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Today is the 2186th day that Shan Renxing accompanies you
(Follow the video number, Dr. Shan Ren shares the latest business knowledge every week)
01
Just a few days ago, as the first victim of the Sino-US trade war, ZTE first suspended trading in A-shares and Hong Kong stocks, and then announced an important news on the resumption of trading on the same day.
He received a judgment from a U.S. court, the probation period for ZTE's sanctions expired, and the U.S. supervision of ZTE ended.
As soon as this good news came out, ZTE's stocks rose in a rupture, and the news that shareholders were boiling for a while and Chinese companies were winning once again jumped out.
Although the end of the "slowdown period" is a major positive for ZTE, it is really difficult to make people happy behind the whole incident.
What happened to ZTE also raised two questions for all business operators.
In the face of card neck, what can companies cope with?
Do you want to develop the whole industrial chain?
2
To answer these two questions, let's briefly review the fuse of the Sino-US trade war and the reason for ZTE's sanctions.
ZTE and Huawei, in the field of communications in China and even in the world, are leading enterprises and are also strong competitors for 5G, and they can provide complete end-to-end communication solutions.
But in 2016-2017, the U.S. Department of Commerce caught evidence that ZTE had violated embargo regulations.
Lao Mei found that ZTE was not very honest, importing chips from the United States and then secretly selling the assembled equipment to Iran and North Korea.
Both countries are on the U.S. list of embargo regulations.
Therefore, Lao Mei took advantage of the situation to list ZTE in the blacklist of the US Department of Commerce and issued a sky-high punishment.
Americans don't care if my conditions are reasonable or not, it depends on whether you admit guilt or not.
Because the core components of the chip are subject to people, ZTE accepted the penalty in March 2017, paying a fine of $890 million and a deposit of $300 million, subject to supervision by the US judicial department.
Originally thought that breaking the bank would eliminate the disaster, as a result, on April 16, 2018, the US Department of Commerce once again issued an announcement that ZTE would not purchase sensitive products from US companies in the next 7 years, and would not participate in any us import and export commodities, software and technology transactions.
The reason turned out to be that ZTE did not warn its employees who "violated the embargo" that year.
A month later, ZTE issued a tragic announcement that the company's main business activities could not be carried out and was completely shut down.
Hou, the founder of ZTE, temporarily left the mountain for the noble grandfather and ran to the United States for peace talks.
However, the result of the peace talks was that ZTE once again accepted the penalty, adding an additional $1 billion fine and a $400 million deposit, while accepting the 4-point demand put forward by the United States:
ZTE changes the board of directors and management within 30 days;
ZTE hired a compliance team selected by the U.S. Department of Commerce to oversee the company for a period of 10 years;
ZTE is subject to the ombudsman dispatched by the U.S. Department of Justice, and the period is extended from 3 years to 5 years;
The United States has the right to reactivate the ban at any time in the next 10 years.
So far, not counting ZTE's impact on its business, the fine and security deposit alone have paid $2.6 billion in cash, which is 16.5 billion yuan at the current exchange rate.
This time, only 2017 to the end of the judicial supervision, the knife hanging on ZTE's head has still not been removed, how can this be called a win?
03
Today's emphasis on card neck technology and attention to the chip field are largely due to the successive sanctions imposed by ZTE and Huawei by the United States.
ZTE's core technology and components are dependent on U.S. suppliers, and in the face of sanctions, companies cannot survive.
Huawei envisioned the scene of supply interruption, made a "spare tire plan" in advance, developed its own chips, and although it suffered losses under US sanctions, it did not affect the normal progress of the company's business.
In the alternation between before and after, ZTE and Huawei have gradually opened up the gap in terms of revenue scale.
Judging from the recovery speed of ZTE in recent years, after suffering from sanctions, ZTE attaches more importance to core technologies than ever before, and regards "technology leadership" as an important strategic goal of the company.
Especially in chip technology, ZTE has invested heavily in the development of the whole industry chain of chip design.
The entire company has 33,422 people are R & D personnel, accounting for half of the company's employees, most of them are masters, ZTE in 2021 will be 16% of the annual revenue (18.8 billion, nearly 3 times the net profit) invested in research and development.
This proportion is close to Huawei's 19%, far exceeding the 5% stipulated by the science and technology innovation board.
So, obviously, in the face of the card neck, what can the company cope with?
Only by mastering the core technology will not be stuck in the neck, when your neck is one day as hard as iron, naturally no one can jam you.
We can also look at sanctions from another aspect, US sanctions are not only the core technology, but also the development space of the supply chain.
If the sanctioned enterprise cannot find an alternative supply plan in a short period of time, then it can only be artificially knifed, and I am fish meat.
This is where sanctions work well, and most companies do not have the ability to go from top to bottom, especially in the key chip field.
This also begs the question, should our enterprises develop the whole industry chain?
04
For business operators, the whole industry chain is first of all a kind of business management ideas and concepts.
In the past, the concept of the whole industry chain was not recognized by the operators, why?
It is because the cost is too high to be crossed.
Yin Yimin, the former chairman of ZTE, once said: "A person who opens a restaurant wants to raise pigs and brew vinegar himself?" If you do this, no one in this restaurant can afford to eat. ”
The same is true at the level of business operation, if an enterprise wants to cover all the links of the industrial chain, all the supplies come by itself, and the upfront cost paid is unimaginable.
In Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations", it is said that the great explosion of productive forces in modern society stems from the emergence of the social division of labor.
Today, an important significance of commercial development lies in the division of labor and refinement of the industrial chain.
The essence of the market economy determines that the enterprise is a for-profit organization, and cost and efficiency are the two lifelines of enterprise operation.
Even like Apple, it is to hand over the accessories and production to its own suppliers to be responsible, as long as they strictly control the supply chain, support the second supplier in a supply link to achieve a balance, and can be replaced at any time.
Of course, under the influence of US sanctions, globalization crisis and geopolitics, enterprises' thinking about the whole industry chain is not really to start from the source independently.
I think there are 2 points worth thinking about.
The first is to raise the synergistic relationship between upstream and downstream transactions within the original enterprise from the perspective of cooperation and transaction to a strategic height, effectively manage each link from the source to the terminal, and effectively control the key links.
What is effective management and control?
When your procurement accounts for 30% of the supplier's output value, you have become a big customer that the supplier cannot lose, and you can work with the supplier to improve quality control and quality.
Secondly, when we can feedback the needs of the most end consumers to the supply links at the forefront through data, all links in the industrial chain can be market and consumer-oriented, to save inventory and stock, everyone is profitable, and the upstream and downstream can form a community of interests.
At the same time, enterprises should have a spare tire plan, find the lowest replacement capacity, and a fundamental purpose of the whole industry chain is to improve the utilization rate and controllability of enterprise resources.
Second, the whole industrial chain is to realize the value of the enterprise in different links of the industrial chain, and naturally concentrate resources on the high-value links.
What is a high-value link?
We have two adjectives for the industrial chain, one of which has low-end industries and high-end industries.
Some people have been talking about eliminating low-end industries, but I think low-end industries are an inaccurate concept, which should be called backward productivity, and the word that applies to it is not called elimination, but upgrading.
For example, a worker produces a pair of inferior leather shoes a day, which is called backward productivity.
A worker can design, produce and transport a pair of personalized brand basketball shoes in one day, which is advanced productivity.
So, I hire 1,000 workers to produce 1,000 pairs of shoes a day, and then pair them with the leadership team, is this not called the scale of development?
No, this is called a productivity regression.
I hire 200 people to design and develop new products, use 10 devices with 100 people for lean production, produce 5,000 pairs of shoes every day, and hire 10 people to go to distributors and manage distribution, which is productivity upgrade.
I focused my resources on the most valuable R&D and design, improved product quality, improved production efficiency with equipment, and improved my competitiveness by controlling channels and brands.
For many of our enterprises, the thinking of the whole industry chain must not be to do the entire industry by themselves, but to control the key links of the supply chain and find the ability to find the lowest replaceable.
At the same time, while developing new technologies, enterprises can fully integrate and utilize existing technologies to improve the production efficiency and production quality of the industry, and upgrade to higher value and return.
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Responsible editor| Luo Yingfan
The pictures in this article are from the Internet