Chapter 162: Single-Month Capacity of 3 Million Units: Sister Chengzi Phone's First Double

Hearing the news, Tang Qingshan brought several senior administrators from the Virtual University and made a special trip to the Zhuxianzhuang Tech Park.

Under the pretext of a visit, every word he said kept circling back to this year's graduating seniors.

Chen Yansen caught the hint at once, smiled, and told Tang Qingshan that the technology and product departments could take on 200 interns, and as long as they met the bar, they would all be eligible for conversion to full-time after graduation.

Tang Qingshan nodded in satisfaction, then went on: "This year the quota for students from poor families is tight, and the part-time slots we can arrange in the cafeteria, dorms, and library are limited. As their senior…"

"Pinbei Tech is short on customer-service staff. I'll have a word with HR and bring on 50 part-timers first. Just have someone send me the roster, and thanks, Teacher Tang—you've really helped me out of a tight spot."

Chen Yansen cut Tang Qingshan off before he could finish, agreeing readily.

It was clearly Tang Qingshan coming to ask him for a favor, yet after Chen Yansen put it that way, it sounded as if Tang Qingshan had helped him solve his own staffing shortage.

It made Tang Qingshan exclaim inwardly: this kid knows how to play the game!

College students were cheap and easy to use, so Chen Yansen had no reason to refuse—and he could pocket a good reputation in the bargain.

Besides, when Sister Chengzi Tech had first applied for the 3C certification, the network access permit, and the radio transmission equipment model approval certificate, Tang Qingshan had called in plenty of his own connections to speed up the paperwork.

Favors are meant to flow back and forth—only then do relationships grow deeper.

Chen Yansen's attitude sat well with Tang Qingshan, who, before leaving, invited him to give a speech at the freshman welcome evening.

The kind of thing that was all posturing with no real benefit—Chen Yansen couldn't be bothered, so he made an excuse and turned it down.

Seeing he had no interest, Tang Qingshan didn't press the matter.

After seeing Tang Qingshan and the others off, Chen Yansen had barely returned to his office when he got a call from Cao Dahua.

"Remember Wang Hongde from Youpu Batteries?" Cao Dahua's tone could barely hide his amusement.

"I do. I heard they're only able to take orders from Shanzhai phone makers now. From the way you sound so pleased—don't tell me Wang Hongde got hit by a car?"

Chen Yansen sat back in his chair, grinning as he ribbed him.

"Not quite, but close enough. Youpu's batteries screwed Chuanyin—four phone explosions happened in Abyssinia this month, and once they investigated, every single one turned out to be caused by batteries Youpu supplied."

Cao Dahua explained slowly, then added: "The news has spread through the Shencheng circle. Nobody dares use Youpu's stuff now, and a bunch of people are waving contracts demanding refunds. Then yesterday, the authorities shut Youpu down and seized both the people and the goods."

"Did you and Old Zuo pull this off?" Chen Yansen asked, suspicious.

"Hey, I'm a good guy, a model teacher—how could I do something like that? It's just that Wang Hongde was too greedy. To make money he kept squeezing costs and grinding his workers down, and he didn't bother with quality checks either, so a ton of defective products ended up shipped out."

Cao Dahua hurriedly denied it and laid out how things had actually unfolded.

"Got it. I was planning to deal with him myself, but looks like I don't need to. By the way, didn't Zhou Jinling go to Abyssinia? Does this mess affect our market-development plan?"

Chen Yansen frowned and asked in a low, serious voice.

"I've talked it over with Xiao Zhou. They opened a Sister Chengzi phone store over there. Before the incident, they could sell dozens of Sister Chengzi F1s a day, but the past two days sales have been in single digits."

Cao Dahua sighed, the smile gone from his face.

Every cloud has a silver lining—but in this case, Wang Hongde hadn't just screwed Chuanyin, he'd screwed Sister Chengzi phones too.

Locals now deeply distrust smart phones made in Huaguo—after all, who wants to buy a phone that explodes?

Within Sister Chengzi Tech, the first-generation phone was named the Sister Chengzi C1, while the one developed specifically for the African market was the Sister Chengzi F1.

The Shencheng factory had only produced one batch—50,000 units in total, priced at 99 US dollars.

The 17 African market-development teams had spent nearly three months selling them and had moved only 40,000 units, leaving 10,000 in stock.

With this mess, future sales were bound to get even harder.

"If they can't handle it, pull everyone back and swap in a new team. Tell Zhou Jinling I'm giving him one last month."

Chen Yansen judged Zhou Jinling's execution lacking, and instructed Cao Dahua accordingly.

If you can't cut it, you're out.

"Got it, I'll pass it on to Zhou Jinling. On another note, the other production bases start production today, so by tomorrow Sister Chengzi phone shipments will hit 100,000 units."

Cao Dahua acknowledged, then delivered a piece of good news.

The production plants in zones A1, A2, A4, and A5 had finished their preparatory work—production materials, staff, and production-line equipment were all in place.

Monthly capacity hit a whopping 3 million units!

They expected to clear the remaining 3.7 million pre-orders for Sister Chengzi phones before mid-December.

Up to now, the Sister Chengzi phone factories had already shipped 1.2 million units of stock.

"Pinbei is about to launch too. Once the Jingdong flagship store goes live, estimated monthly sales should hit 1.8 million units."

Chen Yansen replied directly—he understood the subtext of what Cao Dahua was saying.

The point was simply that Sister Chengzi phone factory capacity was ramping up too fast, while Sister Chengzi Tech's product line was too narrow, and sales couldn't keep pace with capacity.

"Good, I'll get to work then." Seeing Chen Yansen had taken his meaning, Cao Dahua said no more, laughed, and hung up.

Chen Yansen leaned back and fell into thought.

The next assignment he gave Zhang Cong and Zhou Ze was to design a thousand-yuan phone and a flagship model around 4,000 yuan.

To grab a bigger slice of the phone market.

Apart from Apple, look at Shanxing, HTC, Nokia—didn't every one of them climb into the top ten in shipments by stacking up total sales across multiple models?

Three million units of monthly capacity—he didn't think it was too much; on the contrary, he thought it was too little.

As for Youpu's Wang Hongde, the man struck him as a joke.

Before he could lift a finger, Wang Hongde had already run into trouble.

From what Cao Dahua said, this time Wang Hongde would be looking at least two years behind bars working a sewing machine—selling defective batteries and causing a serious incident overseas was a textbook case for the authorities' double crackdown.

Chen Yansen couldn't help laughing out loud. After a moment's thought, he called Zuo Hongyu and gave him Zhou Shouzhi's contact details.

Next, Sister Chengzi Tech had to adjust its suppliers to avoid repeating Chuanyin's mistake.

DST's supplier resources would also need Zuo Hongyu to take over.

Once DST's funding came in, Chen Yansen planned to have Gao Weilin approach several top domestic screen and battery suppliers to negotiate stakes while their valuations were still low.

To push forward the domestic substitution of Sister Chengzi phones' core components ahead of time.

After receiving the notice of the factory capacity boost, the e-commerce department immediately shortened the user-order queue time from half a year to one month, drastically cutting the wait.

……

……

Hucheng.

Inside a bright, spotless office building.

Zhang Yanan, taking advantage of her supervisor not looking, quietly logged into Sister Chengzi Mall to check her order.

The original estimated shipping date was April 7, 2012, but now it had somehow changed to November 28, 2011!

A full five months earlier!

Could she get her hands on a Chengzi phone by month's end?

Had Chengzi Phone's production capacity finally gone up?

Before, she had spent plenty of time in Chen Yansen's Weibo comment section urging shipments, even threatening to send every employee of Chengzi Tech to the assembly line to make phones for long-suffering users like her.

After all, everyone had backed Chengzi Phone with real money, yet receiving the goods meant waiting half a year — anyone would lose patience.

Zhang Yanan's heart leaped with joy. She was just about to share the news on the Chengzi community when she noticed that plenty of other buyers had also discovered the shipping date had moved up.

Everyone was buzzing about it in the Chengzi community.

"Did Chengzi Phone finally find its conscience? Not playing the hunger-marketing game anymore?"

"My cousin works at a factory in Shencheng. Heard Chengzi Phone just built four new mid-sized production bases in one go — after December, everything's in stock!"

"Damn! Won't the scalpers be dumbfounded?"

"Buddy upstairs, you're not a scalper yourself, are you?"

"Scalpers should all drop dead! The official price is 1,999 yuan, and those bastards dare to sell it for 2,500 — making more than Chen Yansen!"

Zhang Yanan stopped reading at that point; the replies below had gone completely off-topic, nothing but scalper-bashing.

Previously, Chengzi Phone shipped only 500,000 units a month — a drop in the bucket compared to the annual smartphone market of two to three hundred million units.

Although Chengzi Phones could always be bought, delivery times varied. Scalpers exploited that time gap, reselling each phone for an extra 300–500 yuan.

Even though Chengzi Tech's e-commerce division required buyers to submit ID info and limited the number of orders per IP, scalpers still slipped through.

Plenty of users desperate for a Chengzi Phone really did pay the markup to scalpers, driving up the secondary-market price of Chengzi Phones higher and higher.

Meanwhile.

Lei Yijun sat in his office, jabbing a finger at the manager in charge of battery procurement and cursing him out.

He never imagined he'd stumble into the very same pit Chengzi Phone had fallen into.

Because Xiaomi phone users kept complaining about overheating, Lei Yijun wanted to switch battery suppliers and fix the design flaw in the charging power.

He even copied Chengzi Tech, swapping in a phone back-cover material with better heat dissipation.

But when the first batch of batteries arrived, he discovered the dimensions were off from the production specs — the automated assembly equipment couldn't handle them, so workers had to manually wedge the batteries into the slot.

"Mr. Lei, should we return this batch of 20,000 units, or…" Li Wanqiang glanced at the procurement manager, who looked thoroughly chastened, and asked in a low voice.

"Get the factory to find some people to install them by hand."

Lei Yijun said weakly.

Shanxing was choking Xiaomi's screen supply, the contract manufacturers griped that Xiaomi's orders were too small, and now the batteries had problems too — shipping dates kept getting pushed back.

Users cursed him every day for the monkey-show antics!

Lei Yijun decided that getting product out the door came first.

At this moment he finally understood why Chen Yansen had spared no expense and built his own factories.

At least on the production-capacity front, he was finding it impossible to coordinate things right now.

DST's switch to Chengzi Tech with a nine-billion-dollar valuation — he had known about that long ago.

The market was huge, but every extra bite Chengzi Tech took was one less bite for Xiaomi.

Only now did Lei Yijun realize he had still underestimated this rival.

Three days later, Singles' Day arrived.

On Taobao's digital-and-appliances venue, Chengzi Phone's sales surpassed the iPhone 4 in just three hours.

After all, the China-version iPhone 4S hadn't launched yet, and the iPhone 4's specs were falling behind the times — plus the 4S was already on sale overseas, so few people still wanted last year's old model.

At 11:58 PM that night, Chengzi Phone's total sales hit 490,000 units!

Just 3,000 short of breaking the 500,000-unit mark!

Zhang Yong decisively hinted to the category director for digital goods to have his people pad 3,000 orders for Chengzi, rounding the sales figure up to 500,000.

Early the next morning, Alibaba announced publicly.

The third Taobao Mall Singles' Day promotion had racked up total sales of 6.13 billion yuan!

A more than tenfold jump year-on-year from 2010.

Meanwhile, JD. com's sales were only 1.06 billion yuan!

Liu Qiangdong had intended to use Singles' Day to strike at Taobao, but ended up getting a face full of dust.

He hadn't even managed a fifth of Taobao's sales!

Still, upon learning that Chengzi Phone had contributed a billion yuan in sales to Taobao, Liu Qiangdong immediately called Chen Yansen and proposed signing an exclusive cooperation agreement with Chengzi Tech.

For the Double 12 promotion, JD. com was willing to give Chengzi Phone the prime "sea-view" slots — boot screen, pop-up ads, and the homepage banner.

But Chen Yansen was unmoved. He was willing to open a flagship store on JD. com, but signing exclusive was out of the question.

They might be friendly, but when money was on the line, lines had to be drawn.

With no choice, Liu Qiangdong hung up and personally began pushing to speed up the integration with Chengzi Tech.

He even wanted JD. com's design department to handle the UI design for Chengzi Phone's storefront.

Chen Yansen knew perfectly well: this was the final Honeymoon phase between him, Taobao, and JD. com.

Once Pinduoduo came online, the three of them would most likely beat each other bloody.

"The more people, the merrier!"

Chen Yansen stood in his office, gazing out the window at the gradually darkening sky, and chuckled softly.

At the same time.

At the same time, the navel oranges Zhang Yifeng had sent from Xiyue finally arrived at the first floor of the tech park.

Boxes of different specifications, more than twenty of them piled high—on one hand to let the category team audit product quality, and on the other to check whether the current packing methods had any oversights.

(End of chapter)