"When I was a child, my father often took me to watch the dragon boat races in Shunde, and learned what the 'dragon boat spirit' is. This big brother with an accent, his entrepreneurial story started in Shunde.
"Xiaobai" also wants to be a robot
In 2013, by chance, He Zhixiong, who has been engaged in the financial industry for many years, came into contact with the field of robot manufacturing. A college tutor has led students to win awards in national robot competitions several times, and asked him if he would like to invest a little money in the development and manufacture of robots.
At that time, he didn't know anything about robots, but He Zhixiong knew a lot about the manufacturing industry in Shunde. Shunde is an important home appliance manufacturing town in China, and at that time it was known as assembly line production, but it was still dominated by labor-intensive operations and highly dependent on manpower. If "machine substitution" can not only save costs, but also improve the automation level of manufacturing enterprises, He Zhixiong believes that this is an inevitable trend.
The market demand is clear, the prospects are bright, and the investment does not seem to be large, so Ho Zhixiong decided to give it a try. So, he gathered a few friends to start a business together and established Guangdong Tiantai Robot Co., Ltd.
The core team of Tiantai Robot
In fact, except for the mentor, none of the rest of the start-up team has really worked in the robotics industry and has no experience in manufacturing. What gave them courage was to think of Li Shufu's words, building a car is "four wheels and two rows of sofas", thinking that the robot is just a combination of the body, reducer, motor, drive, control and other components, there is nothing to be afraid of. But when they actually entered this field, they found that it was far more difficult than they imagined.
Perhaps it is this kind of start that has laid the special temperament of Tiantai Robot. Although it is now a national high-tech, specialized and special new enterprise, He Zhixiong will still use "barefoot" to describe the entrepreneurial spirit of the Tiantai team, and he often hangs on his lips a sentence: "Shunde people dare to be the first in the world, we were originally barefoot, not afraid of wearing shoes, no matter how bad it is, it is just barefoot." ”
So they began to embark on this long road of entrepreneurship "barefoot", learning and doing, and using all kinds of methods. "We went the orthodox way, read books desperately, and we even went to find a lot of books from the former Soviet Union at that time, from which we found the theoretical basis for how to develop robots. At that time, there were people in the team who pretended to purchase robots and went to peers and suppliers to see how others did it. ”
After a little research, the Tiantai team found that the robot supply chain is actually very fixed, such as reducers, motors, servo drives, and suppliers are basically so many imported brands, many so-called robot manufacturers, in fact, are just doing the design of product results and small integration, so the robot products on the market are actually not differentiated in nature, but they are also caught in homogeneous competition.
"What is the point of doing the same thing, the supply chain is still controlled by people?" He Zhixiong thought that there was no way out for the robot to do this, so he began to consider whether it was possible to participate in the upstream supply chain, independently develop some parts, and not completely fake people.
At that time, they thought that the reducer was relatively simple compared to the motor, control and drive, so they decided to start with the reducer. At the end of 2014, they set up a team in Ningbo to do the R&D and production of reducer parts, and began the first step to cut into the robot parts.
Innovation starts with imitation. They bought second-hand imported reducers and disassembled them, sent the parts to the testing agency to test the ingredients, and then went to the market to find the same or similar materials, and then through external reverse design and research on tooth shape manufacturing. The more they do it, the more energetic they go, and they enter the deep water area of the industry, only to find that there are not many people like them who work as stupidly and gnaw on the really difficult things to do.
Communicate with foreign customers
It wasn't until 2015 that the product was finally made.
"To tell you the truth, although it took us almost two years to make it, it was 'similar but not like'. Installed on the robot, it only took one night and no longer functioned. But for the Tiantai team, this product that is really in hand still greatly encourages them: "After all, it has been made, and then we can find a way to optimize it."
Turn robots into Lego
"This market is very transparent, if the customer splits and calculates the cost of 30,000, it is absolutely impossible for you to sell for 50,000. ”
2017-2019 can be said to be the most difficult period of Tiantai, this difficulty lies in the fact that it is full of hope and belief, but does not know how to actually operate. Although through the reducer and the production line for customers, the company began to have a certain amount of cash flow and slowly operated. However, if the company's products and services are not differentiated, there will be no competitiveness, and there will be no room for development, so we must find another way to seek breakthroughs.
It is precisely at such a difficult time that the Tiantai team thinks that it is the "white moment of the fish's belly", as if they saw the dawn of the sky in the dark night, they knew that the sun would definitely rise, but they didn't know what to do to survive until dawn in the face of the current darkness.
The Tiantai team returned to the original intention of entrepreneurship - to develop replicable standardized core components and apply them to robot production. In this scenario, there are two requirements for the robot, one is multi-joint, and the other is light load. Now that you have experience in making reducers, you can also try to make robot joints. "If you do a good job, you won't be bad. is still the same sentence: Barefoot is not afraid of wearing shoes, Shunde enterprises have such an entrepreneurial mentality. ”
Zheng Bin, co-founder & COO of Tiantai, was interviewed by the media
It's time to really define the concept, the idea and the product line in the second half of 2019. Different from the past robot parts divided by body, reducer, motor servo, controller, etc., Tiantai redefines the composition of the robot according to the perspective of technology and application development, which is divided into decision-making unit, power unit, sensing unit and motion unit.
Bill Gates, Masayoshi Son, and Elon Musk have all said at different times that there will be more robots than people in the future, and you can even imagine that someone around you in the future, if you don't tear off your face and tear off your mask, you don't know whether he is a human or a robot. "The future application scenarios and markets of robots will definitely be broader than computers, mobile phones, and new energy vehicles, and will inevitably become the fourth generation of intelligent terminals.
Therefore, how to position Tiantai, an enterprise that is committed to the development of robot core motion units?
"The English abbreviation of Tiantai is TT, and we hope that the future of Tiantai will be like Intel, which is 'TT inside'. At the same time, this also means that Tiantai has resolutely given up making finished robots in its corporate strategy and focused on output solutions and parts.
This is determined by the resource endowment of Tiantai itself, although in terms of ability, Tiantai can also make finished robots, but this kind of service industrial manufacturing robots are used in different products, different industries when the demand is very different, only people who can deeply understand the industry can create the most suitable robot for this industry. It is difficult for an enterprise to understand multiple industries and multiple production lines at the same time.
Tiantai Robot Company Shunde Factory
On the other hand, Ho believes that only when the supply chain matures, will more players enter the downstream. Just like building a computer in the early days, with a motherboard, CPU, power supply, and chassis, high school students can install a computer. The same is true for new energy vehicles now, the upstream electric drive, electronic control, and battery modules are very mature, and the new power car companies are focused on defining products, that is, focusing on the intelligent cockpit, and then combining each module.
"In fact, robots are the same, and in the future, everyone may be able to assemble a robot according to their own needs. Then we can develop and provide the required parts and solutions according to the needs of customers, just like Lego sells building blocks and provides building drawings. ”
Giving the finished product of the integrated robot to someone who knows more about manufacturing to do, doing a good job of the parts that they are good at, becoming an important part of the upstream of the supply chain, and even becoming the "chain master", is what Tiantai wants to do. The challenge of this path is that if there is no leading edge in technology, it is easy to enter the price competition, the profit margin is still not large enough, and it is easy to push back to the investment in R&D is not resolute enough.
Customized or productized?
Under the 2B business model, there is a key choice, to do customization or to make products, because the needs of downstream customers are different, it is inevitable to put forward a variety of customization needs, but if each demand is responded, it will involve too much manpower, and the investment is uncontrollable.
Tiantai firmly chose productization, and their solution is to develop products with some representative industry head customers, find out the needs and uses of users, and then develop standardized products that are common in the industry.
Tiantai led the first national standard project seminar for robot parts in Guangdong Province
"The income of customized products must not be high, so we will treat it as R&D investment. ”
There is a leading Internet manufacturer is also a customer of Tiantai, although it has only been purchased a few times, but in the process of cooperation, Tiantai understands the demands and use scenarios of this type of customer, and the two sides jointly invest resources in research and development to produce finished products. In the future, Tiantai can launch a standardized product package based on this product.
"Then the customer won't ask you to sign a confidentiality agreement?" Faced with this question, Tiantai's answer was as firm as ever: "In fact, we will also choose like-minded customers, and we will explore the evolution and iteration of robot products in different scenarios together." ”
Perhaps it is the relationship of their own entrepreneurial experience, Tiantai believes that when making products in China, you must not be afraid of "being copied", because as long as you have perseverance and perseverance, you can actually learn, and those that cannot be copied away are your core values, which require each company to accumulate time. "So we have always told our customers that the world's martial arts are only fast and unbreakable, and if we want to be ahead of others, we must always maintain innovation and research and development. ”
For others, they are very cautious. For example, there was once a real estate agency who said that he had customer resources and wanted to make some delivery robot products to sell to real estate customers, such as delivering express delivery or takeaway in the community, and asked Tiantai if he could cooperate in development.
For such an attractive opportunity, He Zhixiong is very calm, "There must be real market demand and find the right entry point to do it." Assuming that he has indeed found someone to pay, it is better to go to the market to find a ready-made delivery robot product, and then come to us after figuring it out, and improve and develop this product together, and we can also standardize this product and sell it to similar customers in the future. ”
At the current stage, Tiantai must "pick customers", "because the final form of the product is a standardized product, not a customized product." "Only customers with sufficient scale and representing the advanced nature of the industry can help Tiantai achieve this goal.
Domestic alternative path from point to chain
According to the China Robot Industry Yearbook, the operating income of Chinese robots exceeded the 100 billion mark for the first time in 2020, and the density of domestic robots reached 187 units per 10,000 employees in 2019, far exceeding the global average. With a market share of 36%, China has become one of the world's largest industrial robot markets.
Just like what Tiantai experienced, the upstream of China's robot supply chain has been monopolized by foreign brands for a long time, and the core components are deeply dependent on imports, and there are "stuck neck" problems such as low bargaining power, long delivery time, and restrictions on exports to China. However, the status quo is changing, and a large number of Chinese companies start from a certain point in the supply chain, first opening up the situation through cost advantages, and then gradually establishing technical barriers, encroaching on the market originally monopolized by foreign investors.
The best of them have become indispensable chain owners in the supply chain with the right to speak and bargain, empowering upstream and downstream enterprises to make progress together.
"We see that all walks of life in the industry are constantly working hard, and 'stuck neck' will not be a problem in the future. In the future, what we want to do is not only domestic substitution, but also 'domestic leading'. Ho Chi Hung is full of confidence in the future.