Editor's note:
At present, Guangdong is continuing to deepen its opening-up to the outside world, and actively promote the synergy between the construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and the development strategy of the Yangtze River Economic Belt. Nanfang Daily and Nanfang+ will launch a series of reports on the "Bay Belt Dialogue" to carry out front-line research and promote cross-regional dialogue, and look forward to the new future of China's industry.
This article was first published on "Wu Xiaobo Channel" and has been slightly adjusted.
"The best way to imagine the future is to create it and grow with it. ”
When the wings are opened, and with the eight propellers spinning rapidly, a "flying car" similar to that in Luc Besson's film "The Fifth Element" slowly rises into the air.
When it rises to a height of more than 8 meters, it makes a circle and then descends slowly. Sitting alone in the cabin, the passenger wearing headphones and double seat belts was none other than Wu Xiaobo.
"As a person who can't even drive a car, now I'm actually flying a plane. Wu Xiaobo couldn't hold back his excitement, "The era of low-altitude economy is really coming." "This scene happened at the headquarters of Xiaopeng Huitian.
On April 9, the Southern Manufacturing Entrepreneurs Alliance, jointly initiated by Nanfang Daily, Nanfang +, Wu Xiaobo Channel and Agitation Academy, was officially established, aiming to create a learning and exchange platform, government-enterprise docking platform, open cooperation platform, benchmarking and mutual learning platform, think tank service platform and mainstream communication platform based in Guangdong, facing the Bay Area, radiating the whole country, and facing manufacturing enterprises. On the same day, Wu Xiaobo's channel and the Southern Manufacturing Entrepreneurs Alliance launched the research activity of "Wu Xiaobo Studying in the Greater Bay Area".
Find landing scenarios for technology
The first stop of the survey was two companies related to the "low-altitude economy": Xpeng Huitian and XAG Technology.
The "low-altitude economy" was written into the government work report for the first time this year. It is predicted that the scale of the mainland's low-altitude economy will exceed 500 billion yuan in 2023 and is expected to reach 2 trillion yuan in 2030. If we use a popular word to describe it, it is "new quality productivity".
Wu Xiaobo's electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft is called the Voyager X2, and its iteration is more interesting:
When the wings are opened, it is a flying machine, ready to soar into the sky, and when the wings are retracted and stored in the cargo compartment at the rear, it becomes an electric car, so it is called a "land aircraft carrier". Now it is in the Xiaopeng Huitian exhibition hall. It is said that if you book it at the end of the year, it will be delivered next year.
"To be the largest flying car company in Asia. Zhao Deli is the founder of Xiaopeng Huitian, and he talked to Wu Xiaobo about his entrepreneurial experience.
Out of his preference for model airplanes, Zhao Deli, who originally ran a Hunan restaurant, devoted himself to a delta wing and helicopter that could carry people, but this thing was not only difficult to learn, but also cost millions of yuan to "research".
"Can I make an electric motorcycle, like a Harry Potter broom or a black cat sheriff, as long as the venue allows, it can achieve one-key vertical take-off and landing, and it can also drive automatically?" This seemingly "unreliable" idea has become Zhao Deli's entrepreneurial motivation.
The prototype of the first generation of aircraft appeared, and it quickly became a hot topic on the Internet. In Zhao Deli's view, this first-generation aircraft priced at the level of 1 million solves two pain points: many people can afford to buy a car with an airplane, after all, if they buy a lot of cars for 1 million, they can buy flying cars;
All technologies, from the moment it was born, have been on the way to finding commercial application scenarios. However, once the product and the scene are matched, it is the so-called industry "outlet".
"In fact, apart from the technology gap, it is important who can commercialize it on a large scale. Zhao Deli said that if you directly aim at the sky above the city, you may not survive in the future, so you can first expand the surrounding scenes, such as tourism, urban emergency, fire rescue, highway inspection, high-rise escape and so on.
Through subversive innovation, Xiaopeng Huitian has seized the opportunity of the civil aviation subdivision track. Another Guangzhou company Wu Xiaobo visited, Tianhe-based XAG Technology, focused on agriculture.
Like Zhao Deli, the founding team of XAG Technology is also a group of "enthusiasts" who play model airplanes, and they only came up with entrepreneurial ideas because they gathered on the website.
The idea of using drones to farm originated from a trip abroad by the founding team. "At that time, we saw Yamaha's launch of remote-controlled drones for agricultural plant protection. Gong Yaoqin, co-founder of XAG Technology, said.
However, at that time, Japanese drones needed to be controlled by remote control, which was difficult to operate. The intelligent agricultural machinery developed by this group of young people from XAG Technology can be operated by farmers only on their mobile phones, making farming as simple as "playing games", which greatly reduces the application threshold.
XAG also described a fully automated intelligent scenario to Wu Xiaobo: unmanned planting, intelligent drip irrigation, Beidou navigation, and intelligent supervision...... Intelligent operation mode, the use of agricultural machinery autopilot can easily operate agricultural machinery, alleviate the fatigue of agricultural machinery, can mount and independently control flat, loose, sowing and other agricultural machinery vehicles, accurate execution of agricultural tasks, operation records can be synchronized in real time, reduce labor costs and ensure operation efficiency.
The cost-cutting code behind innovation
"The best way to imagine the future is to create it and grow with it," Wu said. ”
Any disruptive innovation, if you want to complete commercialization, first of all, product-market-fit (Product-Market-Fit), then rapid iteration of technology, and finally through large-scale production and building the entire supply chain system to achieve scale effect. At this point, the "moat" of the enterprise has been constructed.
At the scene, Wu Xiaobo threw a "tricky" question to Zhao Deli: "Foreign countries are more advanced in building airplanes, will they catch up with flying cars?"
Zhao Deli replied that the Chinese's research and development speed is too fast, just like new energy vehicles, to achieve corner overtaking; more importantly, new energy vehicles have established a perfect supply chain industrial system in China, and the cost reduction is very fast.
The core technology of new energy vehicles is the "three-electric system" - motor, electronic control and battery. And these three leading core technologies in China can almost be "seamless" connected to the field of intelligent flying cars.
According to the data, China's new energy vehicles took the lead in breaking through technical barriers, and the production and sales volume has been the first in the world for 9 consecutive years, accounting for more than 60% of the world's proportion, forming a complete industrial chain with great resilience and competitiveness.
"Although the best electric aviation technology is still in the United States, it is too tall to be commercialized, and a flying car costs $4 million, while China can sell it for $1 million. Zhao Deli explained the logic of the development of electric helicopters in China and the United States: China is building cars, while the United States is building airplanes, and the former is a completely different disruptive innovation.
In XAG Technology, Wu Xiaobo also asked Gong Yaoqin a question: "Why was the agricultural drone industry born?"
The co-founder of XAG said that the key is that the attitude sensor of the aircraft's flight controller is in play. He made an analogy, which is a bit similar to the built-in gyroscope sensor of the mobile phone, which can monitor the horizontal or vertical screen of the mobile phone, which used to cost hundreds of yuan each, but now the cost is only a few yuan.
Behind the significant cost reduction, it is relying on Guangdong's perfect smartphone industry chain. Data shows that Guangdong's mobile phone production accounts for more than 40% of the country's total, starting from Tianhe, within a radius of 100 kilometers, you can find all kinds of electronic accessories you want.
For example, Dongguan, a manufacturing city, has formed an advanced manufacturing system composed of 100 billion head enterprises, 81 listed enterprises, more than 3,000 specialized and special new enterprises, more than 10,000 high-tech enterprises, and 220,000 industrial enterprises.
Wu Xiaobo described them as clusters of industrial "aircraft carriers" that are strong enough to cope with the wind and waves.
This is the industrial potential energy formed by China's rich application scenarios and supply chains.
Policy and capital "pushed hard"
For Zhao Deli, what makes his unbridled imagination really come to fruition comes from two things: policy and capital.
In the matter of exploring the "low-altitude economy", Guangdong Province has always been at the forefront of the country.
In order to take the lead in the low-altitude economic track, Guangdong Province proposed to support Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Zhuhai to build comprehensive demonstration zones for the general aviation industry and create a low-altitude economic and industrial highland in the Greater Bay Area. Guangzhou has successively promoted the introduction of the "Guangzhou Low-altitude Economic Development Plan" and "Guangzhou Low-altitude Economic Development Implementation Plan".
That's why the first production license in the global eVTOL (vertical take-off and landing aircraft) industry appeared at EHang in Guangzhou, marking the first eVTOL to enter the stage of large-scale production.
These policies pushed Zhao Deli hard.
However, only Zhao Deli knows the real difficulty of starting a business. Because the autonomous aerial vehicle needs to conduct a large number of tests on the propeller, Zhao Deli has flown more than 1,500 flights and crashed more than 50 times, and many parts have to be replaced for each fall. "In those two years, I spent all my savings, I still owed a lot of debts, and finally sold the house and the family went to rent a house. ”
The initial entrepreneurial team basically left because they couldn't see the future clearly.
Zhao Deli also mentioned that because he had no money, he had not come to buy a propeller for a long time, and the supplier cautiously came to inquire about the situation. "At that time, he (the supplier) thought that I had had an accident, but after learning the true situation, he also made a special credit for me to protect this rare customer. ”
This made Zhao Deli feel for the first time that there is still goodness in the cruel business competition.
And one thing that had a key impact on Zhao Deli's fate was that he received investment from He Xiaopeng.
He recalled that in July 2020, He Xiaopeng found himself in Dongguan. In the first sentence of the meeting, Zhao Deli spoke first and asked him: "Talk first, or fly first?" He Xiaopeng said briskly, "Fly first." So, the two went around in the air, and He Xiaopeng felt that this thing was reliable, so he helped him complete this dream together.
Because of this "impulsive and risky young capital", in October 2020, Xiaopeng Huitian officially moved from Dongguan to Guangzhou, and then developed very quickly.
The happiness and sense of security of entrepreneurs is an important prerequisite for innovation and entrepreneurship, and there are many entrepreneurs like Zhao Deli in China who have struggled, but there are always people who pull them in the dark, and then the limelight reverses, and some people attribute it to "luck" or "noble".
This is not the case. Luck itself may be surrounded by young people who have the same ideals and are willing to work with him, or it may be the local industrial chain formed, or the business atmosphere created by the government that respects entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship is like a black box, in which there are invisible synergies, and eventually it becomes a systematic thing that can lead to success.
Towards an "ecological rainforest"
During the three-day "Wu Xiaobo Study in the Greater Bay Area" research, in addition to exploring the "low-altitude economy", Wu Xiaobo also visited companies such as Xpeng Motors, Zhengjia, Miniso, Yanmo Solutions, Dingtai Technology and Vivo.
These outstanding private enterprises have allowed him to see a "vibrant, inclusive, and eager" Greater Bay Area, and at the same time, he has clearly felt the pressure of entrepreneurs.
On the one hand, there is the pressure of involution in the industry. In the past, an electric drill sold for 20 yuan, but now it sells for 1 yuan, which requires the company itself to continue to iterate and change. On the other hand, it comes from the outside. For example, the supply of foreign products has been cut off, and the procurement of consumables has decreased, and in the next few years, enterprises must seek change under the dual pressure of involution and external impulse.
But there are still entrepreneurs who are constantly "solving problems".
In his speech, Wu Xiaobo mentioned that Mousse bedding has an annual output of 3.6 million mattresses, and the style can be customized, and Marco Polo can "bend" rock slabs.
They have shown strong competitiveness among similar products in the world.
For example, the surface ability of Marco Polo rock slabs and the presentation scene of the products far exceed similar products in Italy.
During this visit, he observed that the Yanmo program has been tackling key problems for more than ten years, and has developed "the ink of the descendants of Yan and Huang", which is comparable to that of international giants......
As "new quality productivity" has become a hot word, Wu Xiaobo believes that this means whether an enterprise can withstand the wave of new material revolution and intelligent revolution brought about by Industry 4.0, and these enterprises are the best bearers and practitioners.
If there is one key word to summarize the current situation of enterprise agglomeration in Guangdong, it is "rainforest" - it has become a high-frequency word in this "study in the Greater Bay Area".
There are technology and Internet companies such as Huawei and Tencent, as well as countless small and medium-sized enterprises, technology enterprises, and specialized and special new enterprises that have grown and expanded, forming an ecological niche in the industrial rainforest, which is interrelated and affects each other.
At the beginning of the business, the "geeks" faced the difficulty of fighting alone, but once they entered the rainforest and became a "group chain innovation", they played a great potential - just like the role and role played by various local governments in Guangdong in the exploration of the "low-altitude economy".
A young government with a broad vision determines what kind of suitable young industries can be found, what kind of public opinion environment can be created, and can provide scientific support for enterprises and talents.
In the creation of the "rainforest", we see:
Guangzhou Tianhe District has issued policies related to modern urban industry to support enterprises in reducing costs and improving energy levels in four sub-sectors of energy supply, urban consumption, intelligent manufacturing, and life and health......
Compared with the "three to one supplement" industry that started in the Pearl River Delta, the rainforest is a more advanced manufacturing ecology. The former is a passive blood transfusion, while the latter can actively make blood and has a strong evolutionary ability.
The trip to Dongguan was the last stop of the day-to-study activity.
Wu Xiaobo noticed that the upstream and downstream of many enterprises are not located in Dongguan, so why are these enterprises still rooted in Dongguan for more than 10 years? In fact, the entrepreneurs and the government have already given the answer.
Wu Xiaobo thought for a moment and said word by word: "The best thing here is the business environment. ”
Southern + reporters Gao Xiaoping, Wu Baohu, Guo Suying
【Authors】 Gao Xiaoping, Wu Baohu, Guo Suying
Southern Industry Think Tank