Chapter 32: Rivals Are Coming
Chapter 32: Rivals Are Coming
There was a small company that made WIN-CE handheld computers. They worked hard to build a small team of about 20 people. The product had not yet been successfully developed, and the entire R&D team, from the R&D director to the new employees, were all poached!
Well, don't be surprised why people are looking for WIN-CE system, because nowadays people think of smart phones not only as Android phones, but also include Symbian, WIN-CE, BlackBerry and other systems. Android is just one of them, and its current market share is less than 1%.
At present, many mainstream mobile phone manufacturers in China are actually pinning their hopes for smart phones on systems such as Symbian, WIN-CE, and some even have their own self-developed systems.
There are actually relatively few people working on Android, and those who do are the kind that place long bets.
There are very few companies like Zhiyun Technology that focus on Android right from the start.
Just as the war of poaching in the smartphone industry entered its second round and companies in other related industries were also poached, related news began to appear in a well-known newspaper and a large Internet platform, and ordinary people also learned that this industry was experiencing an unprecedented war of poaching.
It also let people know that the salaries of R&D engineers in the 3G communications industry are so terrible...the annual salary is often hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, and there are many who make forty or fifty years.
Its average salary has reached more than 10,000, making it the industry with the highest average salary among all contemporary industries. It is also said that the gap in related talents has reached more than one million!
While people were shocked by the high salaries in the 3G communications industry, many people also keenly discovered: how come among a large group of established domestic mobile phone manufacturers and even some international mobile phone manufacturers, a company that had never been heard of before, Zhiyun Technology, emerged!
After reading these news, the online spectators and offline newspaper readers felt that Zhiyun Technology seemed to be quite awesome. It seemed to be fighting back and forth with those big manufacturers in this vigorous war of poaching, and it also established a large smartphone R&D team!
Some reports are more in-depth, introducing some simple information about Zhiyun Technology, saying that the company is a start-up that received more than 500 million yuan in investment right after its establishment. It is a high-tech enterprise that is determined to create smartphones for the Chinese people.
The company has grown to hundreds of employees, has a first-class domestic smartphone R&D team, and is also developing its own smartphone operating system.
After reading the whole article, the reader is left with this initial impression: this is a high-tech enterprise that is not short of money and has a lofty mission and great goals!
Some news reports also come with interview transcripts. The reporter interviewed Xie Jianyong, the R&D director of Zhiyun Technology. Xie Jianyong said that Zhiyun Technology has sufficient funds, first-class talents, and great goals, and is bound to break the foreign monopoly in the field of smart phones and create smart phones that belong to the Chinese people!
The manuscript also includes some photos of Zhiyun Technology’s R&D office… Of course, they are all posed, and even the staff in the photos are not the real R&D team. Instead, they are people temporarily brought in from the marketing and administrative departments to act as models. They are all good-looking, and they wear white coats like scientists, or wear professional suits like scientific research elites!
It looks very impressive at first glance!
As for the real R&D personnel, they are busy...so they don’t have the time to cooperate with your marketing department to pose for photos!
And to be honest, the images of these R&D personnel are not suitable for publicity, because the photos that the marketing department wants have the elite feeling of a high-tech company... the kind that makes the onlookers feel very high-end at first glance!
Many of the R&D engineers at Zhiyun Technology have high hairlines or are even bald.
The important thing is that they stay up late every day and sleep on the floor at every turn, so eight out of ten of them have dark circles under their eyes!
They all dress casually, even sloppily... It's not that they like to be sloppy. They are technicians, not fools, and they also want to look neat, tidy and beautiful.
But now, in order to catch up with the progress, they stay up late and work overtime every day. After working overtime every day, they fall asleep on the way home on the subway... Or they just sleep on the floor in the company. If it weren't for the fact that southern cities are too sticky to take a shower in winter, they don't even want to take a shower after get off work!
Where is the time to work on my image?
Damn, Xie Jianyong and Song Changhai, those bastards with the title of R&D directors, are urging us to speed up the process every few days... They also give us some poisonous inspirational quotes from time to time, saying that you have to work hard when you are young, otherwise you won’t be able to work hard when you are old.
What’s more, your wife and children at home are counting on you. The bonus for this project is right here. Don’t you want to take the bonus and go back to make your family live a better life?
Is there anyone who still wants to take a weekend off?
No one? Very good, I know you are all new generation youth who work hard for yourselves and your families. Since no one wants to rest, then continue to work overtime this Saturday to catch up with the progress. Don't worry, all meals and drinks for overtime work on Saturday will be reimbursed, and overtime pay will be given. We are not those unscrupulous companies that don't even pay overtime.
A group of people were speechless after hearing this...The overtime pay is not much!
In the salary structure of Zhiyun Technology, the basic salary of employees is actually not high. The bulk of it is performance bonus, and there are also subsidies under various names.
It is impossible to say that you will be given a monthly salary of 10,000 and then your basic salary will be 10,000.
In fact, the basic salary is only three or four thousand, and the rest is performance and subsidies.
Although overtime pay seems to be 1.5 times or even double, it is based on the basic salary standard. After calculation, the overtime pay is actually not that much. Therefore, if they can avoid overtime, they don’t want to work overtime.
But... workers don't have any choice. What's more, the project is really rushed. They also know that the company wants to release the mobile phone before other mobile phone manufacturers, and this also affects how generous their project bonuses are.
There is no choice but to continue working overtime!
The reason why Zhiyun Technology has been making such a fast progress recently is that the company has received news from some friendly competitors.
Through industry sources, they learned that their neighbor Huawei was actually preparing to hold a smartphone launch conference overseas, although according to some rumors, the prototype they had produced seemed to be incomplete and it would probably take at least half a year or even longer before it could be put into mass production and released.
But it is still worth being vigilant!
In addition, the Meizu in the neighboring city has also developed a smartphone based on the WIN-CE system and is even in the process of obtaining a network access certificate. If all goes well, it is expected to be available on the market in February.
It is foreseeable that once this mobile phone is launched on the market, it will inevitably attract great attention from the market. It is hard to say what the specific sales volume will be, but the market response will definitely be very large... because this will be the first domestically produced brand smartphone to be launched in the country.
In comparison, the news that Meizu will launch the WIN-CE smartphone in February will have a greater impact on Zhiyun Technology than Huawei's plan to release an Android phone overseas.
Because according to gossip, especially the information revealed by several employees who were poached from Huawei by Zhiyun Technology, Huawei's Android smartphone is not very mature yet. It is only at the level of a concept phone and it is still a long way from mass production and launch!
The domestic launch is even further away... because this phone is a customized phone for Spanish operators and has no chance of being launched in the domestic market for the time being.
By making this comparison, we can see that if Zhiyun Technology were to launch a smartphone to the market this fall, its competitor would not even be Huawei, but the Meizu mobile phone with the WIN-CE system.
This made many managers of Zhiyun Technology very worried, and Ji Chenghe, who was in charge of marketing, made a new suggestion to Xu Shenxue:
"We can first make a smartphone with lower requirements, such as a thicker thickness, a plastic shell, and lower performance requirements. We can use the current semi-finished products for the system, and then we can hold a press conference at the end of this month or the beginning of next month!"
"We'll launch it before Huawei's press conference in Spain, and before the Meizu press conference, and we'll be the first to get the title of the first smart phone in the country."
"Even if the technology does not meet the standards and cannot be mass-produced, it is not a big problem. At worst, we can hold a press conference first, and then delay it for a month or two in the name of organizing mass production, and then put it on the market in April or May."
"Our new flagship model will be available for sale in the fall as planned."
“First, we will release the first domestically produced smartphone to establish our company’s reputation and lay the foundation for the flagship smartphone to be released in the fall!”
Listening to Ji Chenghe's words, Xu Shenxue fell into deep thought!
(End of this chapter)