The first big event for Nanwan Group in 2004 was the Dakar Rally which started on January 1st.
There are two Chinese drivers participating in this competition, Rodin from Mitsubishi Pajero Team and Lu Ningjun from Nanwan Blue Ocean Team.
Rodin, driving a Pajero, finished 47th.
In his previous life, Lu Ningjun drove a Paladin that had only been modified for safety to participate in the competition, and finally successfully completed the entire race.
At that time, Lu Ningjun's car only had 170 horsepower. Except for his car, the lowest horsepower of other drivers' cars in the entire racing team was 250 horsepower.
The racing cars of the Mitsubishi BMW team have a horsepower of up to 300.
It was quite good that Lu Ningjun was able to complete the entire course with a car with 170 horsepower.
But in this life, this situation will not happen.
At least in terms of equipment, Lu Ningjun's equipment is not inferior to others.
This specially made racing car named Sailong has a horsepower of 350, which is not inferior to any foreign driver in this rally.
But even so, those foreigners still looked down on Lu Ningjun's racing car.
Because they had never heard of the name Nanwan Sailong Automobile.
When Lu Ningjun led his team to participate in the off-road championship last year, Nanwan invited a modification team from Faguo to modify these two cars.
Because the organizing committee of the Dakar Rally is made by the French, and the rules and regulations are all formulated by them, these two cars must comply with the French's bad rules if they want to participate in the Dakar Rally.
These French people understood the rules of the game. They judged the two cars until they fully met the French standards before coming to Paris.
Wan Feng has no specific ranking requirements for Lu Ningjun's participation in this Dakar Rally. As long as he can complete the race, obtain all the race data of the Dakar Rally and accumulate experience, it will be fine.
After all, it was their first time participating in the Dakar Rally and they knew nothing.
In terms of logistical support, Nanwan made the most adequate preparations under the advice of the Faguo modification team.
The reporter cars and logistics support vehicles are all modified trucks produced by Nanwan itself.
Lu Ningjun is not the only one participating in the competition. Guan Dahai will also drive a racing dragon to accompany Lu Ningjun to participate in the competition.
They arrived at the race starting point on December 21st and debugged the car the next day.
Many foreign drivers watched Lu Ningjun and Guan Dahai's racing.
They believed that it would be impossible for Lu Ningjun and Guan Dahai to complete the Dakar Rally with these two cars.
Japanese veteran Kenjiro Shionaka, who has participated in the Dakar Rally 17 times, believes that it would be great if China's own racing cars could run out of Europe.
Finnish star Vatanen, who has won the Dakar Rally four times, and former World Rally Champion McRae of England also agreed with this statement.
Lu Ningjun just laughed off the comments from his peers. He was confident in the performance of his two racing cars.
There are not many stages in the Dakar Rally, only fourteen, but the distance between each stage is quite long.
The marathon section in the African desert is particularly arduous, requiring drivers to drive all day without stopping and without a supply or repair team. As a result, many participating drivers, including some famous ones, fail here.
Lu Ningjun's car number is 303, and he is quite satisfied with this number.
Guan Dahai was very upset about his racing number. What a coincidence that his ranking was 250th, which made him very unhappy.
Lu Ningjun looked at Guan Dahai's depressed face and smiled for several minutes.
In the previous life, the driver of the 250 racing car was a foreign driver named Kerry.
Foreigners don't have the term "idiot", so he wasn't depressed at all at that time.
On New Year's Day 2004, heavy snow fell in Clermont-Ferrand, the starting point of the Dakar Rally.
It was a real heavy snowfall. Although the snowflakes were not as big as goose feathers, they were no problem as big as chicken feathers or duck feathers.
For Chinese people, snow on the first day of the New Year is called "auspicious snow heralds a good harvest", which is a good omen.
The first stage was not long, only about ten kilometers, but the road was narrow and dangerous, and there was heavy snow.
However, Lu Ningjun and Guan Dahai both achieved good results in the starting stage.
Lu Ningjun's score was two minutes and three seconds, and Guan Dahai's score was two minutes and nine seconds.
They ranked eleventh and eighteenth respectively among all participating drivers.
Lu Ningjun is 22 seconds behind the number one Japanese veteran Kenjiro Shinozuka.
Mitsubishi Pajero team driver Rodin ranked 53rd.
On January 5th, the team entered Africa and began the desert stage.
After five days of competition, thanks to Lu Ningjun's superb skills and the powerful performance of the Sailong racing car, Lu Ningjun has risen from eleventh place in the racing driver list on the first day to eighth place.
Guan Dahai's ranking did not rise but dropped to 22nd place.
After entering the desert stage, Lu Ningjun and Guan Dahai began a legend that shocked the foreign drivers.
While heavy snow was falling in Clermont-Ferrand, it was springtime here in South Bay.
Nanwan Group’s annual meeting was held on this day last year.
The Spring Festival in 2004 was on January 22nd, so the annual meeting, which was usually held on the 5th, was held a few days earlier.
Although the outbreak of SARS in 2003 affected sales for hundreds of years, throughout the second half of the year after SARS, sales of the group's various products soared like a helicopter taking off.
At the end of the year, the group's revenue was not affected by SARS but increased by 30% compared with the previous year.
Even though no new models were released in South Bay this year, vehicle sales still achieved a 40 percent increase.
This is mainly due to Dingfeng's outstanding performance in the National Track Cross-Country Championships.
Sales of gasoline and diesel versions of the vehicle reached 100,000 units in just the last two months of the year.
Another product with a large growth rate is naturally the launch of H3688.
With its high configuration, excellent performance and the price of domestic mobile phones, H3688 swept all the mobile phones in the Chinese market.
From its release in September to the end of the year, it sold five million units.
This is the maximum production capacity that Huaguang Technology can achieve.
Because other mobile phone manufacturers are producing H2001 for Europe and the United States, otherwise H3688 might be able to achieve sales of tens of millions of units in these few months.
Wan Feng feels that there are too few mobile phone processing companies. When smartphones are launched next autumn, if there are not enough processing companies, the production capacity problem cannot be solved.
Therefore, in 2004, he planned to expand the production scale of Huaguang Communications in Nanzui and open another processing plant in Hongya.
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