The people of the United States began to go mad with desire for these cool, sci-fi-like personal terminals, but the entire country was unable to purchase such products through official channels.
After the authorities prohibited the sale of 5-进制 related terminals, major global terminal companies almost all withdrew from the US market.
Since only Apple possessed a binary terminal product line that was permitted for sale, chip production technology belonged solely to Qualcomm, and many software applications came from Google's development. These three companies had formed a tight alliance.
After painstakingly obtaining privileges almost equivalent to Ld through various means, why would they share this advantage with other companies?
Therefore, during this period, the only personal terminals that could be publicly purchased in the US market were Apple's. If the major terminal companies didn't withdraw, would they just stay there and pay idle US employees salaries for nothing?
Fortunately, with the introduction of Jiangnan Group's epoch-making holographic 3D stereoscopic projection technology, a wave of terminal replacements swept across the globe. All major terminal companies were not worried about having no business, nor were they worried about lacking a market. In the short term, they didn't care about the US market.
But the American people also wanted to own these cool terminals capable of holographic stereoscopic projection.
Naturally, US billionaires were the first to use stereoscopic holographic projection terminals. They could directly spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase Jiangnan Group's luxury collector's edition and then carry it into the United States by hand.
However, ordinary citizens clearly did not have such convenient conditions. They could only choose to go to the Immortal Realm, and then the US HB was directly making a fortune!
A personal terminal with holographic stereoscopic projection capabilities, originally priced at no more than $700, was being resold on the Immortal Realm for $2200 per unit, more than tripling the price.
So, part of the reason for this was that most users in the market were still waiting in line. To get a terminal as soon as possible, they could only find scalpers, and the price from scalpers directly doubled.
Then, after HB painstakingly brought these terminals back to the country, it wasn't excessive to charge you double the price, right?
Of course, even with such exorbitant prices, it couldn't dampen the desires of the American people. As the saying goes, what you can't get is what excites you the most.
The more unattainable something is, the more it makes you desperately want to obtain it, and in comparison, the price seems to matter less.
So, even at triple the price, they were still instantly snapped up on the Immortal Realm as soon as they appeared. Eventually, even at prices as high as $6000 per unit, people were still willing to pay to be among the first to purchase them, and the HBs across the United States were going crazy.
What they were frantically searching for worldwide was no longer dp, but those personal terminals. These were the true gold.
Simultaneously, due to the excessive price gouging, many who couldn't afford them on the Immortal Realm began to devise other plans, such as going abroad directly to buy terminals.
In the United States, going abroad is actually a low-cost affair. For Americans going on vacation abroad, they don't need to go too far. Going to a country like Mexico, a half-month trip there, including airfare, would generally not exceed $5000 in total cost.
So, many smart Americans realized that since buying directly on the Immortal Realm was so expensive, why not just travel to Mexico? They could buy personal terminals locally and enjoy a wonderful half-month vacation, killing two birds with one stone.
As a result, the US tourism department was surprised to find that in the entirety of 2033, outbound travel from the US experienced a new boom, with over 86 million tourist departures in a year, an increase of nearly 40% compared to the previous year's data.
Of course, going abroad didn't guarantee the purchase of a personal terminal with holographic stereoscopic projection technology, as worldwide backorders were already booked a year in advance.
Then, the scalper market in Mexico began to flourish again. As long as you could get your hands on a brand new, or even a used, personal terminal with stereoscopic projection technology, you could immediately sell it for around $2000-$3000, with pure profits exceeding 200%, attracting countless Mexican scalpers.
Then, very soon, major mobile phone companies were surprised to discover that the sales of personal terminals in the Mexican region were steadily increasing, with unprecedented growth.
Not only that, but many personal terminals sold in other regions ultimately had their activation locations in Mexico. Nearly 12% of the world's personal terminals with stereoscopic projection technology were eventually routed to Mexico, which was an extremely abnormal situation.
The truth was very easy to investigate, and these major personal terminal manufacturers soon understood the cause and effect.
However, they were not angry; instead, they were overjoyed.
It was a joke. They had withdrawn from the US market earlier, but if policy hadn't prohibited it, who would have…
This electronic mall was not open to local Mexicans; only those holding US passports could enter to shop and consume, and naturally, all the products sold inside were personal terminals, almost all of them featuring holographic stereoscopic projection capabilities.
The sellers of personal terminals in this mall were all major local Mexican powers.
Due to issues like express delivery, this mall did not require reservations; all terminals were readily available. As for how they obtained large quantities of inventory from major global terminal manufacturers, only heaven knew.
Of course, considering the current tight supply of ready-made goods in the market, these ready-made goods were expensive, usually costing about double the retail price.
However, this price itself was much cheaper than buying from the Immortal Realm or other scalpers. Thus, the Americans flocked to it, especially those traveling to Mexico, who would definitely visit this electronic mall to buy a brand new personal terminal with its price doubled.
As for this extra doubled profit, it was said to be equally split between the local Mexican powers and the supplying terminal manufacturers.
With such easily achievable increased profits, the mall's staff was always very sufficient, to the point that later many people from other countries tried desperately to sneak into the mall to buy ready-made goods, as buying ready-made goods in their own countries was also prohibitively expensive.
Later, many terminal manufacturers saw how lucrative this was and came up with the idea of launching premium "Crown" models priced at over $3000.
These "Crown" models were equipped with the best configurations, but their actual cost was only around $1000. Major terminal manufacturers could thus make a profit of $2000 from each unit.
As a result, such products continued to sell like hotcakes. After all, having spent thousands of dollars on travel, would they hesitate to spend a few thousand more to buy a "Crown" model?
In the end, all the major global terminal manufacturers adored the relevant US institutions and sincerely hoped that these institutions would continue to implement this policy, allowing them to continue to make exorbitant profits from Americans.
This situation was soon discovered by the relevant US authorities, but they had no good solutions, as they couldn't stop others from selling products in other countries' markets.
More critically, Apple's personal terminal sales remained very poor. Even with the entire market open for them to sell, with the advent of next-generation holographic stereoscopic projection terminals,
customers preferred to keep using their old terminals and save money to buy the cooler holographic stereoscopic projection terminals rather than buy those old products that were destined to become obsolete.
Apple, Qualcomm, and Google soon discovered that this exclusive business was not profitable and was even continuously losing money.
As almost all global manufacturers were servicing 5-进制 terminals chips, the binary terminals were all self-developed by these three companies. The development costs were staggering, reportedly requiring sales of over $140 billion to barely cover all research and development costs.
As a result, to date, they had not even earned $10 billion, while annual ongoing development and maintenance costs were as high as $20 billion. This was a product incurring massive losses every year.
With the release of these related financial reports, the stocks of the three companies began to plummet. Ultimately, Qualcomm declared bankruptcy and underwent restructuring, completely bewildering the market.
Finally, the four major financial consortiums had to reluctantly admit that with Jiangnan Group holding an absolute technological advantage in the terminal field, unless they could produce products that technologically surpassed it, they could not prevent market choices even with their grip on power.
Not to mention that many poor but more eager Americans for holographic projection terminals had already launched nationwide activities, and these people were almost all Black. A clearly larger movement was gathering, and it might just lead to another nationwide disturbance.
So, more than a year after the policy was introduced, the relevant US authorities announced that they had completed the technical inspection of the 5-进制 chip and provided some technical details requiring modification by Jiangnan Group. They stated that as long as Jiangnan Group completed these technical modifications, related products could be sold in the market again.