Chapter 53 The Problem of Mass Production

Chapter 53 The Problem of Mass Production

Chapter 53 The Problem of Mass Production

Xu Shenxue knew that it would cost a lot to make a high-end smart phone, but when he actually used it, he found that it was even more expensive than he had imagined.

Not to mention the R&D expenses, the salaries of R&D personnel are extremely expensive nowadays. Even an ordinary programmer who does odd jobs has to make more than 100,000 yuan a year.

Some engineers who are really capable of doing their job basically have an annual salary of more than 100,000 or 200,000 yuan.

If you are a technical backbone who can work with a team, at the team leader level, your basic annual salary should start at 300,000 or even 500,000.

The big bosses all have an annual salary of more than 500,000.

This is still referring to the basic salary, which does not include various project bonuses or options. However, options make up the bulk of the salary costs for some mid- to senior-level technical personnel.

Not only that, you also have to get your middle and senior technical staff to accept your options instead of salary plan, otherwise it will all be converted into cash salary. A senior software engineer of Song Haichang's level would have a comprehensive income of no less than one million in other large companies.

Very exaggerated!
There is no way around it. The premium for mid- and senior-level talent in the 3G communications industry is too high.

The high salary cost of staff is also an important expenditure in R&D costs... Even though Zhiyun Technology has the assistance of a scientific research system, the R&D talents it has attracted are only mediocre. However, for a R&D team of 200 people, not counting options, the basic salary and bonuses alone would cost tens of millions a year!

At the same time, during the research and development process, the expenses are not only staff salaries, but also various testing costs. Once many experiments are started, money will be burned.

Scientific research is actually very expensive.

For example, those who work on chips do not need to pay any testing fees during the design phase. They just need to pay some staff salaries and get some computers and software.

But after the chip is designed, it has to be sent to the chip foundry for tape-out. The tape-out cost cannot be millions or tens of millions at a time. If the tape-out fails several times, the tape-out cost alone will be tens of millions... and this is still for tape-outs using backward technology.

If it is the tape-out cost of advanced technology, it will be even more exaggerated.

Don't think it's too expensive, and don't think that others are deliberately trying to rip you off.

But chip tape-out is really that expensive. Even if a domestic chip foundry in the future can tape-out a 180-nanometer chip that is so outdated that it is unbearable to look at, it will cost hundreds of thousands. The 16-nanometer chip with advanced technology will directly soar to to million.

In the future, TSMC's 5-nanometer chip production would cost about million yuan in Chinese yuan.

For three hundred million, I will give you a wafer test... to see if the chip design is good or not!
To some extent, tape-out is the cost of "experimentation" for chip R&D.

This is the case with chips, and other R&D projects are actually similar. No matter how well you do in theory, you have to make something out of it to see if it meets the requirements.

For example, if you want to make a very common plastic part and verify whether it is feasible, you have to make a special mold to make it.

The huge salary costs of R&D personnel, coupled with various messy experimental expenses, will eventually push up the cost of R&D, leading to high R&D costs.

The same is true for making smartphones!

Many things need to be tested bit by bit, and this kind of testing is actually the main source of R&D costs...

Research and development is not something that can be done by just drawing a design. Who can guarantee that something will work before it is made? You have to try it first, and then find that it doesn’t work, so you have to change the direction and redesign it, and then test it again... and so on, and finally get a solution to the problem.

Therefore, the R&D cost of smartphones is actually very high... At least in the contemporary era, without a public version design and a large number of mature component suppliers, the R&D cost is very high.

The reason why Zhiyun Technology was able to do it so smoothly and quickly was purely due to the help of the scientific research system.

With more than 200 scientific research quotas, the R&D personnel can play a role that exceeds that of a thousand engineers of the same level. To some extent, their R&D efficiency is even higher.

Because many things cannot be solved by more people. For example, in terms of system optimization and design, the Android system development and optimization teams of major domestic mobile phone manufacturers are all tied together, and there must be at least a thousand people.
It is estimated that they cannot beat Zhiyun Technology's system development team which has only dozens of people.

The software engineers at Zhiyun Technology can tell where the problem lies at a glance, and then think of a solution with a quick thought. The whole process takes no more than half a minute!
If the same problem is placed in the R&D team of other companies, it is estimated that ten or eight engineers will be thinking about it every day, but after a few days, they may not be able to find where the problem lies, let alone how to solve it.

There's nothing you can do about it, technological research and development is just so unreasonable.

With the support of the scientific research system, Zhiyun Technology was able to complete at least a year's work for R&D teams in other large mobile phone companies in just two or three months, and then produced the first Zhiyun mobile phone C1.

This also saved Zhiyun Technology a lot of R&D funds. Otherwise, the tens of millions invested by Xu Shenxue would probably have been wasted. After all, Zhiyun Technology was truly developing from scratch and had no technical reserves...it had to do everything itself.

The overall research and development is more difficult and requires more work, so more manpower is naturally required and the research and development costs are more expensive.

But with the assistance of the scientific research system, everything became simple, and the Zhiyun Phone C1 was created.

But just making a prototype is not enough!
If you want to sell a product to the market, you have to have a product, right?
And this involves the mass production stocking environment... In a sense, this is more expensive, at least for Zhiyun Technology.

Because scientific research can be assisted by a scientific research system, it will be easier to do any research and development.

However, mass production and stocking up require huge financial support.

The purchase of core items such as chips, memory, storage, and screens all cost money. Even if you only pay a portion of the deposit, the total amount is still a huge amount.

In addition to core components such as chips, memory, storage, and screens, many other components are non-standard components. There are no mature components on the market for you to use. You have to contact suppliers one by one, or even customize them, which is also very expensive.

The purchase of this kind of non-standard spare parts does not mean that you can just ask for the goods and the spare parts suppliers will happily send you tens of thousands of sets of spare parts for you to use first.

Zhiyun Technology doesn’t have this kind of card yet!

At the same time, spare parts manufacturers do not have these special parts in stock, and do not even have the corresponding production lines. If you want them, they have to set up a special production line for you and make special molds.

This kind of purchase involves non-standard products, and if you don’t pay a sufficient deposit, they won’t do it for you... If they are foolish enough to invest their own money to make it, what if Zhiyun Technology doesn’t want it or wants to lower the price, or even Zhiyun Technology simply goes bankrupt, they will lose all their money!

Therefore, if you want to purchase, you have to pay a considerable deposit!

Only after they have received the deposit will they feel at ease to organize the production for you.

The deposit for various spare parts is hundreds of thousands for this one, millions for that one, well, it would easily be tens of millions or even hundreds of millions.

Then inventory is also a huge expense. It takes time and multiple links for a mobile phone to be produced in a factory and then sold. It is impossible to ship it directly to consumers as soon as it leaves the production line and then the money is credited to the account.

Products will accumulate in the production, transportation, and sales process.

This means that there will be inventory costs caused by backlogs, which is also very costly.

Then after you make your product, you can put it on the market for sale, but you still have to carry out marketing promotion.

Well, if you want to be good at marketing, you basically have to start with tens of millions.

For Zhiyun Technology at present, if it wants to achieve large-scale mass production and market the products in a short period of time, it will need at least 200 million yuan of funds to leverage the entire supply chain, assembly and production, and market sales, and then it can enter a virtuous cycle!
To be honest, Xu Shenxue cannot take out this money now and can only rely on subsequent financing.

(End of this chapter)