Little Giant | Tianji Intelligence Chen Xi: Crossing boundaries in stability

Economic Observer reporter Xue Zhi work, exercise, reading, these three things filled Chen Xi's life, she is responsible for a start-up company - Guangdong Tianji Intelligent System Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Tianji Intelligence"),work occupies almost 80% of her life time.

Is it boring to be like this day after day and year after year? She said yes, but there was also a "balance" between "boredom." It's like running, running day by day, but the goals of each day and each stage are different. Entrepreneurship is also like this, the company is changing every day, the interest exists in the change and uncertainty, seeing the company can survive and grow in such an environment, just like running can secrete dopamine.

Founded in 2015, Tianji Intelligent is a shareholding company of Changying Precision Group, and its subsidiary, Guangdong Tianji Robot Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Tianji Robot), was established in July 2017 as a joint venture between Changying Precision Group and Yaskawa Electric (China) Co., Ltd. In July 2021, Tianji Intelligent was identified as the third batch of national specialized new small giants.

Chinese startups in the robot industry, these few restriction words almost frame the development path of Tianji Intelligence. China's robotics industry started very late, facing continuous competition from four major families (Japan's Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric, Switzerland's ABB and Germany's KUKA) or other foreign brands. Chen Xi said that the development of the entire industry is very tortuous, and not everyone can cross the twists and turns and continue to move forward.

Even if it is a company in the same robot track, due to the difference in basic conditions and the founder's personal background, the growth path is not the same, but it has to survive a relatively long development cycle.

Tianji Intelligent chose a relatively long exploration path: because it did not have the strength of its own research and development at the beginning, it first joint ventured, slowly understood the scene and customer needs, absorbed the resource advantages of all aspects, and then began to build core technologies.

Chen Xi has been involved in every change since coming to this company in 2019, and she believes that this path can ensure that the product has better market recognition and strong explosiveness. Backed by Changying Precision and Yaskawa Motor, the strengths of Tianji Intelligence at the beginning are manufacturing capabilities, quality management and product consistency and pass-through rate, based on this, research and development can be slowly completed in the later stage.

This avoids a more serious situation: R&D capabilities and products are good in themselves, but there will be unstable quality problems in the delivery stage, followed by a lot of after-sales work. Direct delivery is easily deductible by the customer, which means that the company's products will not have any chances in the next year.

Another example is running, entrepreneurship needs to be steady, and you need to master a certain rhythm, try to break through, cross your own boundaries.

Divergence and focus

Prior to joining Tianji Intelligence, Chen Xi was mainly engaged in the field of investment. Making an investment requires considering the whole picture in the general environment and then choosing a track. Every year, the hot theme is different, and perhaps in a few years, it will continue to switch between chips, pharmaceuticals, new energy and other industries.

But to do business is to "only do this one thing", this thing will have cycles, there will be adversity.

Chen Xi said that compared with investment, the challenge of entrepreneurship is greater and more interesting, "how to cross the cycle to resist adversity and become a long-term valuable enterprise, which can be regarded as a great enterprise, fighting for comprehensive ability, need to have a clear understanding of each module, but also have a very good judgment on the macro environment." ”

Before choosing to enter this industry, Chen Xi did some analysis, she thought that after all, she is not young, the opportunity to switch tracks in life is not too much, according to the habit of investment to consider the robot industry, this is definitely a long-term enough track, competitiveness will become stronger and stronger with accumulation. As a comprehensive discipline, the field of robotics includes motion control, system software, mechanism design, sensors, etc., which also determines that the barriers of the industry are relatively high, and it seems that it will not be as cruel as other industries. But at the end of the day, that's what interests her.

The idea of investment has been brought into Chen Xi's current work, making Tianji Intelligent more open in the application of robots, and will not be limited to a specific scenario. "Whether it is catering or shoes and clothing, before opening up a certain industry, we will analyze its potential development space from a large framework, whether it is worth further layout, and use more investment thinking in this process."

The core product of Tianji Intelligence is industrial robots, in addition to the development of robot 3D vision cameras, robot controllers, force control systems and for 3C, shoes and clothing, new catering, medical and other industries to provide standard workstations, intelligent NUMERICAL control equipment and system integration solutions.

The establishment of a joint venture with Yaskawa serves the same purpose, and the two begin their cooperation with an understanding of the scenes they are familiar with. Robot is a "universal" product, can be applied to almost all walks of life, but robot production enterprises are difficult to cover, each field of expertise is few: Tianji Intelligence because of the origin of Changying precision, so the 3C scene is more familiar, Yaskawa better understand the motor. Through joint ventures, the two can exchange resources and complement each other's advantages.

From business expansion to organizational structure, the breakthrough and exploration of boundaries penetrates the intelligence of Tianji. The thing Chen Xi has been thinking about is the refined management of the enterprise. In her view, most Chinese enterprises have not yet entered the point of refined management, and Chinese entrepreneurs are still mainly selling to large customers when doing TOB. Foreign companies tend to start from corporate culture, carry out refined management, and focus on the synchronous growth of individuals and enterprises. But building a corporate culture is a very difficult thing.

The habit of manufacturing is to establish the boundary of ability, only to do things within the boundary, Chen Xi wants to break such behavioral habits, encourage people in the organization to step out of the comfort zone, try to work for things outside the boundary of ability, whether it is manufacturing, or human resources, or even employees in the financial department, crossing the border will be more or less beneficial.

"I want the whole company to become simpler, more like an Internet company, open, innovative, and value teamwork, so that it can somehow avoid situations where things don't matter to themselves, blame each other, and when something happens, it's even difficult to trace."

The goal is "specialized and new"

Entrepreneurship is against the current, and the most important thing is the dilemma.

When Chen Xi thought about the several transformations that Tianji Intelligent had undergone, he said that the basis for each step of change was very market-oriented and very "cruel": the first transformation was to reduce the orders that relied on the parent company Changying Precision and switch to receiving external orders; the second transformation was from the integrated project type to the product type.

Prior to this, Tianji Intelligence relied on the integration project to drive robot sales, and the follow-up choice was to stop all the integration projects, allocate all the teams to the group, and only retain the decision of the robot body industry, which is also decided by the company's own advantages in Chen Xi's view.

After all, doing integration projects and doing robots are two sets of systems, including management, sales and operations are different, in addition, there are many companies on the market that do non-standard machine integration, but there are very few that can make money. Therefore, in the end, he chose to concentrate on the research and development of the robot business.

This is not an easy choice, because integration projects are easy to make the company's revenue bigger, and a project can bring tens of millions of operating income. But only to do the robot business needs to endure the growth of revenue brought about by the sales of robots, and at the same time, the pressure on robots in product competitiveness is greater, so the demand for talents is also higher. Every year there are new challenges.

In 2017, Tianji Intelligent developed the first generation of EWP7-R700 small six-axis industrial robots, and its sales volume ranked first in Dongguan. Up to now, the second generation of TR8 series small six-axis robots, SR series SCARA, upside-down SCARA, has sold more than 4,000 industrial robots and thousands of sets of intelligent integrated equipment and robot full automation line.

Chen Xi told reporters that based on the judgment of the demand for robots, the current Tianji intelligent orders are full, and the thirst for funds has also improved. Chen Xi sees that some industries that have not been combined before also have the tendency to embrace the robot industry, and their demand is stronger and faster than that of traditional industries. The robot industry is blossoming at many points, the art industry has a specialty, it can be said that every company has a lot of opportunities.

Chen Xi is also reaching out to strategic investors, on the one hand, he needs to introduce more funds, on the other hand, he also needs to import more resources. Being selected into the list of "specialized and special new" is also conducive to the financing process of Tianji Intelligent to a large extent.

Of course, the country's tax reduction policy is also reducing its burden and revitalizing the capital chain, for example, Under the guidance of the "three divisions to help enterprises" of the Songshan Lake tax department, Tianji Intelligent will enjoy the software product VALUE-added tax refund policy in 2020, and handle the tax refund of more than 3 million yuan; this year, it has enjoyed the new policy of quarterly prepayment of research and development expenses, and as of the third quarter of 2021, Tianji Intelligent enjoys about 25.4 million yuan of additional deductions for research and development expenses, and can reduce or reduce corporate income tax by about 6.3 million yuan.

"The introduction of the new policy of deducting R&D expenses is conducive to accelerating the speed of enterprise capital withdrawal, and has a more obvious role in further encouraging enterprise scientific and technological innovation." Huang Yan, head of the income tax section of the Dongguan Municipal Taxation Bureau of the State Administration of Taxation, believes that the new policy is very conducive to the development of innovative enterprises

Unlike his father's generation of traditional entrepreneurs, Chen Xi has no obsession with the scale of the enterprise. Just like the name "specialized and new", to be a distinctive enterprise does not necessarily mean that the company will surpass the previous generation in scale. But as soon as you mention this company, you can quickly form a portrait, whether it is a strong ability to innovate, or a high level of technology, it is best to have a memory point. "Compared with the scale of the enterprise, we are more pursuing the leading position of technology, and whether the technology of foreign countries can be equal or even surpassed, which is something we very much want to do." Chen Xi was very firm about this.