Calculating and considering everything, this incident has entirely benefited Huang He. More than half of the over 3 billion we jointly invested has fallen into the hands of his Jiangnan Group! Peggy said dejectedly. After the explosion, he spent a full day analyzing the entire sequence of events and discovered that the majority of the benefits ultimately went to Jiangnan Group.
The exorbitant advertising fees are not to be mentioned. The key point is that the contract manufacturing rights for both companies' mobile phones are all with Jiangnan Group. Their phones were severely criticized by customers in the market, yet Jiangnan Group quietly reaped all the profits.
Speaking of Jiangnan Group, I don't really care how much money they made from me. I just find it to be a huge hidden danger! Steve Jobs showed a rare expression of worry on his face. The electronic industry development alliance of Jiangnan Group has already controlled too many suppliers, to the point where both our companies have no choice but to rely on Jiangnan Group for contract manufacturing. Don't you think this is too dangerous for both of us?
Heh, it's unavoidable that we rely on Jiangnan Group for contract manufacturing. After all, the entire product was developed by Jiangnan Group, so it's normal to only rely on them for contract manufacturing. However, your Apple products seem to be independently developed by you. How is it that you still have to rely entirely on Jiangnan Group for contract manufacturing? Peggy said with a smile. Steve Jobs couldn't help but show a hint of annoyance on his face, but he quickly regained his composure and said, All of Apple's products are contract manufactured by other companies. It's just that Jiangnan Group's reach is too far, and this is very dangerous.
There's nothing we can do about the danger. China has the highest human resource cost-effectiveness globally, and the entire global electronics industry is shifting towards China because only China can provide the necessary electronic components and equipment. This is the global trend. Unless you have the ability to make the United States withdraw from the WTO, you can only accept this fact, Peggy said.
But we should also cultivate one or two competitors for Jiangnan Group. We cannot let the entire market be monopolized by them. I know a contract manufacturing company in Taiwan. Although their prices may be 3-5 percentage points higher than the Jiangnan Alliance's prices, we have an obligation to cultivate a competitor for Jiangnan Group.
Therefore, I suggest that starting from the next generation of mobile phones, we should outsource at least 40% of the components for contract manufacturing to other manufacturers. At the same time, the most important thing is to separate the overall assembly production line from Jiangnan Group and hand it over to another contract manufacturing company. We must not let the entire lifeline of our companies be held in the hands of Jiangnan Group, Steve Jobs stated decisively.
Indeed! Peggy also nodded. The two sides had reached a consensus and planned to limit Jiangnan Group. This is also very understandable. After all, no company can hand over its lifeline to a single entity. Boss Huang himself wouldn't do such a thing.
Speaking of Jiangnan Group, I've actually always had a thought. Do you think there might have been some subtle actions by Jiangnan Group behind this public opinion explosion this time? Peggy suddenly threw out such a guess.
What are you talking about? Steve Jobs looked at Peggy in surprise. This kind of thing is absolutely impossible.
But don't you feel that there is a significant gap between the products we received this time and the batch we received before? Before this large batch of goods, we received two to thirty thousand devices sequentially. Although these devices also frequently had stuttering issues, they were never as bad as this batch of goods.
Before, it would stutter for three minutes after playing for ten minutes. Now, it stutters for five minutes after playing for ten minutes. The product quality seems to have decreased significantly. Could it be that Jiangnan Group, in order to save money, lowered the production standards and used some inferior components, leading to such poor quality in this large batch of goods? Peggy speculated.
Your Google has always focused on pure internet and software. This is your first time dealing with physical products, so it's normal that you don't understand the situation! Steve Jobs said calmly. In the entire industry, there is always a certain quality gap between a product's prototype and the bulk order.
The reason is simple. Before, to attract you for contract manufacturing, they would definitely make every sample the best. But when you actually place an order of millions, to meet the production schedule and deadlines, or as you said, to save costs, many details will be overlooked. They will do whatever is fastest, and a decrease in quality is naturally expected!
Apple's products also encountered similar situations before. These are all normal phenomena. Although I don't particularly like Jiangnan Group, this is indeed the law of the industry, and it's not intentional!
You need to understand that our deal with Jiangnan Group is not a one-off transaction. At least our first-generation products can only be contract manufactured by Jiangnan Group. The more we sell, the more money they earn. Jiangnan Group has no reason to intentionally lower our product quality and create such a big problem.
If our sales decrease, their profits will also decrease. Moreover, the materials they purchased and prepared in advance will be wasted. Jiangnan Group would never do something that intentionally lowers quality. This is just the quality reduction that is unavoidable in their mass production!
Could it be that Jiangnan Group is cutting corners? Although Peggy admitted that Steve Jobs's reasoning made sense, he still felt something was amiss.
I don't know if you have any cutting corners on your end, but our Apple's quality control absolutely does not allow such a situation to occur. Therefore, after the first batch of products arrived, our Apple engineers randomly disassembled over a hundred Apple phones. All the components were tested and found to be qualified products. For branded components, we also used products of the corresponding brands as per our requirements. Therefore, there is no issue of cutting corners with these phones.
Uh... Peggy's expression was a bit embarrassed. It seemed that this company had never conducted such work as disassembling received goods to inspect all the internal parts. Indeed, Google was still far behind Apple in terms of experience in selling physical goods.
Is there another possibility? Peggy hesitated slightly and then said, What if the samples that Jiangnan Group gave us before used better parts, so the specific performance of these samples was even better? And this time, the bulk order used parts according to our design drawings, so the performance became worthless.
Steve Jobs was stunned by this question and after a long pause, managed to blurt out, How is that possible?
That's true! Peggy couldn't help but laugh at himself, feeling that his idea was indeed too ridiculous.
After parting ways with Peggy, Peggy's soul-stirring question made Steve Jobs unable to calm down. So, after returning to the company, he personally went to the company's research and development center with a mentality of trying it out. He then asked his staff to simultaneously dismantle a previous sample and the batch received this time and compare the parts between the two batches.
Although the research center staff found their boss's strange request very baffling, they still complied.
Soon, the two batches of devices were dismantled, revealing their internal structures.
Steve Jobs first scanned them briefly. He found that in terms of component layout, there were almost no differences between the two devices, and the parts used looked similar, so there shouldn't be any problems.
Please dismantle all the main performance-related components and check their data one by one! Steve Jobs ordered. These staff members had no choice but to continue the painstaking work of dismantling the machines.
The first to be removed was the core component of a mobile phone: the processing chip.
Apple's chip was not self-designed. The A-series chips that were later praised were used only after the iPhone 3GS. Instead, it used Samsung's s5L8900 processing chip.
Although Steve Jobs had specifically gone to Taiwan to find TSMC to contract manufacture chips, the new generation of lithography equipment always had various issues, so this generation of chips could not be mass-produced for a long time. Helpless, Steve Jobs had to abandon the new self-designed chip and use the originally planned alternative, which was Samsung's chip.
This chip was actually Samsung's masterpiece, the most powerful micro-computer chip sold in the market at that time. However, this chip was still produced using traditional lithography machines, and its computing power could not reach the level of Apple's self-designed A-series chips.
Moreover, the most crucial point is that this chip does not support 3G, only 2G networks. This was not the chip Apple wanted to use the most, but to seize the market as early as possible, Apple had to reluctantly use this chip.
The same situation actually occurred with Google. The chip used in Google's PT was actually from Qualcomm. However, this chip was originally in Google's plan, or rather, in Jiangnan Group's plan.
Jiangnan Group had reached a cooperation agreement with Qualcomm three years in advance, and through sponsoring research and development, they sponsored Qualcomm to launch the Snapdragon micro-mobile phone chip. Currently, only Google in the world can use this chip.
In short, the computing power of these two chips is similar. They are the strongest computing chips available for mass purchase in the market. Jiangnan Group cannot produce these two chips themselves. These two chips are actually all purchased from Samsung and Qualcomm, so there are no problems with the chips.