Rebirth Tokyo 1986

Chapter 131 It’s hard for a clever woman to make a meal without rice
After the meeting, Fujio Masuoka looked at the two high-end talents from Toshiba with emotion.

"You two are here too."

"Well, I always feel that this place is more suitable for research and development work."

In order to carry out their research, Ohkawa Tsuneichi and Yamazaki Takuma had to climb into management positions and wasted a lot of energy on the management level.

Xinghai Semiconductor is different. Although it also has many problems of Japanese companies, it has a very scientific side when it comes to handling technical talents.

Xinghai Semiconductor is now divided into 10 levels.

Management positions range from P1 to P10, and there is only one person who holds the highest position of P1, and that is the current Masato Takeshita.

A similar approach is adopted for technical positions, which are divided into K1 to K10, corresponding to P1 to P10 for management positions.

The salary of a management position is determined by the salary of a corresponding technical position.

The annual dividends are similar, there are as many technical positions as there are management positions.

However, there is currently a vacancy for K1 technical positions, and there are only two K2-level employees, namely Fujio Masuoka and Masanari Morita.

One of them is the company's most important scientific research genius, and the other is a veteran of the company. They must be given the utmost attention and not neglected in any way.

Of course, although these two people are at the K2 level, their salary and benefits are actually on the same level as Masato Takeshita.

If both of them were promoted to K1, Masato Takeshita could only increase his salary and benefits by one level.

It is this small system of equal levels between technical and management positions that has touched the hearts of countless Japanese scientific research talents.

This policy was also crucial in attracting more than 1000 people to Xinghai Semiconductor.

Not all scientific researchers like management positions, and not all scientific researchers like managing people.

Many scientific researchers who desire fame hope to have a good scientific research environment.

Without being bogged down by management tasks, you can freely conduct research and development.

Bell Labs in the United States is actually a similar place.

It is also because of this that Bell Labs has produced many inventions that have impacted the world and given birth to many Nobel Prize-level achievements.

Masato Takeshita's goal is to build a Bell Labs in East Asia one day.

But all this is still too early.

Only when Xinghai Semiconductor develops into a giant like NTT can we make a small attempt.

"That's right, President Takeshita attaches great importance to talent. Only a president with such innovative ability could think of the separation system between management positions and technical positions."

Fujio Masuoka is the one who is most grateful to Masato Takeshita.

It was at Xinghai Semiconductor that he understood for the first time what the dignity of a scientific researcher was.

If you're at Toshiba, forget it.

You are a screw in the company, and everything you have is provided by the company.

The company can still achieve great results without you.

This is also one of the important reasons why Yasuo Tarui is happy about the birth of Xinghai Semiconductor.

In his view, Xinghai Semiconductor is a catfish that can stimulate companies such as Toshiba.

Unfortunately, ideas formed over a long period of time are not so easy to reverse.

Whether it is Toshiba or Hitachi, it will remain the same.

This kind of thing cannot be described as a small company like Xinghai Semiconductor. Even if giants like South Korea's Samsung collectively pressured them, Japanese semiconductor companies would not change much.

After a brief chat, Ohkawa Tsuneichi asked with a smile, "President Masuoka, in your opinion, what direction should we take for research and development?"

"I don't have any ideas for this either." Masuoka Fujio shook his head, then cautiously offered his opinion: "But I think the most important thing right now is to buy a few more laptops and disassemble them while researching."

Reverse research is always the fastest way to achieve your goals.

As long as Fujio Masuoka and others can understand the principles of mechanical hard drives, they can quickly develop solid-state drives with similar uses.

Nagawa Tsuneichi and Yamazaki Takuma were assigned by Fujio Masuoka to develop hardware. At Fujitsu, Toda Manjo, Yamamoto Kazuo, and Asakura Naruto were led by Fujio Masuoka himself to develop flash memory chips with higher storage capacity.

The storage capacity of today's flash memory chips is too small. Even if a hard disk is developed, it will only have a few hundred KB, which is not very practical at all.

If you want to install the hard drive in a laptop, it will take at least a dozen MB.

In this way, laptops can store enough data to meet people's mobile office needs at a relatively low cost.

"Alas, the technology is still immature. No, I'm going to go to Sony to have a look."

A solid-state drive project is not worth looking at right now. Even if each one is sold for a few hundred dollars, it won’t make much money.

The sales of laptops are there.

Of course, in addition to laptops, Apple's desktop computers are also a good sales target.

Because Apple really likes to sell high-priced innovative products.

This is also why Apple still has a large number of fans even after more than a decade of decline.

Everyone likes this kind of innovative company and believes that only such companies can change the world.

This is indeed the case, and later Apple led the wave of mobile Internet.

However, Apple is already showing signs of fatigue, so even if we can sell SSDs to Apple, the profit won’t be very significant.

Masato Takeshita must find more profitable ways to generate revenue for flash memory chips.

For example, Sony is a good target.

He was targeting the digital camera business, which was also one of the important profit sources of flash memory chips in the 20s.

As for the mobile phone field, both mobile phones and memory cards are not very mature at present.

There is no cell phone service in Japan yet, and the mobile phones that are available are more like cordless phones carried in your car.

As for the field of memory cards, it requires a certain amount of technical accumulation.

"President Dahe, I'm sorry to bother you again."

The last time Masato Takeshita dealt with Norio Ohga was when he acquired the radio business.

That time, Sony suffered a loss.

If Sony had not sold the radio project to Masato Takeshita, it could have easily completed the Kanto region disaster emergency radio project with its deep political and business connections.

Of course, if Sony had not been sold, Masato Takeshita would not have launched the disaster emergency radio so early.

He is not the kind of president who plants his own trees only to have the fruits harvested by other companies.

"Welcome, President Takeshita, you're welcome."

After a brief chat, Masato Takeshita began to talk about the purpose of his trip.

"Cooperate in developing digital cameras?"

"Yes."

Ohga Norio thought about it seriously and didn't feel that his company would suffer any loss, so he said in a bossy manner, "Yes, sure."

Our company's digital cameras are already lacking in storage components, so it would be great if Xinghai Semiconductor could supplement them.

"Very good, it's stable."

Masato Takeshita breathed a sigh of relief, as the company had another long-term meal ticket.

Although Kodak developed the digital camera, the first commercial model was launched by Sony.

Sony is still the best digital camera in the world.

It’s just that the sales volume is a bit small, not much different from the current notebook computer business.

(End of this chapter)