Chapter 2906 The Four Soft Giants

After the technical meeting, for Zhou Buqi, the domestic affairs came to an end.

He could finally start his long-cherished vacation plan.

Before that, I need to notify Zhang Yiming.

Went to his office and he was on the phone with Ziweixing International.

Zhou Buqi was not in a hurry and just found a place to sit down.

After Zhang Yiming ended the call, he smiled and said: "It's Zheng Xiaoli. Let's learn something about the technology circle in the United States. Although Ziweixing is mainly based in China, it always wants to know the technology trends in Silicon Valley at the first time. , we can also respond in a timely manner.”

Zhou Buqi smiled and said, "What did you learn?"

Zhang Yiming said: "There is nothing too new...but there are two things related to you, which are quite important."

"What is it?"

"First, BlackBerry has announced a global layoff, at least 4,500 people will be laid off."

"Uh..." Zhou Buqi had already been mentally prepared for this. "BlackBerry is giving up the mobile phone business. It can't be done without laying off employees. Next, it depends on how they will deal with the BlackBerry brand in the mobile phone business. It's quite good. It’s valuable. Let’s see if Lenovo wants it. If Lenovo doesn’t want it, I’ll bite the bullet and let Xiaomi take over this business.”

Zhang Yiming didn't care much about the mobile phone business, and just said very plainly: "BlackBerry is in big trouble now. They said in the announcement that revenue plummeted by 50% in the past fiscal quarter, and due to the inventory expenditure of the new flagship machine This resulted in a net loss of US$965 million.”

"So, after the new CEO came to power, he quickly gave up the mobile phone business and relied on his own advantages in the field of operating system security to provide in-vehicle services. This is a very correct idea. If BlackBerry continues to make mobile phones, it cannot be a domestic mobile phone manufacturer. Opponent." Zhou Buqi realized something immediately and raised his eyebrows, "What do you mean? You also want to do car service?"

Zhang Yiming smiled and said nothing.

Zhou Buqi said succinctly: "I just had a technical meeting with Wang Jian and the others, and that's what I said. The project that I don't take a position on may succeed or fail. It's up to you whether you want to do it or not. I'm clear The projects I support must have great potential and must be pursued bravely; the projects I oppose must have no future and must be given up decisively without any thought.”

Zhang Yiming avoided the topic and said easily: "Another thing is very interesting. It was reported by a Silicon Valley reporter that Qualcomm did not pay Apple this month's technical service fee. It is not clear yet. Is the payment delayed or the payment refused?”

The so-called technical service fee is the fee that Qualcomm paid for buying Apple and switching Apple from Infineon to Qualcomm. It is US$1 billion per year.

This money is not a one-time payment.

Instead, it is paid monthly.

In this way, the bills can be spread over each month, and the operating pressure on the book funds will be less.

Now, Qualcomm no longer pays Apple the annual "technical service fee" of US$1 billion, which is enough to show that Qualcomm is already angry and angry, and further shows that Boss Zhou's plan has been successfully implemented!

After some operations, both China and South Korea will take action against Qualcomm.

The angry Qualcomm directly targeted Apple, the "mastermind behind the scenes".

"Good thing! Good thing!" Zhou Buqi was very happy and determined, "Now there is something good to watch! I can take a long vacation for myself with peace of mind."

Zhang Yiming asked: "When are you leaving?"

Zhou Buqi said: "In the past few days, things in the country have basically been settled. Just wait for the news."

"There will be a strategic decision-making meeting that evening. There are three important development plans. You can also discuss them."

Zhang Yiming seized the opportunity and didn't want to let him go easily.

Zhou Buqi could only ask for leave from his family, saying that he would work overtime at night.

This meeting might be open until 12 o'clock in the evening.

The first thing is about cloud computing.

Now, the domestic understanding of cloud computing is becoming more and more complete, and the market is gradually opening up.

However, many customers always encounter many problems during use.

Ziweiyun platform is not a popular platform, and the threshold for use is relatively high.

The Ziweiyun operating system is not as easy to use as the Windows system, and the process of paying for various services and subscribing to various data packages can easily be confusing. The most critical point is that there are more and more cloud products now. There may be more than ten data collection products in a single product, with various models, various standards and various adaptations. How to choose?

Therefore, Zi Weiyun needs to expand its team.

It is necessary to expand the technical team of at least 1,500 people to engage in some expatriate work. The main thing is to let them go on business trips to some of Ziwei Cloud's important customers, come to help them solve some difficult problems, and teach them step by step how to use Ziwei Cloud's cloud services.

After a round of recruitment expansion this summer, the number of domestic employees of Ziweixing now exceeds 20,000.

The monthly expenditure on employee salaries, benefits, allowances, and business trip subsidies alone exceeds RMB 800 million.

An average of 40,000 yuan per person!

However, this data is somewhat deceptive because there is a middleman between the company's expenses and the income received by employees. The actual average salary received by Ziweixing employees is about 16k per month.

The trouble with this topic is that Ziwei Cloud is a long-term loss-making project.

If we don’t count the transfusion from other internal businesses, Ziwei Cloud’s revenue this year is only 840 million yuan, and the expected loss will exceed 7 billion!

If it continues to expand, the loss next year may exceed 10 billion.

There is also a more important point, which is the second topic of discussion.

A technology-oriented project.

Ziwei Cloud has invested too much in infrastructure, and a very important investment is to purchase foreign processors. Whether it is Intel or AMD, server chips are very expensive. Ziwei Cloud needs to use good ones, and a chip is worth 10,000 US dollars.

So it must be self-developed.

Ziwei Cloud’s self-developed chip is not called CPU, but CIPU in the professional field. It is a CPU specially used on Ziwei Cloud’s cloud server. It can connect computing, storage, and network resources through virtualization, pooling, and scheduling technologies to make it quickly cloud-based and hardware-accelerated, thus becoming the center of the data center.

Now the sample test has come out, the performance is good, the stability is also OK, but the power consumption is too high.

It must be further upgraded.

Therefore, Ziweiyun is applying for a 16-month research and development fund worth 1.5 billion yuan to develop a new generation of CIPU.

As for whether the new generation of CIPU can be used...

Not necessarily!

If you want CIPU to be truly applied on a large scale, the newly developed CIPU must be more cost-effective than the server chips of Intel or AMD of the same period. If the cost-effectiveness of self-developed products is so poor, it will not only not reduce the cost, but will greatly increase it, then there is really no need to use it.

This leads to great risks in research and development.

I don’t know when it will be used.

I want good performance, strong stability, and low power consumption... This is really too difficult.

You know, this is still a castrated option. Dedicated chips do not need to be responsible for the public in terms of adaptation, so there is one less compatibility link, which greatly reduces the difficulty of development.

If you develop general server chips like Intel and AMD, the difficulty will only be greater.

Of course, there is no doubt about this investment.

Zhou Buqi didn’t quite understand the technical logic, but since they applied for it, he had to support it. In any case, we have indeed achieved certain results in performance and stability. The next step is to overcome the difficulty of power consumption. At least we have a clear goal and direction.

The third thing is an investment business.

It is also the thing that Zhang Yiming values ​​most.

"Now, the market for online car-hailing has gradually opened up, and the public has also gained a certain understanding of the reliability of online car-hailing's 'black cars'." Zhang Yiming turned his head and held a PPT presentation pen in his hand. "Now there are more than a dozen online car-hailing companies in the industry that have received financing. The three companies with the highest market share are Kuaidi, Didi and Speedy."

The PPT contains a shareholding structure chart.

It is very interesting.

The three online car-hailing companies belong to the three major domestic Internet giants.

Behind Kuaidi is Alibaba, behind Didi is Ziweixing, and behind Speedy is Penguin.

This is a very serious and solemn matter.

Because it is related to fighting with the two giants Alibaba and Penguin in a new track, the process is destined to be very dangerous and must be done with great caution.

The executives attending the meeting all looked serious.

Able to realize the bloody storm that may be set off behind this decision.

Zhou Buqi had foresight of information gap, so he acted calm and relaxed, and said with a smile: "What's the matter? Now netizens are all famous, aren't they called the 'Soft Four Giants'? What about the other one? What about Baidu?"

In this life, there are four major Internet giants in China.

In addition to Baidu's B, Alibaba's A, and Penguin's T, there is also Ziweixing's E.

The combination is bate, which means "soft".

Someone on Weibo gave a very cute name, called "Soft Four Giants".

Then it spread.

It became a common saying.

"Baidu?" Guo Pengfei now looks down on Baidu, "Baidu can't keep up, it's behind, Baidu is now busy delivering food!"