Chapter 635
Mental Pleasure
Chapter 635 Mental Pleasure
Zhang Yunqi had been lying at home for several days, enjoying his time with Chu Jian by his side. However, he couldn't be idle all day. One day in mid-August, he took some time to visit the Aihua Electronic Industrial Park.
Liu Ming, general manager of Aihua Electronic Components Company, was busy working with experts from Tsinghua University to develop laser head reading technology, servo control system and new generation error correction algorithm. Meanwhile, Hu Zhibiao was launching one marketing war after another in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. As long as the funding was in place, this marketing genius's brilliant marketing ideas would indeed come out one after another, making his competitors suffer.
Zhang Yunqi was accompanied by Liu Dongsheng, the factory director, on a tour of Aihua Electronics' production base.
Aihua Electronics' production base has been in operation for more than half a year. The standardized workshops and facilities are complete. The twelve large standardized workshops include circuit board production workshops, core assembly workshops, shell assembly workshops, complete machine assembly workshops, packaging workshops, and supporting testing centers and warehousing and logistics areas. They are all in operation at high speed. Every day, trucks from dealers from all over the country line up in the warehousing and logistics area to pick up goods. The engine noise can be heard until the middle of the night.
Zhang Yunqi spent nearly two years building this company, and it has now reached a certain scale. This year's annual output value should reach a staggering 4 billion yuan, accounting for half of the added value of the non-public sector economy in Jiangchuan City.
This figure of 4 billion yuan was Zhang Yunqi's conclusion based on the financial statements for the first half of the year. Starting in March 1996, Aihua Electronics' production base was able to produce at least 100,000 DVD players every month, while the market price of DVD players in the first half of the year remained high at over 3,000 yuan.
This is the result of a combination of factors.
去年飞利浦CDM12系列机芯年总销售不超过40万套，96年4月到8月，爱华就采购了40多万套，直接把飞利浦的生产线干冒烟了。
In March of this year, after Liu Jinshi, representing Philips, reached an agreement with Zhang Yunqi, the expansion project of Philips' Shanghai factory was immediately launched. However, even with the best efforts, it still took several months. During these months, almost all of Philips' newly added production capacity was supplied to Aihua Electronics.
This has given Aiwa Electronics a huge supply chain and production capacity advantage in the market, which not only ensures the stable shipment of its own DVD players, but also enables it to have a strong grasp of the market rhythm against the backdrop of industry-wide production capacity being limited due to the shortage of the core component, the mechanism.
These past few months have been a crucial period for the VCD player market to explode. Despite engaging in public opinion battles with competitors such as Samsung and Shinco every now and then, Zhang Yunqi secured a massive order worth 400 million yuan from Philips for the underlying protocol of the VCD player's core mechanism. Based on this underlying protocol, Liu Ming's R&D team developed a powerful error correction function to address issues such as stuttering during the playback of pirated discs.
For most consumers, this is a killer weapon.
Setting aside the exaggerated marketing claims of competitors, there is currently no company on the market that can rival Aiwa Electronics in terms of error correction functionality. This is because they are unlikely to have access to Philips' underlying mechanism protocol; their so-called upgrades to error correction functionality rely entirely on patching and empty promises.
With Hu Zhibiao, the former VCD player tycoon and marketing genius, in charge of market operations, Aiwa Electronics launched the "infamous" Super Error Correction Arena marketing campaign, which lasted for three months in first- and second-tier cities. Zhang Yunqi lost 30 million yuan, but Aiwa also became the leader in the Chinese VCD player market, with a market share exceeding 32%. In the past six months, Aiwa has made a profit of nearly 1,000 yuan per VCD player!
This achievement is truly remarkable.
However, the market is fluid. Currently, the Chinese VCD player market is booming, and such high profits naturally attract more capital to flow into the industry. In the past six months, five or six pure VCD player assembly plants have sprung up in Jiangchuan, relying on Aiwa Electronics' supply chain for assembly. For high-profit industries, a large number of followers will emerge in a short period; this is an inevitable phenomenon in China, especially since the technical threshold for assembling VCD players is not high.
Zhang Yunqi doesn't mind if there are more companies like this in Jiangchuan. What he wants is an industry agglomeration effect and an industrial cluster effect. Only in this way can he drive the vigorous development of the electronics industry in his hometown.
Currently, Jiangchuan's electronics industry foundation is far from strong. In fact, not only Jiangchuan, but the electronics industry foundation in inland areas is far inferior to that of Shenzhen and Dongguan. However, Zhang Yunqi acted quickly, and after nearly a year of hard work, with strong support from the city, the Aihua Electronics Industrial Park has established a complete component supply chain. Many supporting manufacturers have chosen to build factories directly in the industrial park, including cardboard packaging factories, hardware factories, mold factories, component factories, and logistics companies, all specifically supplying Aihua Electronics. In this process, Aihua Electronics has also provided technical support to its downstream suppliers without regard to profit or loss.
Secondly, given the current market situation, with the second phase of Philips' Shanghai factory and Sony's core component factory going into production in the second half of the year, the supply of core components will be sufficient, and the market trend will definitely change, entering a more intense price war phase.
Of course, Zhang Yunqi was confident in Hu Zhibiao's ability to wage a price war. In his previous life, Hu had spearheaded the price war in the Chinese VCD player market, turning the entire industry upside down. His Aido VCD player was the first in the country to bring prices below 2,000 yuan. However, Zhang Yunqi didn't want to rely solely on price wars to maintain market share. He wanted to develop a self-developed player with superior error correction capabilities for the lower-tier market! This was where Liu Ming needed to focus his efforts; this guy had made a solemn promise to him at the beginning of the year.
Overall, Aihua Electronics is currently thriving. Zhang Yunqi is very satisfied. A sense of crisis is necessary, but a sense of accomplishment is equally important. Accompanied by Liu Dongsheng and others, he toured the entire base.
After the tour, Zhang Yunqi went to the conference room.
He wanted to find fault with Liu Dongsheng and give him something to do.
Four months ago, he visited Aihua Industrial Park and was quite shocked by the living conditions of the workers there.
He kept Yang Jin here for over a month. After Yang Jin had been there for over a month, she wrote him a long report about human resource management at Aihua Electronics Factory. The contents were indeed quite suffocating. What impressed Zhang Yunqi the most were the slogans displayed in the factory: Every drop of urine is lost production capacity; sweat is output, pain is a medal!
It's not that I'm pretending to be kind.
He's not short of money, he doesn't need to pretend.
The world has always been like this, but at least for him, it shouldn't be like this. If making money is done this way, he could find ten thousand faster and more ruthless ways to make money. Just the Qingwu Commercial Pedestrian Street on Huangxing South Road alone could generate billions of dollars in wealth for him in a few years.
Why should he bother working so hard in the manufacturing industry?
To put it more bluntly, it will be another ten years before Mr. Ma loses interest in money, while Zhang Yunqi is already uninterested in money now. What interests him is how his money can better serve people and society, thereby bringing him a higher level of spiritual pleasure.
Of course, Zhang Yunqi didn't think Liu Dongsheng had any problems. This was an era when the two-day weekend system had only been in place for a year. Apart from some state-owned enterprise employees who could just coast along, private enterprises were thinking about how to maximize the enthusiasm of their workers. These days, it was very popular for private enterprises to introduce modern foreign enterprise management systems and processes, but they never mentioned the corresponding welfare and benefits system and ignored it. They only shouted the slogan of "more work, more pay" loudly every day.
Of course, the physical sensation is different for workers.
From 1993 to 1995, an important measure for deepening the reform of state-owned enterprises was to reduce staff and increase efficiency, which can be considered the pilot stage of layoffs and reassignment. From 1995 to 2001, it was the peak stage. Under the influence of factors such as the Asian financial crisis, a massive wave of layoffs swept across the country.
Against this backdrop, the workers in Jiangchuan were already very satisfied that they could find such stable jobs near their homes without having to leave their hometowns. The good pay and the principle of "the more you work, the more you earn" made them even more grateful to their boss, Zhang Yunqi!
These workers can endure this hardship because they have endured even greater hardships. They have few complaints about their living conditions because they have hope for this era. They are free from the three elements of falling back into poverty, and every penny they earn on the assembly line is genuinely improving their lives.
People are different. The parents of the post-60s generation were content with their 24/7 work on assembly lines, while the post-90s generation sits in air-conditioned rooms, lounging with their legs crossed, cursing Jack Ma and others for exploiting them. Everyone's perception of the essence of life is different, which is neither right nor wrong. But the tide of the times rolls forward, and each generation is stronger and more progressive than the last.
Zhang Yunqi has made progress.
Even if he has so much money he doesn't know what to do with it.
In the meeting room, he still discussed the issue of employee welfare and protection with Liu Dongsheng. This is indeed a gradual process, but it should be done. At least some improvements can be made in terms of food and accommodation for now.
Zhang Yunqi was also very direct: "President Liu, I've eaten at our factory canteen privately before, and objectively speaking, it's much better than pig swill, but there's still a lot of room for improvement compared to human food. As for accommodation, we could build more dormitory buildings so that 30 or 40 workers don't have to sleep in one large communal room, stinking to high heaven. In the long run, even if the workers are just like screws being tightened, this kind of living condition won't work, will it?"
Liu Dongsheng was quite embarrassed. Zhang Yunqi had indeed mentioned this matter briefly a few months ago, but the boss had not given any instructions. Of course, with such a large business empire, the boss would not have time to pay attention to these things.
In his own opinion, as a privately-owned mixed-ownership enterprise, Aihua already offered decent benefits to its employees; at least in the entire Jiangchuan region, there wouldn't be any private enterprise with better compensation. However, it's good that his boss is now considering this aspect from the employees' perspective, as it can better motivate them. Aihua Electronics' current growth momentum doesn't preclude it from incurring higher labor costs.
He immediately replied, "Understood, boss. I will come up with a rectification plan in the next couple of days for your review and approval."
Zhang Yunqi nodded: "I haven't given any direction on this before, it's my responsibility, not yours. But you're a former state-owned enterprise factory director, you know better than me what the welfare and benefits standards were in state-owned enterprises back then. Of course, I'm not saying we should just copy the old system of equal pay, or Aihua will go bankrupt. My requirement is that we do exactly what the Labor Law promulgated in 95 says. Of course, we can do better in terms of workers' food, accommodation, and transportation. I'm not saying we should make the workers feel like they have a home at Aihua, that's nonsense. It would be good enough if they could work peacefully and go home happily."
After a pause, Zhang Yunqi thought of something else that made him nauseous: "By the way, who came up with those signs saying 'Every drop of urine is lost productivity'? Turn them all off."
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(End of this chapter)