Rebirth: Starting from selling water to become the world’s richest man

China Core, Made in China

The outside world’s discussion about the Li family being the richest man in Shanbei Province is getting more and more heated.

However, Li Shanshan’s mind was not on this at this time. After nearly a year of accumulation of wealth, he can now be said to be wealthy.

With strong financial support, he decided to recruit talents in advance, lay out high-tech industries, and develop his own chips.

Chips belong to the semiconductor industry and are the carrier of integrated circuits. Designed integrated circuits are embedded on silicon wafers made of semiconductor materials. They have the characteristics of small size and are inseparable from all electronic products.

Chips can be said to be the cornerstone of the electronic information industry.

The main reason why Li Shanshan wants to enter this industry early is because he knows that although China’s economy will rise strongly in the world in the future, it will be restricted by others in the chip industry.

Especially the unreasonable sanctions imposed by the Americans. They require all companies that use American technology and equipment to produce chips not to sell chips to Chinese companies.

Once this sanction was issued, it had a huge impact on Chinese companies, especially Huawei’s customers in more than 170 countries around the world, hundreds of billions of dollars in network expansion and maintenance, and affected the information communications of more than 3 billion people.

Many people can’t understand why Chinese people could build atomic bombs by eating bran-fed vegetables, living in thatched huts, and sleeping in mud huts, but now they can’t make good chips?

The “chip pain” has made the Chinese people extremely angry, and it also makes people have to reflect on how fragile our chip industry is, and how easily it can be choked by the Americans.

In fact, China once followed the United States in chip manufacturing and has the potential to keep pace with Western developed countries.

The core of chip manufacturing is the cutting-edge lithography machine. When it comes to lithography machines, the most advanced lithography machine is none other than ASML in the Netherlands.

At present, more than 70% of the global market share of high-end lithography machines below 45nm is monopolized by this company. Among them, ASML’s most advanced EUV lithography machines are priced at 120 million yuan each, which is equivalent to the price of a Boeing 737 aircraft. .

Huaxia developed a BG-102 step-by-step projection lithography machine in the mid-1990s. After appraisal by relevant departments, its performance was about 5 years behind the most advanced foreign lithography machines at the time.

However, due to the industrial environment and related policies at the time, “Buying is worse than making” became the mainstream at that time, and domestic companies no longer conducted independent research and development from then on.

Later, some statistics showed that China’s total R&D investment in those 10 years was less than the United States’ investment in one year. At that time, the United States’ annual investment was about 20 billion yuan.

Since then, China’s research and development in the field of integrated circuit manufacturing equipment such as photolithography machines has stalled and been stranded.

When I later wanted to invest in research and development, I discovered that the gap between myself and foreign countries had widened to as much as 20 years.

In order to prevent this tragedy from happening again, Li Shanshan felt that he had the responsibility and obligation to make arrangements in advance to save China’s chip industry.

Of course, the most important thing is that the chip industry does make money. With the development of China’s economy, China spends more than 200 billion yuan on importing chips every year.

If Li Shanshan can achieve Huaxia Core and Huaxia Manufacturing, he will not only fulfill his social responsibility, but also make a lot of money for himself.

To develop China’s chip industry, he knew that he couldn’t do it alone, so he decided to go to the imperial capital to find help.

When he came to the Imperial Capital this time, he was the first to find Ni Guangnan, who had been dismissed from his post by Lenovo.

The reason why I found him was first of all because he was a person who had a strong pursuit of developing domestic chips and had the same idea as Li Shanshan.

The second reason is that Lenovo fell into the internal strife of the “Liu-Ni Controversy”. Ni Guangnan had serious differences with Liu Dezhi, another founder of Lenovo, and was eventually kicked out.

Speaking of Ni Guangnan, he is also a legendary figure.

He entered the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1961 to engage in computing technology research.

In 1984, he served as the chief engineer of the New Technology Development Company of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. With his efforts, he developed the Lenovo Hanka, which made great contributions to Lenovo’s early development and gave Lenovo its name.

In 1989, the company was officially renamed Lenovo Group Corporation. Ni Guangnan served as the company’s director and chief engineer. Under his leadership, Lenovo microcomputers and Lenovo brand computers were developed.

It can be said that Ni Guangnan’s joining has changed the direction of Lenovo. He is Lenovo’s biggest contributor. Without him, Lenovo’s subsequent development would not have been possible.

But Liu Dezhi is the founder of Lenovo after all, and Ni Guangnan’s appearance challenged his authority, which also laid hidden dangers for the conflict between the two.

Especially when Liu Dezhi later saw that Ni Guangnan, as the technical core, led Lenovo to comprehensively lay out the chip and communications industries and made significant progress, Liu Dezhi could not sit still.

Around 1994, Ni Guangnan traveled to Hong Kong, Shanghai and other places to recruit talents and established the “Lenovo Microelectronics Design Center”.

However, this plan called “China Core” was stopped by Liu Dezhi. He was worried that the large amount of money and manpower invested in this plan would make him lose his power.

The sudden termination is equivalent to pouring cold water on Ni Guangnan. For this technician, he still cannot understand why this project that benefits the country and the people will be suspended.

If he follows his plan, independent chips can be used in Lenovo Hanka, microcomputers, motherboards, laser printers and other products in the future.

After this incident, the relationship between the two people also deteriorated rapidly. At every Lenovo work meeting, Ni Guangnan would argue with reason, but in Liu Dezhi’s view, I have to suppress you to establish his authority.

The dispute lasted until 1996.

During this period, Ni Guangnan sent one complaint letter after another with the persistence and persistence of a technical expert, hoping to get the state departments to intervene in this matter.

But as a successful businessman, Liu Dezhi used his beautiful “bed diplomacy” to win the support of most of Lenovo’s top executives during this period.

In the end, Liu Dezhi won the battle.

Since then, Lenovo has basically bid farewell to independent research and development, and has completely reduced itself to a computer assembly company cloaked in high-tech clothing.

In Li Shanshan’s view, this infighting not only caused Lenovo to miss the opportunity to become a first-class chip and communications company, but also caused China to miss a golden opportunity to develop core CPUs and free operating systems.

In particular, Lenovo’s communication switch business started even earlier than Huawei. If Ni Guangnan had not been driven away, Lenovo would probably be on par with Intel and Huawei now.