GBP #504 - Win-win cooperation
#504 - Win-win cooperation
If it were just an order for accessory products, no matter how high the profit, it would be a small deal for Zeiss. President Cabot wouldn't be so concerned. In his mind, what he really wants isn't to make huge profits on optical lenses. The scale of that product, no matter how high the profit, can't compare to getting on board with Dongda's industrial chain.
That's right, among the European entrepreneurs today, any company with ambitions to enter the international market is now trying every means to get in good with Dongda.
For these European entrepreneurs, Dongda is not just a market, but also the leader of a new system.
Who can't see that John Bull's Rolls-Royce immediately transformed itself after getting on board with Dongda's aviation industry and is now the undisputed aviation giant in Europe? Now Gaul and Prussia are racking their brains to get into Airbus to catch a ride.
Not to mention so many computer companies, they have also taken off one by one after getting on board with Dongda. There are several computer companies in Prussia that have taken off in almost a year or two!
It can be said that being able to enter Dongda's industrial chain is a great opportunity to take off while sitting down.
Therefore, Cabot's eyes were particularly fiery after Fang Guangqi released the new proposal.
"Professor Fang, if we can reach a comprehensive cooperation agreement, then it will definitely be a different pricing model," Cabot said. "Zeiss is ready to integrate into Dongda's industrial chain. We focus on the optical lens industry and are very interested in Dongda's related industries. We hope to bring our best products into Dongda's products."
I couldn't choose before because I couldn't find an opportunity. Now that the opportunity is delivered to my door, I will cherish it. Cabot almost offered a red heart.
Hiss, Fang Guangqi gasped, he didn't expect this state.
Is this foreign devil's attitude too enthusiastic? Is there some ulterior motive?
"If we want to jointly develop new optical lens products, can Zeiss accept sharing the intellectual property rights of the new products? Of course, we will reasonably consider the market share of both parties in terms of product shipments," Fang Guangqi tentatively asked.
The main task of this trip to Zeiss is to get the new generation of optical lens system, but if we can form a strong technical cooperation relationship with Zeiss, it will be the icing on the cake. Although the progress of Dongda's domestic optical technology is rapid, that is a vertical comparison compared to the past. If we compare horizontally with the international level, Dongda's optical technology cannot be considered top-notch.
A top optical technician needs a long time of training, not to mention inheritance and talent. Such harsh growth conditions are difficult to have at the same time for Dongda's optical research.
Now, Dongda's optical research can be at the forefront of the world in terms of materials. After all, with Ren Zhong's main world purchase information, the research and development of new optical materials is ahead of other majors.
Cabot's eyes narrowed. Fang Guangqi's statement is equivalent to explicitly asking for Zeiss's technology sharing, because Zeiss now has a clear leading advantage in optical technology. Joint research and development is not just preparing to dig out Zeiss's secrets? This is a posture of eating and taking the pot, a bit unkind.
Thoughts flashed through Cabot's mind. He would definitely not share his housekeeping skills, but if he didn't do anything, I'm afraid today's cooperation would not go deeper.
How to grasp this degree in the middle is really a bit difficult.
"Professor Fang, in principle, we at Zeiss are willing to research advanced optical technology with our partners, but if some technologies involve the fundamentals of Zeiss, we hope to provide products packaged as components. Please understand this," Cabot said.
Handing over core technology is impossible, that is the foundation of Zeiss's foothold in the industry.
"Understood, understood," Fang Guangqi was not disappointed. "We believe that the future optical market is infinitely broad, and it can even be said that it is ten times or a hundred times larger than the current market. In such a vast market, we will not be competitors, but friendly merchants working together. I believe Dr. Cabot is very clear that it is better to divide a few pieces in ten cakes than to divide a large piece in one cake."
"Specifically, in the application market, optical lenses in the future will not only be in professional fields such as astronomy, chemistry, medicine, and even military, but we believe that its market is more extensive in the civilian industry. For example, in cameras, we believe that with the rapid economic development of the world, people's living standards are getting higher and higher, and the era of everyone owning a camera has arrived. The current camera industry will be a sunrise industry.
The product scale of the future camera industry will be a large market of millions or tens of millions. I believe that our in-depth cooperation in this field will be a solid foundation for both of us to move towards glory."
The pie that Fang Guangqi drew for Cabot made Cabot's blood boil, but he was also a little skeptical.
But this time Fang Guangqi didn't lie, these were all he heard from Ren Zhong.
In 1963 of the main world, the famous camera company Kodak once again launched a revolutionary product series—the Instamatic camera. This series of products made the film box into an independent dark box, which can be opened in any natural environment to replace the film, and has automatic exposure function, so that consumers can operate completely "foolproof".
The result of taking photography off the altar is that sales have risen to the throne. In the second year after the release of this fool camera, Instamatic sold 7.5 million units, setting the highest record for camera sales!
During the 1960s and 1970s in the main world, Instamatic sold a total of 60 million units, becoming Kodak's most profitable product series, and also created Kodak's glory. In its peak era, if Kodak's market value is restored based on the inflation factor in 2017, Kodak's peak market value reached 177 billion US dollars, and it monopolized 90% of the film market and 85% of the camera market share in the rogue eagle country at that time.
And this fool camera is one of the civilian products that Fang Guangqi and the others are now working hard to research.
Although the lens quality requirements of this camera are not that high, considering the quality of the entire product, Fang Guangqi can let Zeiss join this plan and become one of the lens cooperative suppliers, even if their supply origin is likely to be transferred from Baden-Württemberg, because the cost control of this fool camera will be very strict.
Cabot does not have Ren Zhong's foresight, but the miracles created by Dongda again and again make him unable to help but have some inexplicable confidence in Dongda.
"Professor Fang, we are very sincere in cooperating with Dongda in all aspects. We have an open and cooperative attitude towards optical lenses, no matter in which field they are used. If Professor Fang has no objection, we at Zeiss are willing to sign a comprehensive cooperation agreement with Dongda," Cabot said.
Although he hasn't seen much real stuff yet, Cabot would never miss the opportunity to get on board with Dongda now.
After all, Dongda has created too many miracles in the past few years, whether it is electronic products or computers. Before these products came out, who could have imagined that they would create such a big market.
Now that Dongda has so much confidence in the camera product market, hitching a ride will definitely not be a loss. Anyway, they don't have much to lose. At most, they will learn some related technologies from Dongda in the field of ordinary lenses. Although Dongda has not fully mastered these technologies, they are not completely without a foundation. After all, Dongda's optical progress in the past few years has been obvious to all, and they have even developed very modern technologies such as infrared lenses.
After several months of hard work, the first generation of 2-micron optical objective lens system was finally developed. After being installed on Dongda's L-50 system for testing, it quickly achieved stable production of 2-micron lithography.
In this way, the new generation of 2-micron L-100 lithography machine was successfully completed.
For this new optical objective lens system, Zeiss conducted a comprehensive cost test and negotiated with Dongda to confirm a price of $60,000, which was an acceptable offer for both parties.
This creates conditions for the large-scale mass production of the L-100 lithography machine.
On the other hand, the research and development of a new generation of 1-micron optical objective lens system has restarted. The next generation L-200 lithography machine needs to achieve a more precise processing scale of 1 micron. For Dongda's chip research, this is to support the production of the next generation 80386 chip.
Don't underestimate the improvement of just 1 micron, but the technical difficulty of this new system is much greater than that of 2 microns. Zeiss is now unsure how long it will take to develop such a demanding new objective lens system.
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Zeiss also did its best to spend several months overcoming difficulties to complete the production of the entire 2-micron objective lens system.
Now, it is necessary to further improve, and even the top masters at Zeiss are having a headache.
If the research on the optical objective lens system starts from the extreme aspects of technology, it is a continuous breakthrough in the limits of optics.
However, the direction that everyone is tackling in the development of idiot-proof camera lenses is different. This time, facing mass products, they need to overcome the irreconcilable problems of cost and performance.
According to Dongda's pricing for the new generation of cameras (currently codenamed Polid) is $300, but this camera must achieve many functions that seem incredible now.
It can easily replace film, automatically expose, and automatically focus, reducing consumers from photography experts to barrier-free photography that only requires pressing a button to take pictures.
It can be said that before Ren Zhong provided the Dawn Optical Technology Research Center with relevant information about this camera, and even provided a physical camera for imitation, none of these researchers at Dongda in the Bright Sword world had any concept or clue about these things.
However, with Ren Zhong's cheating function, they can directly understand the most basic principles of this new product by reading the information.
There are also related product prototypes, so the research and development process does not have too many insurmountable technical barriers. Although some technologies are indeed not easy to implement and require these technical personnel to invest in research for several months before making progress.
However, relatively speaking, everyone's research direction is very clear. Step-by-step research is conducted according to these clear functions. This kind of research is much better than groping in the dark without knowing the results at all. Therefore, the progress of this research is also much faster than the original time and space in the main world.
In terms of lenses, since Zeiss has been brought in, the imaging quality of this camera is now better guaranteed. However, although Zeiss's products are of good quality, the cost is currently too high compared to the price positioning of this product.
There is no way to directly use existing lenses to support this camera.
Therefore, in terms of lenses, it is now necessary to customize a cheap and high-quality lens for the camera. It is not only a conventional fixed-focus lens, but also to find ways to add some customized options to this idiot-proof camera, such as developing zoom lenses to enhance the expandability of this idiot-proof camera, so that it can have stronger photography capabilities after replacing the lens, and the performance of some professional cameras can be infinitely close.
To some extent, after configuring a suitable and better lens, the Polid camera's ability can be comparable to a real professional camera!
Of course, the technical challenge of this goal is even greater.
When Zeiss received these requirements, they were really in pain and happiness. After they participated in the research and development process of the Polid camera and understood some of the characteristics of the camera, they were almost stunned.
If such a camera really comes out, they themselves would want to buy one!
For such a product, although the researchers at Zeiss are not top experts, their capabilities in all aspects must be very comprehensive. They are constantly optimizing the production process of this lens, because according to Dongda's design production capacity, the annual output must reach more than 5 million. If all such lenses are manually polished, it will definitely not be able to meet the demand, so they are developing machine production equipment with Dongda's engineers.
Machine automation is realized in most of the processes, and only manual intervention is used in the detection and correction links, so that large-scale lens mass production can be realized.
Zeiss is also very impressed with Dongda's level in optical materials. The new synthetic material has better processing characteristics than glass, but its optical characteristics are similar to those of lenses made of ordinary glass, which is sufficient for ordinary camera lenses.
Only in the customized lens group, Zeiss will consider using glass production to make the customized lens have stronger light transmission capabilities and can take better photo effects.
In this way, Dongda's demand for optical lenses has received strong assistance and supply from the world's top companies, which has also broadened the horizons of the technical personnel of the Dongda Optical Technology Research Center. Even if they are not allowed to cooperate with Zeiss's top technical experts on some things, they have the opportunity to jointly develop the Polid camera lens from beginning to end.
This gives Dongda a chance to learn about Zeiss's research and development experience at close range.