After Zhou Xin came to this era, he only had one feeling, that is, there are opportunities everywhere, and it is difficult to come back in an era with so many opportunities.
Technology concentration exploded in the thirty years from 1990 to 2020, bringing a large number of dividends to countries participating in the chain of economic globalization, and members of these countries also enjoyed the dividends.
China has been the biggest beneficiary in the last two decades of these thirty years. Countless Chinese people have relied on the tide of the times to change their own and even their family's destiny. In that era, efforts and rewards were likely to be directly proportional, and young people who did not enjoy the dividends later would be dissatisfied that they could barely survive despite their efforts.
This is especially true in the Internet field. Currently, not even one-third of the demand for the Internet field has been tapped. If mobile Internet is also included, there is not even one-tenth.
After hearing the host's question, Zhou Xin fell into memories. He was very glad that he chose to go abroad to start a business after arriving at the turn of the century. Waiting to successfully complete the golden body shaping abroad before returning to the country to start a business is an important measure to effectively avoid unnecessary wrangling.
If you start a business in China, you first have to face regulatory uncertainty, and secondly you have to face a lot of unknown risks. In the end, even if you succeed, the valuation of an Internet company of the same size in China is higher than that of Amerikan. The valuation is much lower.
Zhou Xin regained his wandering thoughts and said: "I think that starting an Internet company and solving problems are based on the same logic.
A problem will have different solutions in different environments, and the underlying logic between different solutions may be the same.
To achieve your goal, you need to grasp the core contradiction. A very simple example is why in the Internet wave that emerged after 1995, it is also e-commerce. In China, foreign trade e-commerce websites such as Alibaba emerged, while in America, eBay and Amazon emerged. In the face of this, Personal e-commerce website?
This is because the needs of the two countries are different. The vast majority of people in China do not have computers, do not know what the Internet is, do not believe in online shopping, and lack the demand for online shopping, while the foreign trade industry has this demand. As for American, the largest consumers of American are the nationals of their own countries. The cost of their local products is high, and only developed countries can afford such high prices.
Therefore, the target users of Amerikan's e-commerce website are domestic consumers, so their business form is a B2C model for individuals. However, China's e-commerce is concentrated in the field of foreign trade, and domestic consumers are not familiar with both hardware and concepts. Supports electronic shopping, so the business form of Huaguo e-commerce is a B2B model for enterprises.
The same problem is that e-commerce needs to connect the consumer end and the manufacturing end. The difference in the consumer end leads to completely different e-commerce business forms between China and Amerikan.
This is a difference caused by different consumer groups, as well as differences caused by different policies. For example, it is also a Q&A community. Amerikan has electronic payment, so Quora can do paid Q&A. There is no electronic payment in China. If you rely on the card model, you can pay. Q&A cannot scale.
Therefore, on the Internet, targeted analysis is needed for different situations.
Rather than saying that I can understand the needs of Chinese and American people in the Internet field at the same time, it is better to say that I know some underlying logic and can then conduct specific analysis for different situations.
After being trained, Huaguo's product managers can reach the same level as me. In the past few years, Huaguo has also seen companies go overseas, such as Tencent and Alibaba. They are doing well in Silicon Valley. Among them, Tencent mainly does enterprise real-time For communication software, I just gave the initial idea.
After training, they have a much more accurate grasp of American's corporate needs from the product side than I do. Not only is it more accurate than me, but it also beats competitors in the same industry. You must know the competition in the same field. The opponents are giants like Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL.
The same is true for Alibaba. They mainly help Amerikan chain stores and supermarkets build online shopping websites. The online shopping website itself is not profitable, but Alibaba can quickly establish contact with customers in the process of building an online shopping website. Americen has built a bridge between supermarket chains and foreign traders in China, turning these supermarket chains into customers of Alibaba's e-commerce business.
This is great.
Judging from the experience of Alibaba and Tencent going overseas, the ability to solve problems is common. After Chinese Internet companies clearly understand what problems they can help overseas users solve, they can achieve the same level of success overseas as they do domestically.
Of course, I would also like to give a piece of advice to domestic Internet companies here, that is, it is good to go overseas. This is a blue ocean market and you can enjoy a lot of dividends, but it is best to go to countries with sound laws and regulations, and some countries with imperfect laws and regulations. , there is no way to bring back the profits. "
What I’m talking about here is Asan. You can’t bring it back even if you make money. Not only Chinese companies, but also European and American giants don’t get anything good from Asan. For foreign investment, China's business environment scores 90 points, while Asan's business environment only scores 30 points.
In the past year, after supporting Alibaba in going overseas, Alibaba has also brought unexpected benefits to Zhou Xin, that is, Alibaba and Xinyun supporting play.
Americen has some chain supermarket brands, and their strength in informatization is relatively weak. If they want to establish an online shopping website, it also involves high-concurrency functions such as user online payment and online delivery, which requires relatively high network and bandwidth requirements.
Xinyun's pre-sales team will appear at this time to calculate the accounts for the enterprise. Choosing Xinyun's public cloud service can achieve the purpose and reduce the cost by at least one-third.
And we are ready to support you in dynamic expansion according to your needs.
This also brought the first batch of enterprise customers to Xinyun. Previously, Xinyun’s customers were mainly individual developers.
As for why Tencent cannot bring customers to the new cloud, it is because Tencent’s enterprise qq involves a large number of sensitive information of enterprises, and it is difficult for enterprises to safely put this part of the data on the public cloud.
The host continued to ask: "Mr. Zhou, what you are talking about already belongs to the field of methodology. It is not just the field of Internet products. We can also establish similar solutions in our lives to deal with different difficulties encountered in life.
Mr. Zhou just mentioned Internet companies going overseas, and also cited two Internet companies that have been very effective in going overseas, Tencent and Alibaba.
We all know that there are emerging investments behind these two companies, which is your investment, Mr. Zhou. Let’s ask questions one by one. I would like to ask you first, how do you choose when investing in a company?
Which type of company do you prefer?
When the first Internet Conference was held that year, you met with the entrepreneurs of Internet companies one by one at the Yanjing Marriott Hotel, and decided the investment amount and share ratio one by one. This has become a good story today. Among the companies you invested in that year, today They are all living very well, and even 20% of them have been successfully listed. This is an amazing ratio.
At the same time, companies like Shanda, Alibaba, and Tencent have higher valuations than many listed Internet companies.
Among the companies you rejected, some of the Internet companies that seemed to be prosperous back then have either gone bankrupt or have far less momentum than they did back then.
I believe that not only I am interested in this issue, but our viewers in front of the TV are even more interested in this issue. How do you choose the companies you want to invest in, and what characteristics of the companies you value more? "
Seeing Zhou Xin thinking, the host paused for a moment and continued: "You just mentioned that emerging investments are run by domestic managers, but you selected the early investment projects one by one. You must be very good in this regard." He is quite experienced, so you can talk about your experience or interesting things from that year."
Among the companies Zhou Xin invested in at the end of 1999, Sohu and NetEase were successfully listed. However, Yitang.com, which was huge at the time, has collapsed, and Sina is far less viable than before.
The macroeconomic environment was so bad that there was only a short window of time between when the Nasdaq recovered and when the Twin Towers were hit, for Chinese Internet companies to go public. Sina missed this window of time, causing them to not go public.
Their failure to go public is not unrelated to Zhou Xin's lack of investment and Zhou Xin's certification behind them.
While Sohu has launched a dual attack in the question and answer community and search engine fields, NetEase has promoted it aggressively in email and portal websites, causing Sina's market share and user stickiness to continue to decline.
After Mphone enters the Chinese market, the launch of Weibo will directly dig into the foundation that Sina will rely on for future generations.
Zhou Xin judged from public information that if Sina did not seize the opportunity, based on the current development trend, it would collapse in at most three years.
For Internet companies, especially those without profitability, going public is crucial. Going public means that you can obtain low-cost funds and be able to hold on until you find a profit model. You can survive losses in the incremental era, but in the stock era, Internet companies with many users cannot tolerate losses.
Even Twitter, which can be said to be an overseas national-level application, after being acquired by Musk, has been able to limit the number of user views and pay to view more posts.
If Zhou Xin had come back a few years later in 1998, he would probably have the illusion that he would live forever. France began to blame social media and video games for corrupting young people, and Twitter began to charge compulsory fees.
Zhou Xin replied: "It's more of an intuition. From my personal perspective, I judge whether I like the company's products or not. This is the first priority."
Zhou Xin originally didn't want to talk more about this issue, but later he thought about it, it would be good to talk about this issue more to bring overseas investment institutions into a trap.
"The second is the founder team. I will judge how the founder team is, because in the last few days of 1999, I met the founders of these Internet companies one by one at the Marriott Hotel. We had a relatively long time to chat. I I will judge from small talk whether the founder of the company has what I consider to be the characteristics of an entrepreneur.
After both points are satisfied, I will give a valuation based on the user scale, current situation and historical valuation. Because I am relatively rich, I will be very willful.
At that time, the highest valuation among those companies was only US$20 million. Even if I gave it double the valuation, US$40 million would be nothing. The prices I offered were relatively high.
Because I had just finished boasting at the Internet Conference the day before, saying that I would invest one billion US dollars in Chinese Internet companies, so when we talked about investment later, I would even deliberately give a higher valuation. "
In talk shows, usually after Zhou Xin finishes speaking and pauses for more than three seconds, the host will continue to ask: "Actually, looking back now, among the companies that we invested in back then, you don't think much about whether they have benchmarks in Silicon Valley. enterprise?
Because as far as I know, when overseas venture capital institutions invest in Internet companies in China, what they value most is whether they have benchmark companies in Silicon Valley. If they have benchmark companies in Silicon Valley, whether the benchmark companies in Silicon Valley are listed on the market? What is the valuation.
Overseas venture capital institutions almost all base their valuations on this logic. "
Zhou Xin shook his head and said, "I don't value this. Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are also human beings. Entrepreneurs in China are no worse than entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. It's not that Silicon Valley only has them, but only China has them."
For example, enterprise instant messaging software was first developed in China, and then Internet companies in Silicon Valley began to imitate their own enterprise instant messaging software.
I never refer to this metric.
I mentioned earlier that there are common needs both abroad and domestically. I don’t think all foreign Internet companies have tapped into these needs.
In the past, even if all Internet companies around the world were included, they only tapped into a small part of human needs. Chinese companies can also boldly innovate. If you have financial needs, just come to emerging investments. We will not refuse to invest just because your business model is not available in China. "
The host applauded. From the conversation just now, the host realized that Zhou Xin was confident and had his own thinking and persistence on things. Judging from his past interviewees, Zhou Xin had enough potential to be a successful person.
The host said: "It can be seen that Mr. Zhou is very confident in the Internet field, not only in the Internet field, but also in the fields you are involved in."
Zhou Xin said: “Because I have always been a problem-oriented entrepreneur, I have always been on the road, and I have been working hard to solve problems that exist in reality.
Like Xinxin Technology, we have launched Bluetooth chips and mobile phone chips before, but for the majority of consumers in China, the A series chips are too expensive, and Mphone is also too expensive.
Therefore, Xinxin Technology is about to launch an integrated chip solution, TK series of chips.
Using this model, the price of mobile phones can be reduced to less than 1,000 yuan. "
This is the top two purpose of participating in the TV show this time. To tell Chinese companies, do you want to make a mobile phone? If you want to, please contact Xinxin Technology. We have the simplest solution. With our solution, you can launch your own brand of mobile phones at ultra-low cost.
The host was obviously surprised. Even though he had heard Zhou Xin mention that their solution could bring the cost of mobile phones to a thousand yuan when answering the question, he was still surprised.
You must know that the current price of PHS is about 800 yuan. If you choose a telecom package, the price is 300 yuan. If it is a PHS with separate card and machine, the price is 800 to 900 RMB.
Early PHS phone cards could not be removed, also called card-machine integration.
If the price of mobile phones can reach the level of 1,000 yuan, then the PHS market will be greatly squeezed.
The host asked: "Can you tell us in detail about the TK series of chips and how to use this set of chips to bring the price of mobile phones to the thousand-yuan level?"
Thousand yuan is a conservative estimate. If mobile phone manufacturers have no bottom line and engage in a price war, the price can drop to as low as about 500 yuan.
Zhou Xin said: “The full name of TK is Turn-key, which means turn-key, and we call this solution turn-key.
Nowadays, mobile phones involve different development processes for mobile phones. When manufacturers design mobile phones, they first need to obtain the reference design from the chip manufacturer, usually the public version design from ARM.
Then make modifications based on your own needs and determine the accessories and components.
Next is the development and debugging of drivers, product motherboard design, further debugging of the cooperation between software and hardware, and finally the final version. The entire process is cumbersome and requires a large number of professional and technical personnel.
As for the turnkey solution we adopt, what we provide to mobile phone manufacturers is no longer design drawings, but a motherboard with the main components already assembled and a reference list. Mobile phone manufacturers only need to choose and purchase products compatible with the motherboard based on the list. Mobile phone screens, microphones, speakers, and casings.
Finally, these peripherals and the motherboard are assembled, OEM packaged, and ready for sale. Mobile phone development does not require or only requires a very small number of R&D personnel. "
Zhou Xin continued: "Of course, there will also be problems, that is, mobile phone manufacturers relying on this solution, because their costs are only motherboards, accessories and assembly costs, they will definitely engage in price wars, and it will be difficult to produce high-end domestically produced products. brand.
In the short term, it is impossible to change the current situation where high-end brands in the Chinese mobile phone market are exclusively overseas brands. "
The current Chinese mobile phone brands mainly include Konka, Bird, Kejian, etc. They basically rely on low prices to win, and are standard mid-to-low-end players.
The price of domestic mobile phones can be as low as about 1,500 yuan, while domestic mobile phones with more than 2,000 yuan can be considered high-end, and foreign brands can easily sell for more than 3,000 yuan.
Among them, the Samsung A288 with 11 built-in mobile games can even be sold for a high price of more than 7,000. When the Samsung A288 was first launched in the Chinese market in 2000, the price was 7,800 yuan. Later, it dropped to 6,080 yuan. By 2002, the price dropped to 3,370 yuan.
Samsung's price plunge is also traditional.
The host was obviously aware of the power of this thing, and he asked: "Then this will lead to the creation of a large number of mobile phone brands in the country.
From my personal point of view, originally there was a threshold for mobile phone manufacturing, and only manufacturers with certain strength can enter this field. After Xinxin Technology launches the TK series of chips, there will be no threshold for the mobile phone industry, which will lead to a large number of mobile phones appearing on the market at one time. brand.
Will this further worsen the situation of domestic mobile phone brands staying at the mid- to low-end? "
Zhou Xin nodded: "There is such a risk, but compared with the benefits, the risk can be ignored.
Chinese consumers can enjoy low-priced products, and mobile phone manufacturers can also reduce costs.
Under sufficient market competition, sufficiently competitive brands will naturally be born.
Including Matrix, which is owned by me, is about to enter the Chinese market. Matrix is also a Chinese brand. I believe that after Matrix enters the Chinese market, it will change the current situation where high-end mobile phone brands are flooded with foreign brands. "
After Zhou Xin's interview was broadcast, it triggered a heated discussion in China. The media will dig up Zhou Xin's successful history and conduct in-depth discussions based on this interview discussion, hoping to find out the practical significance.
The discussion on Zhou Xin's TV interview on the online forum will be more detailed and will focus on different parts of the interview.
"I didn't expect that a guy like Zhou Xin, with thick eyebrows and big eyes, would also start to stand up for his products. He had never accepted TV interviews before, but now he will only start accepting TV interviews after Mphone enters the domestic market. This is tantamount to hidden advertising."
"What kind of hidden advertising? Isn't this obviously an advertisement? But I don't think it is a platform for Mphone, but more a platform for the mobile phone chip that New Core Technology is about to launch.
Mphone is already famous enough. As an epoch-making product in the field of mobile phones, there are no target users who don’t know about it. You know, when Samsung mobile phones were first launched, they sold for a high price of more than 7,000 yuan. Isn’t it because of the built-in games and good-looking appearance?
Mphone can download hundreds of mobile games from the app store. Its appearance is far more in line with male aesthetics than Samsung phones. With Weibo and functions, target users have already prepared money, such as me.
However, the mobile phone chip Zhou Xin mentioned was a bit beyond my expectation. It should be a specially made product of China. "
"That's right, since the beginning of this year, when Matrix's official website announced that it would enter China, how many times has the Chinese media promoted Mphone for free? Now I hope that the price of Mphone can be lower. If it costs more than 3,000, I Definitely buy it.”
"Three thousand or so are you kidding me? The Mphone is priced at 599 US dollars on Amerikan. Depending on the exchange rate, it should start at 5,000, right? But the biggest problem with the Mphone is that the Internet fee is too expensive. I think the phone itself is just fine. But I really can’t afford the Internet fee. The GRPS Internet fee is 10 yuan and 30M. If you use Weibo too much, you will lose 100 yuan casually.”
"The TK chip is really a special supply to China. Looking at the products Zhou Xin has made before, whether it is hardware or software, they are all for American users. The Mphone was first launched abroad and then returned to China.
TK's integrated solution, a chip that can reduce the cost of mobile phones to less than a thousand yuan, is obviously designed for the vast number of low-income people in China who are in need of mobile phones. This is really rare. "
"It's not just the pressure of making chips. Xinxin Technology has thousands of people around the world waiting for Zhou Xin to support. How long can it last with its own money? You must find a business scenario. Mobile phones are a big piece of cake, and everyone will be tempted to change it."
This is some discussion about this TV show on Tianya Forum. On Suspicious, the most discussed question about this TV interview is:
"Do you agree with Zhou Xin's claim on the TV talk show that Matrix is a Chinese brand?"
Updated 6K today and will continue tomorrow.
(End of chapter)
