My Age of Investment

  Chapter 847 Sales Shackles

After delegating the follow-up due diligence to Hengtai to Li Yaozu and the Hong Kong Island team, Xia Jingxing returned to the Mainland from Hong Kong Island.

  Pengcheng, his first stop.

  After receiving Xia Jingxing’s 100 million yuan capital injection, DJI has changed shotguns and moved the office from the small and cramped warehouse of the original Chegongmiao magazine to the spacious and bright office building of Nanshan Science and Technology Park.

  Nanshan Science and Technology Park has only been established for a few years, but it has gathered the essence of the entire Pengcheng science and technology industry. Enterprises in the park include Huawei, ZTE, Penguin, Great Wall, Shenzhou, Konka, etc.

  DJI chooses to settle here, in addition to enjoying certain policy support, it can also attract talents nearby.

  Nowadays, there is no such profession as drones. DJI can only recruit some engineers with good basic skills from other technology companies. Together, we will relearn and explore how to manufacture drones and flight control systems.

  Li Zexiang and Wang Tao stood at the door of the company and greeted Xia Jingxing and his party.

  Wang Tao is still the same, with few words, and after greeting Xia Jingxing, he stands by.

  Li Zexiang is more familiar with the world. With a smile, he led Xia Jingxing to visit the new office of DJI, and introduced him while visiting.

  Next, he and Wang Tao took Xia Jingxing to a conference room.

  As soon as he sat down, Li Zexiang said: "Mr. Xia, don't be surprised, we just moved here, and a lot of work has not been carried out yet."

  Xia Jingxing waved his hand indifferently, "It's okay, it's already very efficient."

  What he said is actually the truth. Wang Tao and Li Zexiang returned to China from the United States with a full harvest only half a month ago.

  As soon as the two returned to Pengcheng, people from the Fuxing Industrial Group came to the door.

  First signed an equity investment agreement with them, and then paid an initial equity investment of 30 million yuan to help lease a new office.

  At the same time, Fuxing Industrial Group also transferred more than ten employees from Fuxing Mobile to Pengcheng to join DJI, and held many important positions such as DJI's CFO, HR, and legal affairs.

  The joining of these people quickly helped DJI build up its corporate framework, improve various functional departments, and transform from a small workshop into a decent company.

   Excluding Wang Tao and Li Zexiang, the original DJI had only 3 employees, and the number of people sent by Fuxing Industry Group was several times more than this number. In terms of personnel composition, the parent company has already accounted for the majority.

  Wang Tao and Li Zexiang have no opinion on this. After all, the Fuxing Industry Group has invested so much money in DJI, and it is also a normal request to control the enterprise, and this was done with their consent.

  Now everyone has the same goal, and they all want to make the cake bigger.

  And when he was in the United States, Xia Jingxing talked with them about the corporate structure and the division of responsibilities.

  The group headquarters will send people to manage finance, manpower, marketing, etc.;

  Wang Tao served as the company’s CTO, freed himself from the mundane tasks he hated, freed up all his energy, led the team in research and development, and came up with the first product as soon as possible;

  Li Zexiang serves as the company’s CEO and is responsible for the overall situation. At the same time, he uses his identity and influence in academia to recruit talents from universities on Hong Kong Island, the Mainland and overseas to join DJI to strengthen the company’s R&D capabilities.

  In the United States, the two visited the product launch and delivery conferences of Fuxing Mobile and Tesla successively, and had in-depth conversations with the R&D teams of the two companies.

  After visiting and communicating all the way, they were deeply impressed by the R&D concepts and feelings of Xia Jingxing and the two companies.

  Whether it is a mobile phone or a car, we are working hard with the goal of "subverting tradition and bringing innovation to the world".

  Engineers or scientists have always had a sense of arrogance, or IQ superiority, and the more capable they are, the more arrogant they become.

  Wang Tao demonstrated this point vividly. When interviewed by the media in his previous life, he bluntly said, “This world is too stupid, it’s incredibly stupid.”

   However, when facing Xia Jingxing, he can only put away this sense of superiority, because compared with Fuxing mobile phones and Tesla, the current DJI is nothing.

   "The New Year is coming soon, and recruitment can only be temporarily stopped. After the Spring Festival, DJI will start recruitment and expand our R&D team."

  Li Zexiang glanced at Xia Jingxing with his usual face, and continued to report: “In addition, I have already called a few of my graduate students. They all agreed to join DJI and will report back in the next year.”

  "Is there Zhu Xiaorui?" Wang Tao interrupted suddenly.

  "Yes, she has just received her Ph.D. from the Robotics System Center of the University of Utah in the United States, and Harbin Institute of Technology is planning to hire her as an associate professor in the Institute of Advanced Studies.

  I’m less than 30 years old, I’m going to take a PhD student, and I’m still a woman. "

  The last sentence seems to have been deliberately told by Li Zexiang to Xia Jingxing.

  He glanced at Xia Jingxing and said, “Mr. Xia, this girl is very accomplished in the field of robotics. I want to hire her as the chief scientist of DJI.”

  Wang Taosheng was afraid that Xia Jingxing would disagree, and nodded wildly on the side: "Yes, this senior sister’s technique can beat ten me."

  Xia Jingxing has heard of Zhu Xiaorui, she is indeed a powerful female scientist.

  In her previous life, she served as the chairman of the branch and international affairs committee of the IEEE International Robotics and Automation Association. This is the first time that a mainland scholar has held this position.

  Then she also led the team to use a small unmanned helicopter to successfully achieve the first domestic flight test and aerial experiment of Mount Everest.

The most powerful thing is that as the person in charge, she developed a set of "archaeological excavation site intelligent pre-detection system". This technology and application is known as an epoch-making and revolutionary breakthrough in the field of archaeological science and technology, and won the second prize of National Science and Technology Progress Award. .

  What is the concept of this award? If you get another award of the same level, you can enter the Academy of Engineering or the Academy of Sciences as an academician.

  In previous life, Li Zexiang recommended Zhu Xiaorui to join DJI, which had just started, and provided a great boost to the early technological development of DJI.

  This kind of talent is willing to join, Xia Jingxing naturally has no reason to object.

   "Technical matters, as I said before, it's all up to you. The people sent by the group headquarters are mainly to assist you."

  Seeing that Xia Jingxing is so advocating, and really not intervening in technology as promised before, Wang Tao and Li Zexiang are relieved a lot.

  Especially Wang Tao, he can let go of company equity, corporate management and other things, but for R&D, he stares hard at it and treats it as his ideal house.

  Fuxing Industry Group has controlled 70% of DJI’s shares, and at the same time sent people to take over all important positions in DJI except for R&D. As long as there are no major problems in the R&D work, Xia Jingxing will not go too far.

  This can be regarded as a tacit agreement reached between him and Wang Tao, and each takes what he needs. Wang Tao used the capital strength of Fuxing Industry Group to develop the world's leading drones, and Fuxing Industry has one more world-class brand.

  "What do you think about the next development of DJI?"

  Because the matter has not been finalized, Xia Jingxing has never discussed this topic in depth with the two of them. Now that DJI has joined the Fuxing Industry Group, he is eager for the drone company to grow up quickly.

  "Fully develop our own flight control system..."

  Wang Tao thought for a while, then added: “You can save a few more machines. Let’s sell them and make some money.”

  Li Zexiang didn’t speak, he knew that his student’s proposal was a bit too petty. With the ambitions of the Fuxing Industry Group, he would definitely look down on this kind of small business.

  Xia Jingxing smiled without comment.

  Wang Tao’s thinking cannot be said to be wrong. DJI in the previous life developed in this way. It was like saving a computer to buy drones, and then selling them to earn the difference, relying on the money to support the research and development plan of the flight control system.

  The price of the aircraft saved by DJI was not low. It was sold to a state-owned enterprise for 200,000 yuan per unit, but after the product was demonstrated to the leader, it was shelved, or the product was taken home by the leader to play with his son.

  Sales are very limited, making it difficult to become a large company.

  In addition to Wang Tao's lack of skill and experience when he was young, the team soon fell apart, and someone secretly sold the company's design drawings.

  Even worse, there are competitors who bought the drawings, then bought the internal employees of DJI, and used DJI equipment to do product testing...

  The reason why the early days of DJI survived was that Wang Tao’s paranoid spirit had a lot to do with things, and it also had a lot to do with Li Zexiang’s many times of help.

  Xia Jingxing turned his attention to Li Zexiang, he wanted to hear the opinions of this market-oriented scientist.

   Seeing this, Li Zexiang knew that it was impossible not to speak.

  He pondered for a moment, and slowly said, “Mr. Xia, if I don’t expect it to be bad, you want to turn drones into popular electronic products like mobile phones and cars.”

  Xia Jingxing smiled and nodded lightly.

  Li Zexiang continued: "In this case, there are several problems that must be resolved.

  The most important issue is cost. There are hundreds of thousands or hundreds of thousands of UAVs on the market.

  It is a very niche product, which can only be afforded by those who really like model airplanes and at the same time have certain financial strength.

  If drones are to be brought to the market on a large scale, the manufacturing cost must be reduced to at least one-fifth, or even one-tenth, of the current one.

  Secondly, I have studied the drone market in recent times and found that there is no sales company for the whole machine. It is the players who DIY or buy other people's DIY products.

  To describe it in one sentence: buy racks in the East Market, flight controllers in the West Market, batteries in the South Market, and propellers in the North Market...and then assemble it into a complete machine.

  The two problems can be summed up. In fact, there is only one problem. The supply chain system is not perfect and the market and industry are not formed. "

Xia Jingxing smiled: "The summary is very good! In my opinion, this is actually complementary. The cost is too high and the price is too high. As a result, the sales volume is very low. Naturally, there will be no supply chain manufacturers specializing in the production and supply of drones. Various parts.

  But if we can give supply chain manufacturers ten times, one hundred times the order, some people will see this business, so as to achieve the effect of reducing the cost of parts.

  When the cost of parts is reduced, the selling price can naturally also be lowered, so as to achieve the purpose of increasing sales. "

  After listening to this analysis, Wang Tao and Li Zexiang both focus on their heads. It is not difficult to understand that it is the scale effect and the reduction of marginal costs.

   "But just to solve these problems, DJI is still a toy for enthusiasts, or the use scenes are still limited. This is the key to constraining sales."

  Xia Jingxing hugged her hands and looked at the two with a smile. He wanted to see if they could think of a good idea.

  (End of this chapter)