry, or robotics project teams in large companies, feel that the current robotics market is very complicated.

The robot market was booming, but they had no corresponding products to sell!
However, not everyone is ambitious enough to go straight for general-purpose robots. Some startups in the robotics field engage in differentiated competition from the very beginning, making robots that are less popular and in niche fields. In this way, even if the performance is slightly worse, they can still gain a certain market share.

There are so many fields that robots can explore. It is impossible for Zhiyun Group's robots to penetrate every field, and there will always be some living space left for other startups.

This is also the reason why in the field of robotics, even though Zhiyun Group directly monopolizes the market and has huge technological advantages, there are still a large number of startups emerging.

There is still room for startups in the field of robotics.

The premise is that you should not be foolish enough to try to develop some general-purpose robots and collide head-on with Zhiyun Group’s robots.

No matter what, the robot market has been forcibly driven by Zhiyun Group, and the robot economy has become a hot topic both at home and abroad.

People are very keen on discussing how big the future robot market will be. Some say it will be hundreds of billions of dollars, some say it will be trillions of dollars, and some even say it will be even larger, reaching tens of trillions of dollars.

Regardless of which one it is, it means that Zhiyun Group has made a lot of money...

In particular, after the release of the Yun Robot C7 robot, which received a lot of attention and had very good sales, it continued to drive up Zhiyun Group's stock price.

What’s more interesting is that in the first half financial report released by Zhiyun Group in July, the robot business continued to lose money…

While the robotics business is losing money, it continues to push up Zhiyun Group's stock price. This may seem magical to many outsiders, but it is a very normal situation in the investment field.

The current share price of Zhiyun Group does not represent the current earning ability of Zhiyun Group, but rather the earning ability of Zhiyun Group in the future as believed by investors.

Investors believe that Zhiyun Group's robotics business will continue to grow at a high speed in the future and bring in substantial revenue and profits. There are even many optimistic investors who believe that Zhiyun Group's current robotics business will be able to grow into a more powerful business than its current smart terminal business in the future.

The annual revenue of Zhiyun Group's smart terminal business exceeds US$300 billion, with a gross profit margin of over 45%.

Zhiyun Group relies on the strong profitability of its smart terminal business to maintain its business in semiconductor design and manufacturing, while also launching a large number of various miscellaneous R&D projects.

Now, many optimistic investors believe that Zhiyun Group’s robotics business will be able to grow into a powerful business like the smart terminal business in the future.

Annual revenue is hundreds of billions of dollars, and gross profit exceeds 100 billion!
Coupled with the initial explosion in the field of artificial intelligence and the resulting explosive growth in the AI ​​chip business, Zhiyun Group's server GPU revenue is expected to reach more than US$50 billion in the next few years, and the gross profit margin of this segment is even higher.

The rapid growth of the robotics business and the server GPU business, as well as their good future prospects, have made investors very enthusiastic about Zhiyun Group's stocks, and capital from various countries has poured in to buy Zhiyun Group's stocks.

Since the beginning of the year, Zhiyun Group's stock price has continued to rise, and the rate of increase has been quite rapid, from US$1 trillion when the robot was first released, and then to US$1.3 trillion.

It took Zhiyun Group only half a year to reach 1.5 trillion US dollars in July... Although the increase is only 50%, for a behemoth like Zhiyun Group, this magnitude of increase is still very exaggerated.

More than 1.6 trillion US dollars, roughly equivalent to three fruits.

By the way, Apple's competition in the field of smart terminals has long lagged behind Zhiyun Group, and its sales have gradually declined over the past two years. The total sales in the first half of this year were only 60 million mobile phones... If this continues, Apple's mobile phone sales, revenue and profits will be greatly affected.

This also severely impacted the fruit company's stock price... Although the company is still very profitable, in the eyes of many investors, the fruit company is no longer valuable.

As of July, the company's stock price is just over $500 billion, down more than $300 billion from its peak of more than $800 billion.

Today, the company can no longer compete with Zhiyun Group for the title of the world's largest company by market value, and it cannot even maintain its position as the world's second largest company. Its market value has even been surpassed by companies such as Google and Microsoft.

There is no way around it, this is the embarrassment of being the second largest player in the market!
Not to mention that this is the second largest company in the market whose market share continues to decline.

When it comes to the future of Fruit and Zhiyun, two companies that have long been compared, investors are voting directly with their wallets.

One has a market value of 1.6 trillion US dollars, and the other has a market value of more than 500 billion.

This is the result of the investors' vote!
In the words of many investors in the financial field, it is better to invest in Google or AMD these days than to invest in Apple, and then hope that they will rise in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics and compete with Zhiyun Group.

Although both are high-risk gambles, it is obvious that Google and AMD are more worthwhile to gamble on.

As for the future of the fruit company, that’s it… The core smart terminal business continues to decline, and there are no other new businesses to take over.

In recent years, Apple has not seized any of the new trends, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, electric vehicles and other emerging businesses, and cannot even be considered a follower.

This makes many investors very pessimistic about the future of fruit!
In contrast, Zhiyun Group is different... The core smart terminal business continues to thrive. Although sales volume is difficult to grow due to the overall market environment, sales prices continue to increase, bringing in revenue and profit growth.

At the same time, a large number of hardware devices have also driven the continuous increase in revenue and profits of software and Internet services.

The semiconductor business, which used to suffer huge losses, has started to make money like crazy in the semiconductor design business, while the semiconductor manufacturing business is not making money.

This is not to say that the manufacturing of advanced chips is not profitable. On the contrary, it is very profitable.

It’s just that Zhiyun Microelectronics, a subsidiary of Zhiyun Group, is investing too much in building a factory.

This year alone, plans have been made to build five new wafer fabs, covering the fields of logic chips and storage chips. The investment in these five integrated wafer fabs alone will reach 50 billion US dollars... As the technology continues to advance, the construction cost of wafer fabs is also getting higher and higher.

At the same time, in order to support the research and development of EUV lithography machines, Zhiyun Microelectronics has injected a large amount of funds into Gulf Technology through various means for the research and development of EUV lithography machines even before seeing the prototype.

The huge investment and support for the semiconductor industry chain have greatly squeezed Zhiyun Microelectronics' revenue and profits, ultimately resulting in Zhiyun Group's semiconductor manufacturing business turning into a small profit or even a loss every year.

But over the years, people have become accustomed to the continued losses caused by Zhiyun Group's huge investment in semiconductor manufacturing business.

I agree with the statement of Zhiyun Group’s senior management: the losses in the semiconductor manufacturing business have laid the foundation for the continued growth of other core businesses, such as smart terminal business, semiconductor design business, artificial intelligence business, and robotics business.

Once investors accept this statement, they will now look more favorably upon Zhiyun Group's semiconductor manufacturing business... Although this is an unprofitable or even money-losing business, with it, other businesses can make a lot of money.

In addition to the semiconductor business, Zhiyun Group has also opened up the robotics business, creating new growth space.

Smart terminal business, software and Internet business, spare parts and supply chain business, semiconductor design business, semiconductor manufacturing business, artificial intelligence business, and robotics business constitute the main business segments of Zhiyun Group. Together, they have pushed Zhiyun Group's market value to more than US$1.6 trillion, and it is still rising.

Many investors are very optimistic and believe that Zhiyun Group’s market value may reach 2 trillion US dollars within a year, or at most within two years.

Become the first company in human history with a market value of two trillion US dollars!
This also led many people who bought Zhiyun stocks to talk about the slogan of hitting 2 trillion US dollars everywhere, and many ordinary people heard about it.

Then ordinary people took a look and said, wow, why has Zhiyun Group's market value increased again? It is already 1.6 trillion yuan. I'm afraid it will really reach 2 trillion yuan in the future.

However, whether it can really achieve 2 trillion yuan depends on the growth rate of the subsequent robotics business and the growth rate of the server GPU business.

Of course, the most important thing is to look at the development of Zhiyun Group’s core business: smart terminal business.

In the smart terminal business, the most core product is undoubtedly the S series mobile phone.

Therefore, while many investors are paying attention to the 17 trillion market value, they are also paying more attention to the situation of this year's new generation of S mobile phones.

They don’t care whether the S17 is good or not, they only care about the sales of the S17 after it is released!
Investors are not demanding. As long as the S17 can maintain the sales performance of the S16, even if there is a slight decline, it will be considered a success...

After all, the global smartphone market has reached its peak and has now entered a stock market state. The sales volume of Zhiyun Group's S series mobile phones is too high, with a crazy sales volume of 250 million units last year.

Therefore, as long as this year's S series mobile phones can maintain sales of 250 million units, it will be considered a huge success, and a slight decline will actually be acceptable.

In this case, the S17 mobile phone launch conference to be held in mid-August has also attracted close attention from investors from all over the world.

(End of this chapter)