The time soon came to July. After more than a month of hard work, the teams of Taohua Datong and Red Bull successfully made dozens of potato chips with different flavors in the laboratory.
"This tomato flavor is pretty good, but it feels a bit worse than Lay's." At this moment, in the conference room of Galaxy Building, there are a large number of different boxes on the conference table with potato chips of different colors, and there are also many different brands. Potato chips are also among them, mainly Lay's.
At the same time, there were more than a dozen people in the conference room, all of whom were heads of several major companies owned by Chen Zhiwen. After the weekly meeting, Chen Zhiwen asked engineers from Taohua Datong to deliver potato chips of various flavors. , let’s taste it together.
"This taste seems a bit strong. I still prefer a lighter taste." said Xu Jinhong of Galaxy Group.
"That's because you are older, and young people like food with strong taste." Zhou Jiayang laughed at the side.
"I'm younger than you." Xu Jinhong countered.
Lin Yanming, the head of legal affairs, took a bite of the red potato chips and his expression almost changed. He said, "Why are these potato chips so spicy? Does anyone still want spicy food when eating potato chips?"
“In the United States, many people really like to eat spicy potato chips. I found this out from Costco’s previous sales data. I also asked some colleagues in the United States. Many Mexicans in the United States People like to eat spicy potato chips, and many people in the northern United States also like to eat spicy food. In the entire American market, almost 5% of potato chips are spicy, so I specifically asked Taohua Datong engineers to research and develop Spicy potato chips," explained Xu Weishan, who is in charge of Xinghe Trading.
"So perverted." Lin Yanming quickly took a sip of water and calmed his mouth.
"It's normal, just like we like to eat hot pot and drink iced Coke. There is no party culture in the United States, but we like to eat snacks at home, eating spicy potato chips or other spicy snacks, and drinking some cold beer. , which is also very refreshing." Chen Zhiwen said with a smile.
People in Hong Kong generally don’t eat spicy food, and only a few people have this hobby. Chen Zhiwen is one of them, so he often looks for spicy food, but he only likes it a little, and he doesn’t like spicy food very much. However, in his previous life, he knew many people who ate Lao Gan Ma as a snack and wrapped pancakes with raw garlic. This way of eating made him feel spicy just thinking about it, but in fact, there was something better than this. A more extreme way to eat spicy food.
However, for the sake of market development, we won't make extreme spicy ones, but you can't miss the ordinary ones. After all, Costco also has actual demand.
"The customer is God. If he wants to eat sour potato chips, we will make them too." Lin Yanming said with a smile again.
"These flavors can be regarded as the result of more than a month of hard work by Taohua Datong engineers. In a few days, they will make a batch and distribute them to all employees of your companies. Everyone will receive a different brand. Then you arrange for the human resources department to tally the results of everyone's feedback, and Taohua Datong will change the ingredients based on the feedback results." Chen Zhiwen continued.
At present, the combined number of employees in several of its major businesses has exceeded 30,000, making it the largest employer in Hong Kong. Even Jardine Matheson cannot compare. After all, just one Midea Industrial Park has 20,000 employees.
In the Midea Industrial Park, the biggest labor demand is to make fans. With the highest cost performance and the layout in the supermarket market in recent years, Midea fans have successfully entered many supermarkets in Europe and the United States, and because of the feedback from the market itself over the past few years, Yes, many supermarket customers who have never communicated with us will take the initiative to contact Midea to seek fans, and there are even many non-chain supermarket customers.
In the first half of this year alone, Midea received orders for more than 7.35 million fans. There will be fewer orders in the second half of the year, but it is expected to exceed 10 million units throughout the year. Just these fans, including assembly, motor manufacturing and injection molding, require 11,000 employees. If we hadn't moved to Midea Industrial Park, put all the supporting facilities together, and greatly increased the area of the work site, the production capacity would definitely not be able to keep up with demand.
Others include arcade machines, radios, air conditioners and refrigerators, auto parts businesses, beverages, etc. The total of these is not as much as the number of employees required by fans. Of course, the value is much higher. Fans are just purely for walking. quantity, provide jobs for Hong Kong and the mainland in the future, and promote their own brands.
In addition to Hutchison Whampoa and Galaxy's other businesses, there are so many people, so it is easiest to use them for testing. Otherwise, it would be very expensive and time-consuming to invite tens of thousands of strangers to test the taste of food, because this requires extremely strong organizational skills.
"Sheng Chen, are the tastes of American customers different from those in Hong Kong?" Zhou Jiayang asked.
"It's different, but we are all human beings. At least everyone will like delicious food, and they won't like bad food. This has nothing to do with different tastes. At most, it's just different choices." Chen Zhiwen said with a smile. : “Moreover, after testing in Hong Kong, these potato chips will also be sent to Costco. Costco store staff will invite customers to try them, and then invite customers to buy them. In the end, customers can spend money to buy potato chips. , is the final winner.
But the labor costs at Costco are not cheap, and there are dozens of supermarkets. The number of tests will not be large, and it will take a long time. So I want to try it in Hong Kong first. After we screen it out, Then send it to the United States. "
"I understand, then I can also take some here and give them to my suppliers. They also have a lot of employees." Xu Weishan, general manager of Galaxy Trading, said.
"Supplier? That's okay." Chen Zhiwen nodded and said. Galaxy Trading does not have many direct employees, maybe only a few hundred people, but these few hundred people handle tens of millions of overseas orders every month, and looking at the trend Soon it will be hundreds of millions.
With so many orders, and the payment cycle of Galaxy Trading is very short and the payment is timely, in the eyes of many small factories in Hong Kong, they are the best customers. They just help to taste the potato chips. This is very simple, and, The number of workers in these factories is quite large, and the total number of workers may not be lower than the number of employees in Midea Industrial Park.
"That's it. Everyone will collect the data and hand it over to Angel. Red Bull will pick out three flavors and send them to the United States. This can be regarded as a new business for our group." Chen Zhiwen said with a smile.
Tokyo, Japan, Sony Headquarters:
"Dong dong dong" In a luxurious office, an old man with white hair and dark glasses was reading documents. After hearing the knock on the door outside, he said without raising his head: "Please come in."
The door opened from the outside, and the person came in and closed it. Then he walked softly to the old man, bowed 45 degrees and said, "Hello, President."
"Inoue, are you back from the United States?" The old man raised his head and said with a chuckle: "During this period, you have worked hard to develop new business for the company in the United States."
If any contemporary Japanese social worker is here, he will definitely be able to recognize him at a glance. The person in front of him is Shao Morita, the founder of Japan's Sony Corporation, and one of the three major business gods in Japan today.
After hearing this, Inoue quickly bowed at a wider angle and said in a tone that almost made him cry: "President, Inoue is unworthy of your great love. Our three arcade machines have completely failed in the United States."
"What kind of failure?" Morita Shaofu said without any change in his expression, still smiling.
"It can't be sold at all. Americans don't play our games at all. Even when I launched a free event, they only played for a few minutes and stopped playing." Inoue said with some disappointment.
"Is the gap so big? No one is playing for free?" Morita Shaofu said with a sigh.
"Yes, the entire arcade market in the United States is currently completely monopolized by Hong Kong's Midea Company. Their previous Magic Cubes can be found in almost every sized bar I've been to, and there are a lot of people playing them. Moreover, recently, they have There is a new game called Space Invaders, which is even more popular than Magic Cube," Inoue said.
"It's not your fault." Morita Shaofu shook his head and said, "I also know a lot of people in the United States. As far as I know, many American electronics companies have also made arcade machines, but they are basically useless. However, even giants like HP are the same. There is only a small company called Atari, which has a certain market. In the entire United States, almost 95% of the arcade market is occupied by Midea. This is really a terrible statistic. ." Morita Shaofu said with emotion.
The United States is the largest electronics market in the world. In addition to traditional home appliances, all participants in the high-tech electronics industry currently rely on making money in this market. Only when a king emerges in this market, will this product be able to Sweeping across Europe, Japan, South Korea and other developing countries.
The other way around doesn't work, because only the United States needs the highest level of technology and products. A win here is considered a win. Other Europe and Japan's demand for high-tech electronic technology is more than a generation behind that of the United States.
All electronics companies focused their attention on the United States. When arcade machines appeared, they were small in scale and no one cared about them. However, when the "Snake" arcade machine appeared, it quickly occupied bars in every state in the United States and dominated the world in less than half a year. . Later, the same company launched "Magic Cube", further controlling this field.
All bar owners who spend money know the price of arcade machines. It is impossible for these tens of thousands of people to keep it secret. If the relevant personnel calculate the cost, they will know how terrible the gross profit is. It is not tens of percent, but Several hundred percent.
Such high profits naturally make many electronic companies jealous. When they saw the mainboard structure of the arcade machine, they thought it was so easy!
So, they all got involved and developed a game that they thought was definitely better. When they were preparing to make a profit in this market, they were beaten by the contemporaries "Snake" and "Magic Cube".
HP is one of them, and Sony, which is thousands of miles away, is also one of them. According to rough estimates, an arcade machine can earn at least tens of millions of dollars within a year. Such a huge profit would even cost IBM. Jealousy, let alone Sony. You must know that Sony has so many products and so many high technologies. Together, the net profit is only about 200 million US dollars a year. This is already the ceiling for Japanese companies and even American companies except IBM. .
Shao Morita personally ordered the establishment of an arcade game department at the beginning of this year, but there were only two popular games on the market. Sony's department thought about it for a long time and came up with a game based on the falling of an equilateral triangle. It was actually an imitation. "Magic Square", its name is still "Magic Triangle".
There is no way, there are only two popular games on the market, and Sony's engineers just want to make other types of games and have no ideas.
I originally thought that with this game, I could more or less finish the soup in this new industry, but I didn't expect that it was not recognized by the market at all. There are many ways to play the magic cube, not just this inexplicable triangle, and the combinations in it There are always problems.
And after "Space Invaders" was launched, "Magic Cube", which was tired of playing, was also severely squeezed. The arcade machines of other companies were even more dead. Atari, relying on small arcade machines, Barely still maintaining its game, and due to the continuous losses in the arcade market, Atari is already developing new home game consoles.
"This "Space Invaders" is so popular. Its gameplay is completely different from the previous Magic Cubes and Snakes. After playing it, I really want to continue playing it." Inoue added.
"Now it seems that it is no accident that Midea can continue to succeed in the arcade market. Their company must have a deep understanding of this game market." Morita Shaofu said: "In the past six months, our Sony team has also We have developed many other games. Although we have not sent them to the United States for testing, we have also found many passers-by in Tokyo to play. The result is that it is difficult to get these passers-by to play our games for free, let alone let users There is a huge difference in difficulty between spending a few dollars a day to grab machines in a bar, but we can’t even meet the requirement of being free.”
"Yes, their game, we thought it was just like this when we saw it. It is easy to write the program, but how to come up with such a game is the most difficult." Inoue also said, although he also believed that the reason for the defeat was It's not about him, but he was still worried that the president would blame him before. You know, in a Japanese company, if you fail once and are held accountable, your life will be basically over. Now the president's attitude has made the pressure in his heart disappear.
"Just like this screw, it looks simple, but people who were able to invent this more than 2,000 years ago are really geniuses." Morita Shaofu said with emotion after removing a screw from a similar music player next to him. .
Inoue asked again: "President, shall we develop the next game now?"
"Do you have any ideas?" Shaofu Morita asked.
"No." Inoue shook his head and said.
"Neither do I. Maybe we at Sony don't have tens of thousands of employees. It's pointless to blindly develop new games." Morita Shaofu thought for a moment and said: "You arrange the external office and ask them to contact Midea Company in Hong Kong, which is Morita. Schauf would like to visit the company."
"Are you going to Hong Kong? Although this Midea has some achievements in the arcade market, it is very average in other aspects. It only does home appliance business, and it is still very low-level." Inoue said with some surprise, you know Shaoo Morita However, one of Japan's business gods is a leading presence in the global electronics industry, and is also a guest of presidents and prime ministers of various countries. He has also checked Midea's information a long time ago. Although he has some achievements, it is not as good as Sony. 's too far.
"It depends on who you are comparing it to. Compared with IBM, our Sony is actually very average." Morita Shaofu said with a smile: "For a company that has only been in business for a few years, this Midea is already developing at a rapid pace. In my opinion, I have never seen such a rapid development in my life, and even for arcades, you know that their annual profits exceed 100 million U.S. dollars. Looking at the entire world, how many companies can have a net profit of more than $100 million?
This is a company that has been established for less than five years. In ten years, how can you know what this company will develop into? And even at its current scale, it’s worth a trip. I’m really curious how they managed to make three consecutive video game hits. "
Morita Shaofu has already checked the information of Midea Company, and even the information of Midea Company boss Chen Zhiwen. He also knows that if Chen Zhiwen's company is a Japanese company and continues to develop, its popularity in the future will definitely not be lower than his. .
"I'm afraid the other party won't reveal this kind of secret." Inoue said carefully.
"I know." Shaofu Morita smiled and said, "But it's still worth a trip."
PS: Please give me a monthly ticket
(End of chapter)
