Lu Feng attaches great importance to the R&D company, which may be his only backup plan after he gradually loses control of the company due to the continuous financing and the decrease in his own equity.
After becoming a group, all departments, including the talent reserve center, strategic investment department, brand strategy department, marketing planning department, finance department, audit department, and group human resources department, were concentrated at the headquarters. The subordinate factories were only responsible for manufacturing and production, and did not need to worry about anything else.
The result of this group structure is that there are people coming and going from the headquarters office building, and out of ten people, three are vice presidents and the other two are heads of second-level departments.
It was already December, and the company was busy with its first annual meeting. Inside the conference room, Liu Cheng sat at a table with seven or eight people. On the table was a large pile of disassembled pagers, including Motorola, Panasonic, Baxter, and Bird products. These products had been disassembled into pieces, and the R&D company had been working on them for almost two months.
"Currently, Motorola holds the largest market share, exceeding 60%. Panasonic is next, and I don't know where Baxter is from; they have a relatively small number of units. Domestically, Bird is the only one. Bird was established in 1992, and in just over a year, its sales have been quite good, holding about 5% of the market share."
"The problem is his signal isn't very good. I heard he's been in talks with a company in Hong Kong recently. Should we contact them too?"
After Liu Cheng finished speaking, he rested his chin on his hand, looked at the huge pile of parts in front of him, and remained silent.
Lu Feng lit a cigarette and took a puff. He knew Bird all too well; it was another typical company that had surged and then fallen back. Founded in 1992, its main business was pagers. This year should be a year of difficulties for them. They expanded their production line, the market was booming, but the unstable product quality led to serious returns.
According to Liu Cheng's statement about contacting Hong Kong, at this point in time, the Hong Kong company should have already invested, not only with capital but also with technology, holding more than 80% of the shares and completely dominating this small company with a starting capital of only a little over ten million.
Next came Bird's takeoff time. With funding and technology, it thrived in the market and quickly gained market dominance. Because Motorola seriously underestimated the Chinese market, Bird launched a surprise attack.
Once you make money, problems start to arise. Hong Kong businessmen want to set up their headquarters in Hong Kong and interfere in the selection of new factory sites. Often, this interference doesn't mean that if you listen to them, there won't be any problems later.
What they are fighting for is not the location of the headquarters or the new factory, but the control of the company. Today they have the final say, tomorrow they will find a way to fire key personnel, and then eliminate the original team and take over completely.
With investors and the founding team locked in a bitter dispute, the Hong Kong businessman resorted to his most drastic measure: withdrawing his investment!
After the funding and technical team withdrew, the local municipal government had no choice but to take over. After investing in the company, Bird ushered in its second spring. In the late 1990s, Bird officially took big strides in the mobile phone field. They were on the right track and achieved brilliant results.
You may not know that Bird once outperformed Motorola in the domestic market, with annual sales exceeding Motorola's by two million units, truly making it a fighter jet among mobile phones.
Their technology was all purchased from outside, which was the reason for their rapid development, but also the reason for their subsequent decline. In 2003, Bird was virtually unrivaled in the market, but it never expected that a single chip would kill it.
In 2003, MediaTek developed a technology that combined MP3 and mobile phone chips and wanted to sell it to Bird, but Bird refused.
MediaTek, eager to monetize, sold whatever was available, thus ushering in a seven-year era of generic mobile phones. These generic phones, leveraging the advantage of mobile MP3 playback, swept the market. This was followed by a period of individual dominance for these generic phones, with features like subwoofers, scrolling lights, and video playback creating a fierce competition among mobile phones, until Xiaomi was born in 2010.
Looking at the pile of mangled parts in front of him, Lu Feng took a drag of his cigarette and sighed, "When will those foreign devils ever be reliable?"
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