My Lord, you need to stand up!

Chapter 673 Taking a Big Hit Through an Unconventional Path

Because it was truly among those 2,400-plus parts manufacturers that the achievements emerged.

A year ago, Wei Dong gathered dozens of students, mainly from Pingjing Steel Institute and Industrial College, and had them stay at the Pingjing Automobile Manufacturing Joint Venture Company. They were sent to the Santana production line and brought back to Jiang'an Automobile for further training.

Later, more people were recruited from universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Hubei and Changchun to participate.

The company, under the Dongsheng Trading Group, pays their salaries and supports them in conducting technical upgrades and research at various automotive manufacturers and enterprises.

This is a truly unique team. With the advantage of being able to start from the three major joint venture car factories across the country, they were able to enter and participate in a large number of other state-owned and private machinery factories.

The college students immediately saw three completely different business models and understood the current problems in the automotive industry from different perspectives.

This is a survey that no one had been able to conduct before.

It's impossible for ordinary people to conduct in-depth research at these three of the most "advanced" joint venture car factories in China. Not to mention government officials, it would take a long time for any department to do so.

Before the work began, Wei Dong had emphasized that the biggest problem with localization was in people's minds.

They don't believe that foreign countries are that advanced, and when they see something, they don't agree with its advancement, or they are completely convinced that they can catch up with it.

Only by actually participating on the front lines can one understand that car manufacturers subjectively do not want to use domestically produced parts on their production lines.

Workers prefer imported screws because they are smooth and they don't want to use domestic ones with burrs. Management and sales are even less willing to use domestic parts because they would increase the failure rate.

Regardless of whether the improvements are adequate or not, they fundamentally resist using domestically produced parts, as it would increase the pressure and risk in their work.

Working people only care about whether their work is convenient and whether there will be any problems.

Nobody wants to deal with the hassle of using domestically produced parts.

In particular, some factories import parts at zero tariffs and receive subsidies, so localization actually increases various costs, making them even less willing to use domestic parts.

Various excuses and delays exist, and these people are the biggest obstacle on the front lines.

It was precisely the automated sanitary napkin production line in Pingjing that Wei Dong and his team had spent nearly two years developing.

This gives us almost a year to digest the new technologies introduced by Citibank, such as vacuum electron tube technology, acrylic technology, rubber technology, and titanium alloy bending technology.

I've come to understand quite a bit.

We need Weidong to provide a clear direction. It's not that we can't do it, but whether we've done it in the right way.

Modern industry is indeed not something that can be accomplished by simply piling on a large workforce and using manual methods.

A sanitary napkin production line can be made by copying each part, and at most, some computer boards can be imported. This is because the purpose of this is to manufacture products efficiently, and it doesn't matter if some manual labor is used in some parts.

One car can be made by hammering and filing, but it's impossible to make hundreds or thousands of cars that way.

While others use CNC machining, we can only manually repair molds here. We can't catch up with that gap for now, so we'll focus on catching up with what we can catch up with first.

Didn't Wei Dong take a Cherokee back to Jiangzhou to disassemble it, taking measurements of all the parts one by one?

Even at this stage, when we're using vernier calipers, they're using a coordinate measuring machine.

But these college students did the simplest thing: they screened out all the parts that were most likely to be made in China and went around looking for processing plants.

Let's put aside the most difficult parts like the transmission, engine assembly, and especially the electronic control unit for now;
Since it involves steel plate stamping, the exterior cover parts of the stamping dies cannot be made;
You can surely make all kinds of seats, right?

You can always make a wire harness, right?

You can make both large and small braces, right?

This led to an attempt to produce all non-stressed components inside the vehicle.

Try those parts that don't bear much weight, aren't very important, but are still essential.
Around the beginning of the year, around the Spring Festival, the university student team summarized with Wei Dong that the biggest problem with the localization rate was in materials and precision manufacturing.

The former involves the entire industrial system. For example, the non-woven fabric material for sanitary napkins cannot be extracted from petrochemical products yet, and we can only use textiles as a substitute, waiting for the industrial support to be completed.

The latter is worth trying, just as it cannot be automatically sterilized and packaged like a fully automated production line, but it can be done manually.

The structural components of a car are its skeleton, the body panels are its skin, the wiring harnesses and oil pipes are its blood vessels, and the brain and internal organs go without saying.

The amount of meat in this isn't a big problem.

We can produce horizontal connectors, longitudinal load-bearing components, column structural components, partitions, various fasteners, battery brackets, and fuel tank brackets.

Unable to be produced on high-performance assembly lines, it was subcontracted to countless small parts factories, which pieced it together using various means.

First, outsource production to support these parts manufacturers, and then force them to improve their technology.

Therefore, the college students, with the salaries provided by the team, divided into many groups and went to a large number of parts manufacturers, mainly in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Jiangzhou, to carry out improvements.

Since Wei Dong was brought in to work on the Cherokee team last September, the automotive group has expanded to more than 200 people in just over a year, stationed in more than 300 companies of all sizes.

Because these small machining factories have a characteristic: they are often clustered in a certain area, serving as processing support for a large factory, its main products, and the local pillar industry.

So a small group of three to five people can be busy shuttling between a bunch of local factory workshops.

This is the main force of the auto parts manufacturers participating in the exhibition. Ever since Wei Dong started advertising, these groups of college students have been lobbying auto parts manufacturers they know to participate in the exhibition. Some have even contracted out or taken over small factory workshops to do the work themselves!
The quality is absolutely the best that can be achieved with the current equipment available in China!
In short, once you climb a few steps to the second floor of the exhibition center, you'll see a large area of ​​automotive parts manufacturers.

It's actually divided according to the parts of the car manufacturing process.

There are almost no body panels because the technology and equipment for stamping steel plates for the exterior are simply not available, and the cost of importing them is also too high.

But there are many others, listed in great detail.

Many manufacturers were shocked that a competitor was doing this, and even to this extent. These manufacturers who had staff from Dongsheng Trading were generally able to produce products of higher quality than their competitors.

Because this year they were urging the manufacturers to work hard so that their children could get into Tsinghua or Peking University!
It's like handing in exam papers now; people are sending samples to manufacturers in droves, seeking processing contracts.

Collins and his team were initially stuck at their own booth, but they couldn't stop the technicians from going to the parts area to make comparisons, nor could they stop the enthusiastic members of the automotive group from bringing out the parts they developed with the manufacturers to promote everywhere!

As it turns out, Wei Dong's perspective as an "ordinary consumer" was far less effective than his work as a promoter of domestic production rates.

He's still too narrow-minded.

The vehicle ban has only been in effect for two or three years, and there is a huge demand for vehicles in a market that produces several thousand cars a year.

Just like sanitary napkins, which are not yet considered very hygienic or comfortable, they can still sell hundreds of millions of packs annually at this stage.

It's because we didn't have it before!

It's good that it's useful now; people all over the country are eager to have a vehicle, even if it's just a farm vehicle or a pickup truck...

His example of the plateau is also wrong. The plateau is vast and sparsely populated, and the road conditions are much worse than those in the inland areas. So when the road breaks down, there is no one to help but repair it yourself.

Therefore, the durability of the vehicle should be the top priority.

The mainland isn't actually that upset. If Wei Dong and his team drive Dongfeng trucks all over the country, they can theoretically find a county or town to get a tire repair every few dozen kilometers.

When the country is full of the same amazing car repair techniques used by the Pakistani mechanics, and everyone accepts the reality that cars are repaired while being driven.

It's good enough that it can even be driven.

The biggest advantage of these Dongsheng Auto technicians is that they believe the exhibition is run by the big boss, so they have the privilege to promote their products everywhere.

Deep down, they still see themselves as salespeople.

Shamelessly, they brought various spare parts to the first floor to promote and negotiate.

Those who believe they have the capability and produce high-quality products should approach joint venture manufacturers and ask if they can get some spare parts from us.

Most of them first target various domestic manufacturers.

If getting into Tsinghua or Peking University is a problem, can we at least try to get into any university or even a vocational college?
This may be the point where Weidong's last pre-exhibition work meeting came to be, putting enormous psychological pressure on all domestic car manufacturers.

Don't think that just because you can sell a few hundred or a few thousand cars a year, and your output value seems to exceed 100 million, that's something special.

If they don't improve quality and technology, once joint venture automakers have mastered imported technology, they will turn around and steal customers away from them.

So they really did hold meetings all night to discuss what to do. The factory managers, who had no one to confide in, couldn't sleep all night. The next day, they saw all sorts of "high-quality" parts being delivered to their door.

They all felt like a lifeline, a sudden enlightenment.

In fact, all domestic car manufacturers use highly localized parts, or even entirely localized parts, but they are easily eliminated because of their poor quality.

This exhibition actually provided them with an opportunity to access a large number of high-quality components, or at least an opportunity to choose from them.

Previously, these places had almost no choice in which manufacturers to select!
Even for the Pingqi 212, there are almost no parts to choose from, let alone those from provincial and municipal car factories.

If the quality of each part is improved by a little bit and the price is reduced by a little bit, wouldn't the vehicle's cost-effectiveness be improved?

There's nothing you can do if the appearance isn't good, but these days appearance doesn't really matter. Any car that can make you a winner is halfway there, and being sturdy and durable basically wins you everything!
Indeed, Weidong's greatest achievement is that it has gathered almost all of the more than 200 vehicle brands that have rushed into the market across the country, and has also managed to gather more than 2,000 parts manufacturers, most of which still represent the best level in China.

This facilitated a meeting between the two groups!
These domestic car manufacturers actually have some money.

That's the nature of cars; as long as you can sell them, even if you only make a few thousand on something worth tens of thousands, it's still a "high" profit margin rarely seen in other commodities.

A few hundred vehicles can generate hundreds of thousands in profit or millions in sales.

It is relatively easy to generate cash flow in hand.

On the very first day, these manufacturers began signing numerous parts procurement contracts!

These days, factory managers are almost all from technical backgrounds. They can tell the quality of the samples brought by the salespeople at a glance, and they also know the purchase prices by heart.

Orders were quickly signed for purchases, with contracts for spare parts worth tens or hundreds of thousands of yuan appearing one after another in the computer and photocopying sections.

Many factory managers belatedly realized that by the time they caught up, more than 700 spare parts contracts had already been signed on the first day, totaling more than 130 million yuan!
Almost all of the contracts were signed by domestic brands; 212 and Shanghai-registered brands also signed a few contracts to test the waters.

No one expected that the breakthrough would be in this place.

Wei Dong inadvertently "intimidates" domestic car manufacturers, telling them that they are likely to lose to joint ventures and should surrender as soon as possible to manufacture auto parts.

Then, the annual task force for improving the localization rate of automobiles, which had been working on this for a year, acted like a cram school for the college entrance examination, pushing a bunch of parts manufacturers to produce parts for joint ventures. In reality, there was still a gap.

Unwilling to give up, these technicians and salesmen turned to selling to domestic car manufacturers.

They've already managed to manufacture and sell cars, and they probably won't lose money for the next two years because the market is so scarce; they can sell just four cars.

So it's not so easy to get these car manufacturers to give up; at the very least, they all want to try again.

That's what led to this situation!
Keep in mind that only a little over 300 cars were sold on the first day, of which only a little over 200 were from the joint venture factory.

The total amount is only a little over forty million.

This is a shady way to get a big reward.

(End of this chapter)