【1】
In the past few days, OPPO's self-developed chip company Zheku has collapsed, causing widespread concern.
Founded in 2019, Zheku mainly provides solid and comprehensive software and hardware support for high-end flagship mobile phones, and in just over three years, it has successively released the NPU chip "Mariana X" that is good at processing pictures, videos and other data, and the audio chip "Mariana Y" equipped on Bluetooth headsets.
Both of these results are in line with OPPO's needs and are more capable of fighting. At the end of last year, OPPO revealed that more than 10 million "Mariana X" were shipped.
Since there are achievements and OPPO as a backer, why did Zheku suddenly announce that all employees were dismissed and the company was closed?
Some people say that Zheku's resolute fall was not due to lack of money, and one "evidence" is that he adopts an N+3 generous approach to compensation for departing employees.
In fact, dismissing employees on favorable terms can only say that Zheku did a decent job, which does not mean that it is not short of money. You know, in three years, Zheku has smashed about 10 billion, but the change in the situation makes people unable to see the end of investment.
At the meeting announcing the dissolution of Zheku, Liu Jun, CEO of Zheku, admitted that the background reasons for the company's dissolution "include the global economic environment and mobile phone industry is not optimistic, the company's revenue does not meet expectations, and the chip self-research investment is so huge that the company can no longer afford it."
For the fall of Zheku, Duan Yongping, a big man with a lot of ties with OPPO, said bluntly: "Correcting mistakes must be done as soon as possible, and the price is the smallest price." ”
Taste Duan Yongping's sentence, I think there is a message worth paying attention to, that is, there is also a time window for correcting mistakes, which needs to be done as soon as possible, and in sharp contrast, China's development of chips in these years, in many key nodes, did not achieve any results, but lost huge funds, chip research and development time window has been missed again and again.
【2】
In 2003, the state accelerated the support of chips, and "Hanxin No. 1" was born, which was evaluated by many academicians as "reaching the world's leading level".
For a while, almost all the resources in the national chip field were concentrated on its inventor Chen Jin and his team, including 1.1 billion yuan of research funds, but Academician Ni Guangnan's "Ark 1" chip had to be abandoned due to insufficient funds and other reasons.
Who knows, the so-called Hanxin is actually a forgery, just grinding off Motorola's name and changing it to "Hanxin No. 1".
The truth spread, China's chip industry fell into a cold silence, for more than ten years of stagnation, saying that Chen Jin is a "national thief" is not wrong. What is speechless is that Chen Jin was not punished by law in the end, and is still engaged in chip business, with a number of chip-related companies under his name.
Another key node is that in 2015, the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (hereinafter referred to as the "Big Fund") was established, and two phases leveraged more than one trillion funds, focusing on investment in the integrated circuit chip manufacturing industry, but under the "operation" of the then general manager Ding Wenwu, he frequently invested in the Unigroup led by Zhao Weiguo, and a "thief's den" gradually took shape.
The data shows that in the first phase of the big fund alone, Ding Wenwu led the investment in Unigroup to nearly 30 billion yuan, accounting for 30% of the total funds of the entire first phase. In 2017, Huaxin Investment, as the sole management institution of the large fund at that time, signed an agreement with Unigroup, saying that it would invest 50 billion yuan in Unigroup.
After the establishment of the second phase of the big fund, in March 2020, the big fund invested 2.25 billion yuan in Unigroup's subsidiary Unigroup Zhanrui, which is the first investment project of the second phase of the big fund.
With such a large-scale financial blessing, it is still "not enough" to feed Ziguang. In 2021, the company was reorganized in bankruptcy due to its inability to pay off its debts due.
Also from 2021, the people in the "den of thieves" surfaced one by one, Gao Songtao, vice president of Huaxin Investment, Lu Jun, former president of Huaxin Investment, Diao Shijing, former president of Unigroup, Zhao Weiguo, former chairman of Unigroup, Ding Wenwu, general manager of Big Fund, Wang Wenzhong, Shenzhen Sub-Fund of Big Fund, and Yang Zhengfan, deputy general manager of the third investment department of Huaxin Investment Management Co., Ltd., were taken away for investigation.
For these "national thieves", the comments of netizens hit the nail on the head: "It has ruined the trillion fund and harmed the entire chip industry chain." ”
【3】
Saying "scourge the entire chip industry chain", there is also the sadness of missing the chip development window, wasting the country's efforts, and failing the support and care of high-level officials.
The most prominent case is that in 2019, Huawei was included in the "Entity List" by the United States, setting off a boom in domestic chip substitution, and the impact on high-end chips has also attracted much attention.
Among them, UNISOC Zhanrui's "Tiger T710" AI chip once attracted much attention. In July 2019, ETH Zurich's AI performance test list showed that the performance of this chip exceeded Qualcomm's "Snapdragon 855 plus" and Huawei's "Kirin 810", "with a super high score of 28097".
However, in the following years, the chip has not achieved much, and the introduction of the official website of Unigroup is still stuck in the "hegemonic list" in 2019.
According to a report released last month by semiconductor research institute TechInsights, Qualcomm has a unique share of 60.9% in the global baseband chip market in 2022, especially in the high-end market, and UNISOC is classified as "other" column. This is really deplorable, after all, Unigroup's technology foundation and industrial layout are still very promising to rush out on behalf of China's industry. As a result, the opportunity was delayed by this group of wrong people.
The funds should have been used for the most urgent needs, but they were tossed away by the national thieves, the intensity was greatly reduced, and the time window was missed again.
Now, OPPO chip company has fallen, once again alerting the Chinese people: let the people who do practical things and the enterprises that produce results get the blessing of funds and resources, and domestic chips have a better future!
【Reference】
[1] "Domestic tens of billions of chip giants, gone overnight" Times Finance
[2] "A Brief History of Corruption in the Chip Industry"
[3] "Executives are investigated, chip industry anti-corruption is underway!" Revealing the Personnel Intersection between Big Fund and Unigroup Cai Lian News