noveltune Chapter 478 Global sales surpass 80 units
Chapter 478 Global sales surpass 80 units
Eight months after the StarPhone 1 was launched, Ma Baoguo flew back to Jinan from Shenzhen.
When he entered Ling Yun's office, he was holding a freshly printed report in his hand, the edges of the paper still warm from the printer. He placed the report on the table and pointed to the numbers on the bottom line.
Global cumulative sales: 800,000 units.
Ling Yun picked up the report. 450,000 units domestically, 350,000 overseas—150,000 in Europe, 120,000 in the Middle East, and 80,000 in Southeast Asia. Each number was followed by a month-on-month growth rate, all in double digits. He placed the report on the table and gently smoothed out the creases on the paper with his fingers.
What about the production capacity of the Shenzhen factory?
"We've already reached a monthly production of 150,000 units. The yield rate is consistently above 95%." Ma Baoguo sat down and loosened his collar. "President Ling, let me tell you something. There's a female worker on our production line named Wang Ping, the one who was laid off from the electronics factory. She's now leading a shift on an assembly line, managing over forty people. Last month, she came to me saying that the training period for newly recruited workers on the production line was too long. So she created a set of operating instructions, breaking down the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) into catchy rhymes, reducing the onboarding time for new workers from three weeks to ten days."
"Transfer her to the training group. Let her specialize in this."
"It's already been adjusted." Ma Baoguo chuckled. "Go to the production line now and you'll see those new workers muttering incantations while tightening screws, like they're chanting scriptures." (Back when the author went to the production line to adjust the equipment, many new female production line workers relied on memorizing rhymes to avoid making mistakes in their procedures.)
That afternoon, Lingyun held a small celebration within the group. There were no banners in the meeting room; several plates of fruit and cases of drinks were laid out on the table. Not many people attended—Li Mo, Wang Jianguo, Zhao Weiguo, Chen Zhongming, Ma Baoguo, and a few department heads. Wang Jianguo turned on the projector and showed a series of behind-the-scenes photos of StarPhone from its initial project proposal to mass production.
The first image is a screenshot from a surveillance camera at 3:17 AM in the late autumn of 2003 at the Beijing Spark Lab—Wang Jianguo is asleep at his desk, with a cup of coffee with a film forming next to him and a StarPhone prototype with its screen still lit, displaying a line and a half of code. The second image is from the Shenzhen factory production line, showing the first batch of StarPhone phones rolling off the assembly line. A female worker in a blue overalls stands beside the conveyor belt, gently touching the casing. The third image is from Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, outside the Deutsche Telekom flagship store, where a long queue stretches to the door of the coffee shop next door on a snowy day.
After the photos were shown, the meeting room was quiet for a few seconds. Ling Yun stood up and tapped the table with her cup.
"Eight hundred thousand units is our first milestone. We used eight months." He paused, "But I have some news for you—Apple's Purple project is progressing very quickly. Nokia is also working on a touchscreen system; you've all seen their internal report. Our window of opportunity is at most two years."
"Is there any movement from Steve Jobs' side?" Li Mo asked.
"Yes. He called me yesterday."
Everyone in the conference room sat up straight. Ling Yun placed his phone on the table, put it on speakerphone, and played a recorded call. Steve Jobs' voice came through the phone, with his signature unhurried rhythm: "Ling, congratulations. But I must remind you, Apple's Project Purple is progressing well. We'll meet in the market in 2007."
In the recording, Ling Yun's voice was as calm as if he were describing the weather: "I'm waiting. But Steve, the race between the stars and the sea has only just begun."
After a few seconds of silence, a very soft laugh came from the recording.
"You know what? Sometimes I envy you. Because you can make operating systems, chips, and mobile phones all at the same time, while I can only make mobile phones."
"Because you are Steve Jobs, and I am Ling Yun."
They both laughed. The laughter overlapped for a moment on the phone, then Jobs said, "You know what? Sometimes I envy you." The recording ended there.
Everyone in the conference room was still glued to their phones. Li Mo spoke first: "Steve Jobs envies you? Who has he ever envied in his life?"
Ling Yun didn't answer. He put his phone away and said to Fiona, his tone much softer than when they were discussing work: "Jobs is our rival, but also the rival I respect most. Because like me, he's not making products for money, he's making them to change the world."
After the celebration ended, Li Mo caught up with Ling Yun in the corridor.
"Brother Ling, you just said the window of opportunity is only two years. Can the tape-out timeline for StarCore 2 be pushed forward?"
"Until when?"
"Second quarter of 2006. Three months ahead of schedule." Li Mo pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket, which unfolded into a simplified Gantt chart of the project. "For the GPU module, we plan to reuse some of the PC graphics card team's design, which will save about two months of architecture design time. As for the baseband interface, the Noah's Ark protocol stack development is progressing faster than expected—General Manager Liang said last week that the physical layer simulation has run successfully. By compressing these two critical paths, the overall progress can be moved forward."
Ling Yun stood in the hallway and looked through the Gantt chart. At the end of the hallway, someone was moving server racks; the wheels clattered over the floor seams. "How confident are you?"
"Eighty percent."
「那就干。」凌云把纸还给李默，「流片时间改到2006年6月。量产时间改到2007年1月，给StarPhone 2留出足够的测试周期。」
That evening, Ling Yun was alone in his office. A row of streetlights illuminated the park outside his window, and the crane booms, now stationary, hung silently in the night. He opened his notebook and wrote a few lines on a new page. Key milestones of 2006: StarPhone 2 release, StarCore 2 tape-out, self-developed baseband making the first phone call, cloud computing SaaS productization, deepening penetration of the European market, breakthrough in the North American market. After finishing, he paused, then added a line: Beware of Apple—Steve Jobs won't just be an observer.
He closed his notebook and leaned back in his chair. On the table lay a drawing his daughter had made, depicting "Daddy at Work"—a little man in a suit sitting behind a desk, with the word "Daddy" scrawled beside him. Lingyun reached out and straightened the frame.
"Let's go," Zhao Hu poked his head in from the doorway. "The car's ready."
Ling Yun stood up, put his notebook in the drawer, and picked up his coat. As he reached the door, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He took it out; an email popped up on the screen—the sender was Sophia, and the subject was only four words: Qualcomm News. He opened the email and read it from beginning to end while standing in the hallway.
"Zhao Hu, tomorrow morning, call Li Mo and the legal department people into the conference room. Qualcomm has made some new moves."
"Okay, do we need to notify them of Qualcomm's new moves in advance?"
"Tell them in advance that Qualcomm has started applying for sales bans on Spark phones in several key markets around the world." Ling Yun put his phone back in his pocket and continued walking towards the elevator. Zhao Hu followed behind and pressed the elevator button. The moment the elevator doors opened, Ling Yun suddenly remembered something and stopped.
"By the way, could you order a box of the best navel oranges for me and send it to Jobs tomorrow?"
"Navel oranges?"
"He mentioned that he likes to eat fruit. He brought it up when we met in California last time." Ling Yun stepped into the elevator, turned around, and said, "I can't let him think that I'm only going to argue with him about the product."