"What is Cao Dewang's donation of 10 billion, I will donate 30 billion!"
In May 2021, glass king Cao Dewang donated 10 billion yuan to establish Fuyao University of Science and Technology.
Soon, Yu Renrong, a bigwig in the chip industry, made a bold statement that he would donate 20 billion more than Cao Dewang to establish Eastern University of Technology, which once again caused a sensation in the press.
Yu Renrong, a poor boy who came out of a peasant family in Zhongbao Village, Ningbo City, relied on his own efforts to enter Tsinghua University, and started a business step by step, becoming the richest man in China's chip industry, and is now worth 45.5 billion yuan, ranking 486th on the Hurun Rich List.
His counterattack confirmed a truth, reading changes fate.
Yu Renrong, who tasted the sweetness of reading, began to give back to his hometown after succeeding in his career, investing 30 billion yuan to support local education. In March this year, Yu Renrong donated another 1.5 billion yuan worth of shares to continue to inject funds into the construction of Eastern University of Technology.
Yu Renrong has only one purpose: to provide source support for China to break through the technical problems of stuck necks and develop high-end industries.
In 1985, Bao Yugang, the world's king of ships, returned to his hometown of Zhenhai, Ningbo, and generously donated 20 million US dollars for the construction of Ningbo University, and the news quickly spread throughout the countryside.
At this time, Yu Renrong, a teenager from the same village who was in his third year of high school, was full of excitement and secretly decided that when he grew up, he would give back to his hometown and establish a school like Bao Yugang.
In this year's college entrance examination, Yu Renrong won the top prize in the college entrance examination in Zhenhai District, and he is closer to his dream.
In September, Yu Renrong successfully entered the radio EE85 class of Tsinghua University, and at that time, Tsinghua's radio class was opened in the first year and was not a popular major.
But judging from the current ending, no matter what reason Yu Renrong chose this major, there are many factors of fate.
What does EE85 mean?
EE85 refers to the 1985 undergraduate degree in radio science of Tsinghua University.
This is not an ordinary class, in the rapid development of semiconductors in the past few years, students from here, such as Zhao Weiguo, Zhao Lidong, Liu Weidong, Gao Feng, etc., occupy half of the semiconductor industry.
In the eyes of his classmates, Yu Renrong is very talented in reading, and even if he competes, he doesn't need to do more revision, and he can still win the first place.
In addition to learning professional knowledge, Yu has also demonstrated a keen business acumen.
He found a business opportunity in the test papers he did every day, and since the test papers in Haidian, Beijing, were very authoritative, why not sell them to other provinces?
He set his sights on the neighboring province of Hebei and made a lot of money from it, which made him a wealthy man among his classmates.
When he was assigned a class in his sophomore year, Yu Renrong chose to major in image processing.
When I graduated from university, the world semiconductor market was mainly monopolized by Japan's Sony and South Korea's Samsung, and there were almost no independent research and development companies in China.
Therefore, Yu Renrong's job is not easy to find, and his resume has been repeatedly lost.
After several twists and turns, Yu Renrong finally joined the veteran IT company Inspur Group as an engineer.
Two years later, Yu Renrong left Inspur and joined Longyue Electronics in Hong Kong, where he took up the position of manager in the Beijing office, selling electronic components.
With the blessing of technology, Yu Renrong quickly achieved a good reputation, opened up the market, and also allowed him to accumulate rich industry resources, laying a solid foundation for his future entrepreneurial road.
At the end of the 90s, Yu Renrong resigned to start a business and established Huaxin Xinchang Science and Trade to act as an agent for the sales of electronic components.
In 2000, the state paid more attention to semiconductors and other software industries, semiconductor companies sprung up, and Yu Renrong's classmates also returned to China one after another to start their own businesses.
At this time, Yu Renrong had successfully obtained the agency rights of onsemi products in the United States and earned $10 million.
In 2003, at the suggestion of a friend, Yu Renrong began to reorient his business, and in addition to continuing to do distribution, he also began to provide design solutions.
In order to improve efficiency, Yu Renrong was looking for a suitable design company and opening outlets at the same time, and the upstream and downstream were grasped together.
Taking advantage of the east wind of the times, in 2006, Huaxin Xinchang Science and Trade developed into one of the largest distributors of electronic components in China, and Yu Renrong's business empire began to take shape.
However, after a period of time, Yu Renrong found that it is difficult to make a greater breakthrough as a dealer, and he must have his own core competitiveness.
In 2007, Yu Renrong established Weir Semiconductor Co., Ltd. in Zhangjiang, Shanghai, focusing on semiconductor design.
Independent research and development requires a lot of funds, and the cycle is long, and it is difficult to recover the cost in the short term.
The advantage of walking on two legs is not only to support independent research and development, but also to understand the needs of customers in a timely manner and maintain a keen sense of the market.
Under the leadership of Yu Renrong, Weir has continued to innovate and make breakthroughs, and has become a leader in the domestic semiconductor industry.
In order to make the company develop faster and quickly complete the industrial layout, in the following time, Yu Renrong began to embark on the road of mergers and acquisitions.
From 2014 to 2015, Yu Renrong successively acquired Beijing Taihe Zhiheng and Wuxi Zhongpu Micro, and increased the business in the fields of integrated circuits, satellite live broadcast chips, and radio frequency chips.
In May 2017, Weir shares were successfully listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange at an issue price of 7.02 yuan.
The listing did not stop Yu Renrong's acquisitions.
In 2018, Yu Renrong acquired Xinhenghui again, holding 45.15% of the shares.
Before the acquisition, Xinhenghui's main business was smart cards, but after Yu Renrong took the helm, he expanded the company's business scope, and Xinhenghui's performance rebounded rapidly, and the following year it acquired the industry-leading French Linxens, becoming the world's second.
In the history of all Yu Renrong's acquisitions, the most talked-about thing is that he used 13 billion yuan to wholly acquire the shares of semiconductor giant Haowei in 2019.
Speaking of this acquisition, we have to go back to 2017, when Weir shares had just been listed, Yu Renrong set his sights on the equity of Beijing Haowei, but the first communication was unsuccessful, and was opposed by one of the other shareholders, Zhuhai Rongfeng, so he had to give up.
However, Yu Renrong did not give up, and after Zhuhai Rongfeng withdrew its shares, Weir shares saw the opportunity and launched the acquisition of Beijing Haowei again.
In 2018, Weir began to plan the acquisition of OmniVision Technology.
At that time, OmniVision Technology's CMOS image sensor products were among the best in the industry, and its business scope was widely distributed, which was used in most fields such as mobile phones, vehicles, security, computers, video phones, fingerprint recognition, etc., and had long-term cooperation with upstream and downstream customers.
After the acquisition of OmniVision Technology, Yu Renrong's Weir shares have become the world's third largest image sensor manufacturer in addition to Sony of Japan and Samsung of South Korea.
In the same year, Yu Renrong acquired, a company focusing on CMOS image sensor design and overall solutions, and Vision, which holds 53.85% of SPICCO's equity.
So far, Weir's business territory has expanded rapidly, and the company's market value once exceeded 300 billion yuan.
In the "2020 Forbes China 400 Rich List", Yu Renrong climbed to become the richest man in China's chips with assets of 51.38 billion.
In the 2024 Hurun Global Rich List released not long ago, Yu Renrong once again appeared on the list with a wealth of 45.5 billion yuan.
Yu Renrong, who has been adrift for many years and has become the richest man, has never forgotten his vow, and like Bao Yugang in the same village, he will try his best to repay Sangzi.
In 2020, Yu Renrong returned to his hometown for inspection and established the "Ningbo Yu Renrong Education Foundation" in Ningbo, donating 20 billion yuan to build a university.
The university is named Eastern University of Technology (tentative name), and focuses on the establishment of four major departments: science, engineering, information, and business.
Yu Renrong, who has experienced ups and downs in the shopping mall, built the original intention of the university to solve the problem of domestic science and technology being "stuck", hoping to export outstanding talents to the country by building a top university.
In 2021, Yu Renrong will continue to spend an additional 10 billion yuan on the infrastructure construction and operating funds of Eastern University of Technology.
In November, the Ningbo local government invested 16 billion yuan to select the site of the university, and with Yu Renrong's donation, 46 billion yuan has been prepared for the construction of Eastern University of Technology.
On the day of the site selection, Yu Renrong said excitedly:
"In my business journey, deep down I always wanted to start a good school in my hometown. I went to primary school in Zhuangshi and high school in Zhenhai Middle School, and the university was established here very close to where I studied.
As a native of Ningbo, I am always eager to contribute my meager strength to do something meaningful for this land. ”
At the same time, the Yu Renrong Education Foundation established the Ningbo Institute for Advanced Study of Oriental University of Technology as the preparatory institution for the establishment of Oriental University of Technology.
In December 2022, the foundation stone of Eastern University of Technology was officially started, with a planned land area of about 2,300 acres, and the name of the school was changed to "Yongjiang University of Science and Technology (tentative name)", which is expected to be completed in 2025, with a planned enrollment of 10,000 undergraduates, masters, and doctors.
Investing 46 billion yuan to build a private university can be said to be the only one in China.
After a lapse of 37 years, the young boy who was in his third year of high school finally realized his dream of running a good university in order to give back to his hometown.
Today, Yu Renrong has become a leader in the domestic semiconductor industry.
In the past, the CIS (CMOS image sensor) industry chain on the mobile phone side has been monopolized by Samsung and Sony, and Weir shares can only rank third at most.
However, since last year, Weir has gradually laid out the high-end market, and CMOS products with more than 50 million pixels and rear main camera OV50K40 have entered the mass production stage.
With the increase in the demand for CIS in the domestic market for smart phones and new energy vehicles, Weir shares have shown an amazing development momentum as an important supplier such as Huawei, Xiaomi, and DJI.
According to the results of the third quarter of 2023, Weir shares achieved a total revenue of 6.223 billion yuan, an increase of 44% compared with the same period.
In recent years, China has become the world's largest chip demand market, but its self-sufficiency rate is very low.
On the list of imported goods in the mainland, chips have always ranked first.
It is gratifying that in addition to Weir shares, the scale of China's chip industry is also continuing to expand, and it is expected that the scale will reach 1.27 trillion yuan in 2023.
However, compared with international giants, there is still a big gap, and our road to independence is still very long.
We need more time to accumulate technology and develop talent.
"Ten years of cultivating trees and a hundred years of educating people", perhaps this is the original intention of Yu Renrong to establish the university with a lot of money.
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Resources:
Entrepreneur: From the verge of bankruptcy to the second in the world, the third IPO of China's richest chip man has been "difficult to deliver".
Sina Finance: The 85th grade of the Radio Department of Tsinghua University is a special existence: this Tsinghua University is the richest man
Sensor Expert Network: 44.5 billion, he will become the richest man in China's sensors! 9 domestic sensor billionaires have a total of more than 150 billion!
Yu Renrong Education Foundation: "Eastern University of Technology" or "Yongjiang University of Science and Technology"?
Author: Jin Se