After Song Erniu got off the ship, he did not immediately return to his hometown with his entourage. Instead, he planned to stay at the prestigious high-end hotel 'Suzhou River Hotel' in Lili, Beicheng District, Songjiang City, preparing to get a feel for canvas and other important raw materials in the local area. supply situation and the situation of the ready-to-wear market.
Of course, I did not forget to send a letter home, informing my parents and eldest brother of my situation, letting them know that I have returned to my hometown, but I have to deal with some business matters in Songjiang City, and I am expected to stay in Songjiang City for at least half a day. Months, more than a month before I can return to my hometown in northern Jiangsu.
Going back to the mainland this time is one aspect of going on a blind date, but taking advantage of this time to return to the mainland to open up the supply of raw materials and develop the local market is also an important matter for Song Erniu's trip.
Otherwise, he wouldn't have brought the head of the secretary's office and two secretaries back with him, just to deal with many business matters.
After disembarking from the ship, Song Erniu's personal butler went ahead and contacted a carriage rental company that had a cooperative relationship with Pacific Shipping Company and rented multiple four-wheel carriages for use.
One of the most luxurious four-wheeled carriages was used as a temporary vehicle for Song Erniu, one was for the two personal maids accompanying him, another was for the secretary, one was for the butler and the entourage, and another was for the butler and his entourage. It's a car used by security personnel.
In addition to Song Erniu's car, a large number of suitcases were also loaded on the rear of other carriages. This could not be accommodated, so they had to rent two carriages specifically to carry the luggage.
Song Erniu's return to his hometown this time was for a blind date and business work, and no matter what happened, Song Erniu needed to maintain his dignity.
The grandeur of this trip cannot be underestimated... Otherwise, who knows what kind of green you are as a young man who ran back from America?
Again, if you don’t show off, who will care about you? If you want to contact raw material suppliers in Songjiang, you may not even be able to find the person in charge...
You said that you have a large-scale garment factory in America, and your denim brand canvas clothes are sold throughout North America, but who knows whether what you said is true or not...
After all, contemporary information transmission is still relatively slow and narrow... There is a Pacific Ocean between the mainland and the Americas.
In the era of the Chu Empire, and even in the 19th and 20th centuries of the original time and space, the transmission of information was actually very limited. People's sources of information mainly relied on newspapers, television, and books. People's cognition was very limited... After the Internet matures and a large amount of information is moved online, people will be able to receive all aspects of information conveniently and quickly.
Therefore, the Internet era is also called the era of information explosion. Information, especially professional information or knowledge, has become easy to obtain, even free.
On the public Internet, you can obtain most of the knowledge in human history for free.
This was unimaginable in the previous twentieth century, let alone the current Chu Empire.
After all, in the current Da Chu Empire, the main carrier of information is paper text, not to mention telegrams, and there are not even many pictures.
Although there are now ships and railways, it is still difficult to communicate information over long distances. We can only rely on written letters and hand-drawn pictures or photos taken by cameras that have just been released in recent years... However, cameras are still very immature at present, mainly because The technology of photosensitive materials and substrates is still not very good. The use of cameras is very complicated and troublesome, and the cost is very high.
So even in the early 30s of Chengshun, the Da Chu Empire had actually developed the most primitive camera and took the first photo in human history... but the photo took a long time to be exposed. half an hour.
After years of continuous improvement, although the situation has improved, the cameras of the contemporary Dachu Empire still have not developed to the level of mature cameras of later generations. They are expensive, troublesome to use, the image quality is not good, and they do not have the characteristics of large-scale cameras. Conditions for large-scale commercial use.
Therefore, cameras are currently only used in specific fields. They are mainly used by official institutions and rarely used by ordinary people... many people have never even heard of it, let alone any large-scale commercial applications.
In the absence of pictures, the carrier of information can only be text, supplemented by hand-drawn pictures.
At the same time, the long-distance transmission of information is also very troublesome, because there is currently no telegraph...
Compared with the rapid progress of a series of research represented by machinery, especially steam engines, the Da Chu Empire still lags behind in electromagnetic research...
After all, the rise of the Chu Empire was not very long. It was only over thirty years ago. As the controller of the empire in these thirty years, Luo Zhixue was not only trying to develop telegraphs and steam engines. In fact, Luo Zhixue was The entire scientific system needs to be built from scratch, from education to research.
To a certain extent, what the Chu Empire wanted to do was to quickly fill in and surpass the hundreds of years of accumulation in human history in just twenty or thirty years.
The empire's investment is limited, and it is impossible to say that every aspect can be taken care of... Therefore, the empire's investment in education and scientific research has long been inclined towards heavy industry represented by steel and coal, and by extension shipbuilding and trains. , machinery and other heavy industrial fields.
Secondly, the focus is on investment in ensuring people's livelihood, such as agriculture-related research, including grain cultivation (including various types of economic crops), livestock cultivation, research and construction of water conservancy facilities, research and promotion of agricultural tools, etc. The Dachu Empire has long focused its scientific research funding on projects.
There are also industries related to a large number of private employment and economic leaders, such as the textile industry... Although the textile industry is just a light industry, it may not seem important at first glance, but in fact the textile industry is very important in the mid- and early-stage industrial development system. It played a leading role in the industrial economy. In the Chu Empire, the textile industry accounted for more than 30% of the imperial industrial and commercial economic system for a long time.
Comparing steel mining, ships and trains with the textile industry...it's just scum!
To put it bluntly, a lot of seemingly important heavy industries in the Chu Empire actually depended on the national defense industry and the textile industry, and the size of the national defense industry was far less than that of the textile industry!
Even though a battleship costs one to two million Chu Yuan, the exported military weapons and weapons from Chu State are also extremely expensive, but how many can be sold?
From the beginning to the end, the Imperial Navy of Da Chu has only ordered a total of two 10,000-ton battleships... This is still too expensive. Now it is starting to build seven or eight thousand-ton inferior battleships, which is not much. It only plans to build six in total. Only God knows how many ships will be built in the end.
It sounds like the Navy has 600 warships, which seems like a lot, but you have to know that these 600 warships have been accumulated over the past nearly 20 years... 600 warships are not built every year.
Although the exported weapons and equipment are very expensive...but the actual total export volume is not large. Even if the empire's overseas arms dealers do not hesitate to provoke wars among the indigenous people to obtain greater weapons sales, the actual total export volume Not big...
Moreover, making money for arms dealers does not mean that the arsenal makes money... because the price purchased by arms dealers from arsenals is still based on domestic prices. Matchlock guns, flintlock guns, etc. are all very cheap. As for people selling them to overseas colonies How much it costs is a matter for the arms dealer...
Of course, behind all the overseas arms dealers in the Dachu Empire, the five major domestic arms companies hold shares, and the money earned by overseas arms dealers can also be fed back to the domestic arsenals.
However, this amount is only so large...it will have a very small driving effect on the upstream industries of the defense industry, such as steel, coal, machinery and corresponding transportation, mining and other basic industries.
As he said, other people's weapons companies make a lot of money exporting weapons, and sell the unit prices at sky-high prices. This does not mean that people's weapons companies will increase prices when purchasing raw materials and equipment... let alone increase the quantity.
The Dachu Empire's arms export believed in selling a small amount of weapons at sky-high prices, rather than simply relying on low-price dumping to obtain more sales.
So despite the large value of arms exports, in fact the number of arms exports is not large...
The weapons of Chu State represent high-end, expensive and high-quality weapons overseas, not cheap weapons that are mass-produced.
In this way, the five major arms companies have made money, but they have not had much of a driving effect on the upstream and downstream of the defense industry.
What can really drive economic development is the textile industry, which seems inconspicuous and has no technical threshold. It is a textile industry that anyone can invest in.
Without him, the textile industry is huge enough!
In addition to supplying the country's more than 500 million people, the textile industry of the Chu Empire also supplied the clothing needs of hundreds of millions of people in India, West Asia, Europe, Africa and other continents.
This adds up to a textile market of more than one billion people, and the core of this textile industry is not the traditional expensive silk spinning as a luxury product in the Chu Empire, but the cheap and mass-produced cloth spinning and wool spinning.
Huge demand and huge output have in turn stimulated equally huge demands for machinery and equipment and transportation.
Let alone anything else, let’s just say that the new cotton yarn technology that has emerged in the past two years has directly affected countless upstream and downstream enterprises. Hantian Machinery Company has developed a new cotton yarn machine, as well as new equipment supplied by many other manufacturers. Behind these equipment are also There are many parts, material suppliers, heavy industrial equipment suppliers, etc.
The rise of a new cotton yarn technology alone has directly or indirectly affected thousands of machinery and metallurgical related manufacturers.
This was after the rise of new cotton yarn technology. The production efficiency of the cotton spinning industry in the Dachu Empire was further improved, and the cost of machine-made cloth was further reduced. More, cheaper and better cloth began to be supplied to the domestic market, and it would inevitably be supplied to overseas markets in the future.
The cloth manufactured around the new cotton yarn, from production to transportation to sales, involves the related industrial chain of the cotton spinning industry itself, such as weaving, printing and dyeing, garments, transportation, sales, etc.
From beginning to end, the textile industry is closely related to almost the entire industrial system and has a significant impact.
This is why the Chu Empire has always invested a considerable amount of research and development funding and policy support in the core industry of textile industry.
In order to sell the empire's cotton cloth to Europe... the Da Chu Empire even did not hesitate to launch a war to launch a European trade free plan.
We just defeated Spain this spring, and now we are thinking about entering France and gaining access to the huge French textile market...
Other core people's livelihood industries such as the textile industry have been the main direction of the Chu Empire's investment over the years. Relatively speaking, investment in other industries that have not affected people's livelihood for the time being is less.
The investment in electromagnetic research has not been much for a long time... This is not that Luo Zhixue does not pay attention to or invest in it. In fact, Luo Zhixue has always attached great importance to research in electromagnetic-related fields and has not invested much in scientific research. few.
But everything must be prioritized, and the resources the empire can invest in scientific research are limited.
This is not even a question of whether there is money or not. After all, for a unified country that issues its own currency, money actually has no practical significance. It is just a tool to maintain rule.
The investment mentioned here refers to things other than the so-called scientific research funds, such as top scientific research personnel and top scientific research equipment.
Neither of these two can be solved with money in a short time!
The emergence of top talents, in addition to the training system, actually also depends on luck...Top scientists are not cabbage, and you will not be able to cultivate them just because you want to. It also depends on the talent of the talents themselves.
Although some top-notch scientific research equipment has a price on the market, it is often at a price but no market, because a certain top-level equipment with a price tag of 100,000 yuan is not something you can buy if you want to sell it...and It’s not that the factory refuses your order because it doesn’t want to produce, it’s that their production capacity is only so small... Why is the production capacity so small? This has something to do with the scarcity of top talents.
Because a lot of top-level scientific research equipment is too precise, many core components require experienced top-level craftsmen to process them with the help of modern equipment, or simply rub them out by hand.
There is no way to cultivate top craftsmen quickly... It took the Chu Empire more than thirty years to accumulate these top craftsmen. It is impossible to increase the number of top craftsmen in a short time.
This kind of top talent, which requires very high experience, can only be achieved through time and cannot be achieved quickly.
If it is reflected in some of the top scientific research equipment or industrial equipment, it cannot be mass-produced... no matter how much money is spent.
When the number of top talents and equipment is fixed and it is difficult to increase rapidly in a short period of time, it is natural that some projects can get more talents and some projects can get less talent and equipment support.
When the empire gives support to these projects, it will naturally not be a bowl of water, but will have a tendency.
Mainly tending to research on people's livelihood... In the early days, the national defense industry also paid more attention to it, but in recent years it has paid less attention to it. The updates and iterations of weapons are often carried out by the five major weapons companies themselves, and the imperial officials rarely issue them directly. The money is spent on a certain weapons project.
This is also the reason why the Da Chu Empire abolished a series of official weapons research institutes, such as the Artillery Research Institute, the Naval Gun Research Institute, the Firearms Research Institute and a series of other research institutes, because the official no longer wanted to directly pay for the research of these weapons and equipment, but instead paid Leave it to the five major arms companies to do it themselves.
Electromagnetism has been a cutting-edge scientific theory in the Chu Empire for a long time. In the early days, it was mainly conducted theoretical research by some professors in this field from the Royal Institute of Technology and other universities.
These studies actually don't cost much. After all, if you only do theory without experiments, scientific research actually doesn't cost much... Just give it some funding.
Unlike those research projects that involve materials, burning money one by one is like burning paper... and whether it can be completed in the end depends on character.
Most of the many materials with good performance produced by the Da Chu Empire were created by accidents that normal people cannot understand...
Many times, in experiments where even the researchers themselves don't know what they want to do... they accidentally obtain certain materials.
For example, some researchers will be bored and heat and pressurize material A to a certain level to see what they get...
Or, as soon as you have your brain, you take the tape and tear off the graphite sheets with your hands. After tearing the tape off countless times, you discover graphene... How can a person with a normal brain take the tape and tear off the graphite sheets countless times?
Some people play with magnetic field equipment, and then throw various things into the magnetic field equipment out of curiosity, including water, strawberries, tomatoes, and finally even a frog... normal Adults can't do this kind of thing...
The researchers in the Dachu Empire are actually similar. After countless material experiments similar to this nonsense, they found that the material obtained in a certain experiment is quite good and can be applied in a certain field, and then they will follow up with targeted measures. conduct various studies.
This means that in the current Chu Empire, working on materials is almost the same as working on theology, full of metaphysics...
This great uncertainty, coupled with the need for countless experiments, makes materials research extremely expensive.
But even though materials research is full of metaphysics... the official research institutions in the Chu Empire, such as the Royal Institute of Technology, various universities, and various government-run or private enterprises, have always maintained great enthusiasm for materials research and development, and constantly Spend money on research.
Because materials represent the future... This future is not just something too illusory such as the future of mankind or the future of empire, but refers to interests, the interests of research institutions, and the interests of enterprises.
Why is Hantian Machinery Company so powerful in the field of machine tools and equipment? It dominates the world and almost monopolizes most of the domestic high-end machine tool market share. Although they only make mid-to-high-end machine tools, their sales amount is only more than ten percentage points in the entire machine tool industry. Their net profits account for more than half of the entire industry...
Hantian Machinery Company alone can take half of the net profits of the entire machine tool industry in the Dachu Empire, while dozens or hundreds of other manufacturers compete for the remaining half.
It is because Hantian Machinery Company is unique in the world in the technology of high-strength industrial cutting tools, and behind this kind of industrial cutting tools are a series of advanced material technologies and processing techniques. These materials and processes are what support Hantian Machinery Company domestically. The largest scientific research and industrial equipment manufacturer.
Not to mention Hantian Machinery Company, the second largest player in the equipment field for ten years is Li's Iron.
Although their two wholly-owned equipment subsidiaries, Li's Machine Tool Company and Li's Precision Machinery Company, cannot compete with Hantian Machinery Company, the reason why they can stabilize their position as the second largest company in the country is because they have an exclusive series of advanced technologies. technical...
Let’s take industrial cutting tools as an example. The series of industrial yoga cutting tools produced by Hantian Machinery Company have the best overall quality and are even the only ones in many special fields. Their prices are also notoriously expensive... but no matter how expensive they are, You have to hold your nose and admit it, because you have no other choice...
The reason why Hantian Machinery Company can monopolize half of the profits of the machine tool industry is because you have no substitutes for many of its products, so you can only buy their products... which are extremely expensive.
Although the performance of the industrial knives produced by Lee's Iron is a bit poor, they are cheap... In the low-end and mid-range fields where requirements are not high, the industrial knives of Lee's Iron are the best choice, and they are extremely cost-effective. In the end, when it comes to production costs, the overall production cost is also the lowest.
The cost-effective knives of Lee's Iron are also very high-tech, because they focus on the mid-to-low-end market, and the target customers are very price-sensitive, and Lee's Iron needs to improve the quality of the knives within a certain price range. To satisfy customers, the technology involved is not simple.
Sometimes it is not easy to make high-end products, but it is even more difficult to make mid- to low-end products.
In the former, you only need to consider performance, but in the latter, you also need to consider cost-effectiveness.
The cheapest and cheapest industrial products often represent the most top-notch manufacturing technology... Without that technology, you wouldn't be able to make them so cheap.
Research costs money, and after spending money, in most cases you can always see benefits, or potential benefits!
This is also the reason why many basic research, especially theoretical research, requires official funding from the empire.
This is currently the case with electromagnetic research. Its basic theoretical research and a small number of experimental research are basically concentrated at the Royal Institute of Technology, using the internal R&D funds of the Royal Institute of Technology... The internal R&D funds of the Royal Institute of Technology, although most of them are It is self-financed, and a small part is financed by financial appropriations, but no matter from which level, these are state funds.
After all, the Royal Institute of Technology is a serious official administrative organization... It is not a commercial organization, nor is it a pure teaching organization, but a national scientific research institution with teaching attributes.
The reason why it is called the Institute of Technology is just the inertia of history. In fact, it would be more appropriate to call it: 'Institute' or 'Academy of Science'.
Therefore, the funding expenditure within the Royal Institute of Technology closely follows the general direction of the empire in selecting projects, focusing mainly on people's livelihood.
Of course, various basic theoretical research, and even purely theoretical research that has no profit output, such as mathematics and theoretical physics, are also fully guaranteed research funds... but these purely theoretical projects themselves are not very expensive.
For a long time, electromagnetism was conducted as purely theoretical research... This is why while the empire developed rapidly in other fields, especially the mechanical field, the application of electromagnetism, such as telegraphy, was so slow. That’s why it hasn’t been realized yet.
However, with the continuous development of the empire's society and technology, especially the increasing number of overseas territories, the empire is increasingly in need of a more convenient and faster communication method to replace steam fast communication ships for cross-ocean communication. The empire also He began to invest more funds in electromagnetics, began to conduct intensive and messy experiments, and conducted an experimental short-distance telegraph test at the beginning of the year, which was a complete success.
But it is estimated that it will take several years to develop the telegraph and put it into actual large-scale application!
The development of science and technology in the contemporary Great Chu Empire is actually unbalanced compared to the original time and space of the mid-to-late 19th century... where it is strong is very strong, and even in some areas it has reached the level of the 1880s. , such as the field of steam engines, ships and trains, but it is really weak in some fields. For example, in electromagnetism, even the telegraph has not yet been developed. In the original time and space history, the British had already begun to do so in the 1830s. Got a cable telegraph.
In the contemporary Chu Empire, the development of science and technology is unbalanced.
However, this is also a conclusion drawn from Luo Zhixue's perspective and through comparison with the original time and space... If you were a native of Chu, you would not have this kind of confusion, let alone feel that the empire's technological development is unbalanced. Because in their perception, this world is originally like this...
Song Erniu is like this. He doesn't feel that there are many imbalances in the current technological development of the empire, let alone feels that there is no telegraph... He even mentioned the word telegraph in Da Chu Chao Bao North America last month. When I saw it for the first time on the Internet, I thought this thing was quite magical. It could actually transmit information through metal wires.
If a transoceanic telegraph line can be laid across the Pacific in the future, as imagined in the newspapers, wouldn't it be possible to communicate conveniently and quickly between the Americas and the mainland?
If this can really happen, it may be helpful to his business in the future... After all, he is planning to open a factory here to seize the local garment market.
There are factories in both places, and both sides need to be managed. It would be great if there were fast and convenient transoceanic telegraphs.
But in Song Erniu's opinion, things like transoceanic telegraphs were still a bit science fiction... God knows how many years it would take for it to be accomplished.
But now that information is not flowing smoothly, Song Erniu can't tell others directly, I am a millionaire, very rich, and I am here to do business with you.
In order to avoid the situation of not being able to find anyone when looking for business partners, he specially chose the place to stay in Songjiang City, a prestigious high-end hotel where the upper class gathers: Suzhou River Hotel.
Well, it’s the Suzhou Hotel owned by Wang Liqing, the owner of Anhua Textile Company, and his wife!
Compared with Mrs. Wang's financial strength and even social status, Wang Liqing is far behind... After all, although Mrs. Wang takes care of her children at home every day and looks like a husband and godson, everyone in Songjiang's upper class basically knows that she is The famous rent collector and owner of the first-class luxury hotel in Songjiang City.
Many office buildings used by so-called famous companies are all rented by properties under her name.
As for Wang Liqing himself, he set up a cotton yarn factory. Although it has developed quite well in the past two years, it is really just like that... There are many big companies in Songjiang City, and his Anhua Textile Company is not even ranked among them. , it is relatively famous in the independent cotton yarn industry.
When Song Erniu led a group of people to the Suzhou River Hotel, he couldn't help but sigh a lot when he looked at this luxurious hotel that he didn't even have the courage to approach the gate when he was living in Songjiang City!
And when several waiters in decent professional attire at the door were walking quickly to open the carriage door for his group, Song Erniu couldn't help but smile.
Who would have thought that he, a poor boy who was born as a cowherd boy and lived at the lowest level in Songjiang City, would become a millionaire a few years later and move directly to one of the most luxurious hotels in Songjiang City with a large group of people!
Even to himself, he felt that all this was like a dream!
