GBP #393 - Opportunities for industrial development
#393 - Opportunities for industrial development
North America. Vision Corporation was bustling with activity as a constant stream of people arrived to sign sales agency agreements.
This upstart tech company, a rogue eagle that had risen from nowhere, had been aggressively expanding its production capacity and sales channels since raising a billion US dollars in financing last year. Now, its annual sales of color televisions had exceeded 10 million units!
This was an incredibly alarming figure in the current world, signifying that color televisions had entered the mainstream of the television industry, allowing Vision to achieve more than half of the industry's sales volume with less than 30% of the market share, seizing nearly 70% of the television industry's profits.
The global economy's post-war recovery had filled the public with optimism about the future, leading to a significant increase in consumer demand. As the best entertainment product available, the market for televisions was growing far faster than earlier research had predicted.
In particular, the rogue eagle's extremely developed installment payment system made color televisions, which were somewhat expensive but offered far superior performance compared to black and white televisions, the preferred choice for many with stable employment.
Because it wasn't just the color; in terms of clarity and sound, Vision's color televisions were close to the standard 525-line television level of the early days of the main world timeline. In this era, compared to 300-line black and white televisions, they were on a completely different level.
However, the booming sales led to insufficient production capacity, which began to constrain Vision's development. The company had been planning to open a new factory to increase production, but Ma Zhiyuan had something else in mind and couldn't find a good enough reason.
After the Dawn Research Institute patented several integrated circuits for color televisions, Ma Zhiyuan finally found an opportunity. Using technical cooperation as an excuse, he began communication with the Dawn Research Institute's electronics laboratory regarding patent cooperation. For the rogue eagle's technical engineers, the Dawn Research Institute's inventions amazed them, allowing them to make the television main board thinner and more compact.
Moreover, they could also achieve lower costs!
The prospects of this technology were naturally limitless. Soon, preliminary contact turned into cooperation negotiations. Ma Zhiyuan handed these matters over to the rogue eagle's professional managers to handle initially, while he silently watched everything from behind the scenes.
He was already very clear about his family's situation.
However, he couldn't let someone with a yellow face like himself negotiate this cooperation, as it might create unnecessary suspicion among some people at the rogue eagle. Ma Zhiyuan waited for his team to negotiate the purchase of the patent, only to be rejected by the Dawn Research Institute, which quickly launched a new type of color television based on integrated circuits, with more advanced technology, becoming the latest 625-line model!
Ma Zhiyuan was very familiar with these technologies. The first-generation color television he had registered was just an initial version with a resolution of 352x288. After several years of development, Ma Zhiyuan had slowly advanced to the 525-line level.
Now, the Dawn Research Institute had come up with a 625-line version, which naturally shocked Vision's negotiation team!
In their confusion, they felt no resistance to this technology and the Dawn Research Institute finally proposed a joint venture for production.
Through technical cooperation, the two sides would share the market.
After more than a dozen rounds of lengthy negotiations, they finally reached a strategic cooperation agreement: in the Asian market, the Dawn Research Institute would take 70% and Vision 30%; in Europe, the United States, and other markets, the split would be 50/50.
A large-scale television production factory with an annual output of ten million units would be built in Dongda, while Vision's North American factory would directly produce new models of televisions as flagship products.
In Yangcheng, Dongda, the Dawn Research Institute would be responsible for the factory's construction site and infrastructure, while Vision would be responsible for providing the production line equipment.
The integrated circuit main boards used by both parties would all be produced by the factory in Yangcheng and transported to North America for assembly.
The North American factory would sell to North and South America, while the Yangcheng factory would sell to Asia and Europe.
To ensure the consistency of the quality of products produced by both parties, they would adopt the same assembly line operation standards!
Regarding the huge difference in workers' wages, the two parties finally reached a compromise: the wages of workers in the Yangcheng factory would be calculated at 80% of North American wages, but the portion exceeding local wages would be统筹 80% would become Yangcheng's local government's overall fiscal revenue, and the remaining 20% would be used as performance bonuses to reward diligence and punish laziness, promoting changes in the local factory management system.
In terms of shareholders, the structure became: Yangcheng local government providing land and construction, accounting for 30% of the shares; Dawn Research Institute's technology accounting for 20% of the shares; and Vision accounting for 50% of the shares.
Driven by such huge benefits, the rogue eagle's professional managers witnessed what was called the speed of an infrastructure juggernaut. In just three months, a huge factory rose from the ground. However, this was not what frightened them.
What made them truly realize the great deterrent power of Dongda was that the supporting thousands of workers were also almost completely trained at the same time. After the equipment arrived at the factory, after a month of debugging and use, it immediately began to form a mass production level!
In the first month, the production capacity completed 800,000 units. In the second month, it directly exceeded one million units. In the third month, three-shift production was achieved, and the monthly output successfully exceeded 1.25 million units!
Far exceeding the standard of ten million units per year!
If it was just speed, it wouldn't be anything. What was surprising was that, judging from the quality spot checks, the quality level of the Dongda Yangcheng factory had exceeded that of the North American factory, which was producing after a small-scale modification!
This proved that the quality of the workers recruited in Yangcheng far exceeded expectations. Compared with the blue-collar workers in North America, their sense of responsibility, technical level, and work enthusiasm had all surpassed them.
They were not mistaken. These workers were all vocational college students majoring in electronics who had been trained in vocational technology colleges. Although they had only two years of training now, they had nearly three months of internship opportunities in welding technology and assembly technology. For television production, which is a relatively low-tech job, these young, highly educated technical workers far surpassed their North American counterparts, who were mostly high school-level trained blue-collar workers.
After all, this was the first factory for foreign cooperation.
Ren Zhong personally paid attention to everything in this factory. In his opinion, the most successful aspect of the Qianlong Project, which had been released, was now finally starting to feed back. He certainly couldn't let this matter be messed up.
Everything must be completed to a high standard, forming a precedent for future cooperation.
This not only ensured the success of the entire project, but Ren Zhong also hoped that Western assembly line production could impact the current industrial production situation in China, where the assembly line model had not yet become mainstream.
Even though Ren Zhong had taken the lead in promoting assembly line production in the military industry, making the efficiency of the military industry astonishingly high, in the private sector, private capital industrial factories, lacking close understanding of military enterprises, still used a more traditional set of methods.
It was not convenient for military enterprises to allow private companies to visit and learn, but Ren Zhong felt that such a television production factory would be a good demonstration!
Therefore, in this regard, Ren Zhong had further improved the factory's production model and assembly line, making its production organization method closer to the modern factory assembly line production model of the main world.
It was even better than the management of Vision's North American factory.
This naturally inspired awe in the management and engineers who were sent from Vision to work together, and they didn't feel any sense of superiority at all.
Liu Jiayi, developing his business in London, similarly leveraged financing to expand the popularity of tape recorders. He then introduced the new explosive product of video recorders, conquering the financial and technological circles of Britain and turning Goldenstar into a rising tech star in Europe!
Because his video recorder technology could synchronously upgrade resolution and size with televisions, it became a new favorite of television drama production companies. They could directly film through video recorders and convert it into television programs, greatly reducing the hassle of converting from film shooting methods to video tapes, and also significantly lowering costs.
Moreover, by developing an easy-to-use video recorder for home use, it became the third entertainment electronic product for the middle class, following televisions and tape recorders.
And this item's price was much higher than the previous two, making it Goldenstar's current high-profit product!
Precisely because of these two killer products in hand, Goldenstar became a tech star like Vision. The two companies were evenly matched, both dark horses emerging in the tech world!
In the electronics industry, besides these two, the third outstanding success story of the Qianlong Plan was Li Jiabang, who started a business in Gaul with microwave oven technology. His company, CoCo Digital, also opened up the market in Europe and America, becoming the number one brand in the microwave oven industry!
Due to technological advancements, he transformed the microwave oven from a $5,000 product sold to high-end places like restaurants and airlines into a home electronic product under $1,000!
Therefore, Li Jiabang also became a rising star with billions of dollars in sales.
Besides these, household appliances such as electric shavers, washing machines, electric fans, heating fans, and air conditioners, now carried by the Qianlong seeds, have created a certain scale in different European countries.
Although not as prominent as the three mentioned above, they have also become technological leaders in the market and have begun to enter a stage of rapid growth.
They are successfully swallowing the development market space of those electronic giants in the main world. Companies like Phil, Simes, and Honeywell, which were originally poised to shine, are watching individual entrepreneurs rise up and start a new round of reshuffling in the electronics industry!
Precisely because of the success of these once-famous technology entrepreneurs, the Western powers feel that in the electronics industry, they are now on par with Dongda.
Even if they are somewhat behind Dongda in electronic information and rocket technology, they have not yet seen Dongda produce a product in the home appliance industry that can truly be sold to the world.
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This makes them still feel like they can compete.
However, due to Dongda's weak consumption capacity, among the current electronic products, besides transistor radios starting to become popular in households, even though televisions and other things are now available in more than a dozen major cities, with television stations directly broadcasting radio waves and starting to move towards the development of television media, in the initial stage, ordinary people cannot afford such relatively expensive products.
Fortunately, private capital has not been confiscated in this timeline, so there are still about several million families with considerable purchasing power, laying a certain foundation for the domestic sales of color televisions. After the television factory in Yangcheng was built and put into production, it sold domestically under the brand name "Yangcheng Television".
According to the approximate exchange rate of 1:3 in this timeline, a 15-inch domestic color television sells for 1,500 yuan, and a 17-inch one sells for 2,100 yuan. Compared to the average wage income of domestic families, where monthly salaries are still below 100 yuan, this price is of course astronomical.
But for those who retain private capital, this price is nothing. Therefore, the domestically sold televisions quickly achieved a monthly sales level of 100,000 units, which surprised Vision's management, who originally thought they would mainly rely on foreign sales. With the continuous expansion in the Asian market, they discovered that the market, which they originally thought was relatively small, actually had a scale of at least two to three million units after adding the mainland market!
After achieving almost direct balance between production and sales, Vision's board of directors, sensing the huge opportunity in the Asian market, urged the company to continue cooperating with Dongda to build a second television factory.
And this time, they hoped to put the factory in the Modu area, so as to shorten the transportation time to East Asia sales.
The Yangcheng factory will mainly focus on Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Europe.
Seeing the huge prospects for the future, the second television factory in Modu is also planned to be a factory area with a scale of ten million units, but the initial production line may first reach 5 million units.
After the East Asian market slowly develops, the production capacity will be further increased.
According to Vision's board of directors' plan, after building the second Dongda television factory, the current television production capacity of Vision and its partners will almost account for half of the world's!
In this way, Vision will undoubtedly become the global leader in the future television industry, taking the best and biggest share of the television industry.
Due to the launch of the new flagship, Vision's old products have lowered prices to form a product matrix, taking advantage of the trend to compress the living space of black and white televisions.
Fortunately, the overall market is expanding. Although the share of black and white televisions has decreased, the total amount has not decreased. Manufacturers producing black and white televisions can still maintain and continue to expand the overall market of the entire television industry, arriving at the new era of television dominance more quickly than in the historical timeline of the main world.
In this process, Ren Zhong had in-depth exchanges with Mr. Chen several times. With Ren Zhong's guidance and the vigorous development of the television industry, Mr. Chen convinced his partners in Southeast Asia to open ATV in the Asian region, and cooperated with Mr. Situ to open Starry Sky TV in North America.
Among them, ATV will initially develop in Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asia in the form of cable stations. After Ren Zhong develops television satellites, it will develop into satellite TV stations covering the entire Asia-Pacific region.
And Starry Sky TV in North America will deeply cultivate the cable television business. The future development direction is to become a giant integrating cable television and cable broadband networks.
Similarly, this media is also a mouthpiece for the Chinese people to speak to the world. With Ren Zhong's support behind him, Mr. Chen has already achieved great success in the golden age of shipping development. Thanks to the guidance of foresight, the title of Asian Ship King will undoubtedly fall on Mr. Chen.
For such a giant who truly has his motherland at heart, Ren Zhong spares no effort to support their development, so that no matter what, we will always have strong and powerful allies overseas.
Just like now, Mr. Chen has also begun to give back to the country in large quantities, investing heavily in infrastructure construction and labor-intensive industries. For him, as long as it doesn't lose money and can help the development of the mainland, that is support.
Mr. Chen also did not consider withdrawing the funds invested in the mainland. If it is profitable in the future, he will continue to help develop education.
Precisely because of this two-way effort, both the mainland and Mr. Chen are developing very well.
The development of the Qianlong Plan and the leading overseas Chinese has begun to initiate the opening up of the mainland to the outside world, and has begun to leverage a great opportunity for the great development of the mainland's industry.
(End of chapter)