Rebirth 2002: Nano Life

As the CEO of Dongguan New Energy Technology Electronics Co., Ltd. and the concurrent manager, Zeng Liuqing is currently a little distressed.

A few days ago, Liang Shaohua, a partner of the Hong Kong head office, called him. On the phone, Liang Shaohua talked about the possibility of withdrawal of capital from the major shareholder Carlyle.

In 1989, after graduating from the Department of Ship Engineering of Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zeng Liuqing was assigned to a state-owned enterprise in Fujian. After three months, he quit his job and went to work as an engineer in an electronics factory in Guangdong Province.

The company he went to is Dongguan Xinke Magnetic Power Plant (a manufacturing base of SAE). At present, SAE has developed into the world's largest independent hard disk head supplier.

Zeng Liuqing has been working at Xinke for ten years. Due to his outstanding professional ability and courage, he became the youngest engineering director at the age of 31, and the first mainland director.

One day, Liang Shaohua, CEO of SAE, came to him and asked him to help investigate a battery project. He went to Pengcheng to discuss with the experts for a day, and came back to write a report, saying that if we want to make batteries, we can definitely do it.

Liang Shaohua wanted to pull Zeng Liuqing to make batteries together, but he did not agree at first. At that time, Zeng Liuqing was being poached by headhunters and planned to resign from Xinke to become the general manager of a company in Pengcheng. So Liang Shaohua asked Chen Qikang to be a lobbyist again. Chen Qikang is Zeng Liuqing's boss at Xinke. He called from the United States, Zeng Liuqing was finally persuaded, and the three decided to make batteries together.

In this way, in 1999, New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. established by Liang Shaohua, Chen Qikang, Zeng Liuqing and others was registered in Hong Kong, referred to as ATL, and established its first factory in Guancheng, Guangdong Province.

To make batteries, ATL must first identify a research and development direction for itself. At that time, products such as round batteries and square batteries on the market were dominated by Japanese companies such as Sony and Panasonic. They are highly automated and of uniform quality, making it difficult for Chinese companies to compete with them.

In this way, the polymer soft pack battery, which is flexible in size and not suitable for automation, has become the choice of ATL. At that time, a Nokia flip phone was equipped with a Sony polymer battery, and ATL bought the phone to disassemble it for research. This kind of battery is short, thin and easy to carry, and the entrepreneurial team feels that this may be a development direction in the future.

So Zeng Liuqing flew to the United States with funds and purchased the patent authorization of the polymer lithium battery from Bell Labs in the United States. But that technology hides a fatal flaw. At that time, more than two dozen companies around the world that purchased patent licenses were not aware of this trap, including the small ATL.

Zeng Liuqing, who got the patent authorization, returned to China excitedly, and a group of entrepreneurs started trial production of polymer soft pack batteries. If you don't try it, you won't know, just try it and be startled. They found that the batteries made according to the Bell Labs formula had a fatal problem - after repeated charging and discharging, the batteries would balloon and deform so that they could not continue to be used.

More than half of the $2.5 million in the startup has been spent, and the product is unusable. Zeng Liuqing, who was in charge of the project, ran back to the United States to find a patent licensee. As a result, the other party said slowly that the bulging of the battery is an essential problem, and they do not know how to solve it. None of the more than 20 authorized companies around the world can solve this problem.

The patented technology bought with huge sums of money may be in vain, and the agreement also stipulates that a fixed percentage of the other party should be paid for the sale of a battery. Seeing that the money on the books is almost spent, and the product has not yet been produced, the company's prospects look confused. However, with the support of experience and technical team, Zeng Liuqing led the ATL team to overcome this technical problem with great resilience and became the only company in the world to successfully mass-produce this technology.

And very fortunately, ATL caught up with the good times. The year 2000 was at the peak of the popularity of mobile phones in China, and many state-owned enterprises applied for mobile phone manufacturing licenses. At that time, CKD was popular in the mobile phone industry. I bought a kit from a Korean solution provider and assembled it into a mobile phone, and it sold well. However, in the entire industry chain, domestic companies are highly dependent on Korean solution providers, and there are few things that can be changed, except for batteries.

ATL's opportunity is here. ATL negotiated with the customer and offered half the price of the Korean battery used by the customer, but with double the capacity. No customer could resist this temptation, and orders came flooding in, even though ATL's battery consistency was far from what it is today. Relying on high cost performance, ATL opened the mobile phone market at once.

In June 2002, ATL made a profit in a single month, and achieved a profit for the whole year that year. However, in order to grow rapidly and expand its scale, ATL still raised financing, and Taiwan Handing was the first institutional venture capital ATL received. In 2003, a second round of investment was found. The American Carlyle Investment and the British 3i Group invested 25 million US dollars.

After the money was invested, ATL expanded its production and began to focus on quality and product consistency.

Different from Sony's product standardization route, ATL has embarked on a differentiated path - tailor-made batteries for customer products. The self-designed production line was designed from the outset to produce batteries of different sizes. The flexible and fast corporate style is also displayed. In the battery market such as DVD, Bluetooth headset and mobile phone, ATL's products are rapidly spread.

However, in January this year, a director of ATL Carlyle visited Pengcheng BAK Battery Co., Ltd., and after reading it, he said to the inside: "We are finished, you are cheaper, you must know that others can be cheaper."

This is why ATL withdraws its capital and prepares to sell its shares to return the funds.

However, last night, Zeng Liuqing received another call from Chen Qikang, and there was good news from the call, saying that a company in the United States and the RBTDK Group were interested in accepting the shares of major shareholders.

Emotionally, Zeng Liuqing and others are of course more willing to accept TDK Group's investment, but what troubles him is that TDK's investment has a precondition, which is to fully acquire ATL. Once the acquisition is successful, Zeng Liuqing and others will actually become seniors Just workers.

While ATL's internal team was still hesitating, on February 5, Chen Yizhe brought Ding Huicong, the head of the battery project team, to the New Energy Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. factory in Baima, Guancheng under the guidance of Hu Yifeng.

It was Zeng Liuqing who was in charge of receiving Chen Yizhe and others. When Zeng Liuqing received a call from Hu Yifeng, Hu Yifeng made it clear that it was the person in charge of Xiameng Electronics who came to visit.

Since the second half of last year, the company Xia Meng Electronics has been appearing in the news, and the correlation between industries is still relatively high. How could Zeng Liuqing have not heard of Xia Meng Electronics. Especially for the electronic paper technology that suddenly appeared in his company, Zeng Liuqing was a little shocked when he heard about this technology. If it wasn't for the news broadcast by CCTV, he would definitely think that this company was a scam company.

Zeng Liuqing originally thought that Xiameng Electronics came this time because of the supply of lithium batteries. After all, its products use the structure of built-in lithium batteries.

And according to Zeng Liuqing's understanding ~www.wuxiahere.com~ Ipayer used lithium batteries produced by byd before. In his opinion, byd's lithium battery has poor process consistency, and the capacity declines relatively quickly, which is very far from the batteries of some large foreign manufacturers. Even compared with ATL, Zeng Liuqing can confidently answer that the lithium battery he produces is better than byd's. good.

Who knows, when the tour was over and he returned to the reception room, beyond Zeng Liuqing's expectations, Chen Yizhe directly proposed to acquire ASL.

This made Zeng Liuqing feel very sudden.

I didn't know how to answer for a while.

"Mr. Chen, to tell you the truth, after the two rounds of financing, the founding team of ATL actually has very little shares in it. If President Chen wants to acquire ATL, then this time, he should have found the wrong person." Zeng Liuqing Chang He was very friendly and always greeted people with a smile on the way.

"For me, in addition to brand and technology, the greatest value of a company lies in its human resources, and this talent may be more important than the first two, thinking that both brand and technology come from the creation of talents. For me, the most valuable thing about ATL is your founding team, which is why I came to visit you this time. If the founding team of ATL is willing to accept our acquisition, in the next step, Xiameng Electronics will cooperate with ATL For the acquisition of ATL, I dare to say that Xia Meng Electronics has a warm and sincere heart.”

Chen Yizhe paused, then continued, "And as far as I know, ATL's largest shareholder seems to be withdrawing its capital, and Xia Meng Electronics intends to accept its shares and become a new energy holding company, or even a wholly-owned holding company, I believe whether it is in In terms of bids and other aspects, Xiameng Electronics will treat ATL with the greatest sincerity."