If it is said that for example, the director of South Korea's KMT company, Park Chang-hyuk, can directly deal with the visit, and if the chairman of Japan's NEC company, Tadahiro Sekimoto, comes to visit Hong Kong, it will be necessary for a higher-level figure in the Eastern Group to come forward to receive him.

NEC's full name is Nippon Electric Corporation, and the company's earliest history can be traced back to 1899. NEC started as a manufacturer of telephones, and by the 60s of this century, it had grown to become the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in Japan. At that time, the Japanese telephone network had been popularized, and NEC's performance growth began to be sluggish due to the saturation of the domestic market.

At this time, Kobayashi Koharu began to serve as the president of NEC, and under his leadership, NEC began to actively expand overseas markets. At the same time, Kobayashi Koharu also keenly grasped the rise of the world's new technological revolution, took the lead in advocating the new concept of CC (Computer Communication), committed to the combination of computer and communication technology, and transformed NEC from a single professional manufacturer of communication equipment to a multinational information technology company with semiconductors, computers, and communications.

Koharu Kobayashi, the legendary manager of NCE, announced his retirement in March this year after serving as president and chairman for more than 20 years. Tadahiro Sekimoto, the former president, succeeded Koharu Kobayashi as the new chairman of NEC. The chairman and president of Korean and Japanese companies are equivalent to the chairman and general manager, respectively.

When Tadahiro Sekimoto became the new leader of NEC, it was natural for him to come up with his own business strategy. And he looked at the history of NEC in the past ten years. I found that there are really a lot of intersections with the Eastern Bloc. Former chairman Kobayashi Koharu proposed the CC strategy in 1977, the year Apple was born.

Late seventies. Apple's computer sales in Japan are also very hot. This made NEC begin to take notice of this emerging field. After all, Apple is an American company, and the computers it develops are all operating systems in English. The support for Japanese input is terrible.

In fact, after the advent of IBM's PC, there was a similar problem, so NEC in another time and space was the first to solve the problem of Japanese kana input, thus beating IBM's PC with a compatible machine, and almost dominated the Japanese PC market in the early 80s.

But in this time and space, Li Xuan would not make such a low-level mistake at all, and the Japanese market has always been one of the three most important markets for the Eastern Group. Therefore, when the ABC-1 and ABC-2 computers were launched, a Japanese version of the operating system was developed specifically for the Japanese market. Over the years, the Aikang company, a subsidiary of the Oriental Group. It has always firmly occupied the sales championship position in the Japanese PC market, while NEC has been relegated to second place.

In addition to the computer field, the semiconductor industry has also developed into one of the core businesses of NEC. After nearly a decade of development, NEC's semiconductor division has been promoted to become one of the largest semiconductor companies in Japan. However, like other semiconductor companies in Japan, the core business of NEC's semiconductor division is focused on the development and manufacturing of memory.

With the rise of the personal computer industry, the capacity of the memory market has grown very fast in recent years, but the star product of the semiconductor industry throughout the eighties is the processor chip. Don't look at the fact that Japanese companies have beaten American companies to the bottom in the field of memory. But the result of the price war can only be 1,000 wounds to the enemy and 800 self-losses.

What's more, in the end, American companies even played a scoundrel and simply said that the US government came forward and forced Japan to sign the "US-Japan Semiconductor Agreement" to strictly control the export of Japanese memory chips to the United States. This makes the survival of the Japanese semiconductor industry. It's nowhere near as beautiful as it seems.

In contrast, the Eastern Bloc has almost achieved a monopoly in the processor market, and the return on profits is far from what Japanese semiconductor companies can catch up. This is the envy of a number of Japanese semiconductor companies, including NEC. What makes Japanese companies even more frightened is the Oriental Semiconductor Company, a subsidiary of the Oriental Group. Relying on its scale advantage, it is beginning to counterattack the memory market.

Dongfang Semiconductor's new wafer fab in Taiwan and Bay is not only ahead of the mainstream Japanese wafer fab in technological upgrading. It is also better than Japanese companies in terms of cost. Over time, Dongfang Semiconductor is likely to steal a large number of orders that originally belonged to Japanese companies.

In addition to these intersections, such as the LCD industry, which Tadahiro Sekimoto is very optimistic about, the Oriental Group has once again taken the lead, so that NEC can only play a catch-up role again. And now, the Eastern Group has begun to extend its tentacles to NEC's old business - the field of communication equipment.

In fact, as early as a few years ago, NEC and the Oriental Group had a fight in the field of communication equipment. At that time, NEC was preparing to set up a joint venture in eastern Guangdong Province to produce digital programmed computers that were urgently needed in China. You must know how backward China's telecommunications industry was at that time, which seemed a bit incredible to Japanese companies. Make an inter-provincial long-distance call, and if you're unlucky, it can take up to a week to get through.

Manual wiring, which was only used in Japan before World War II, is still very popular in China's telecommunications industry. China's urgent need to replace its more modern communications network has given NEC an opportunity to slaughter the Chinese. Therefore, NEC has been very perfunctory in China's hope to introduce technology and realize the localization of digital program-controlled telephone exchanges. The biggest concession is to ship the relevant parts to China for assembly, and firmly disagree with the opening of the core technology.

Just when the eastern Guangdong province was about to bow its head and accept the NEC's harsh conditions, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, which is responsible for the management of China's entire telecommunications system, directly rejected the joint venture plan. Later, NEC found out that the Chinese side had found a better partner for cooperation - the Oriental Research Institute.

When the DS series of digital telephone program-controlled switches began to appear in the procurement catalogs of telecommunications bureaus across China, NEC was the first to react by reducing the price of its similar products across the board. But even so. NEC's digital switches still haven't been able to compete with the DS series.

This is not because NEC is inferior to each other in terms of product quality, but because their switches need to be paid for entirely in foreign currency. However, DS series digital switches only pay half the foreign currency. The other half can be paid in RMB. This difference in payment alone has made telecom bureaus across China prefer to wait in line for DS Series switches. I don't want to take NEC's spot.

In order to compete for the market, NEC finally came up with a remedy. That was to contact a Japanese bank and provide China with a yen loan for the purchase of NEC's communications equipment. You must know that Chinese officials have a term of office, they only need to make good achievements within their own period, and as for the repayment of loans when they are due, that is a problem that the next official needs to worry about.

This approach has indeed allowed NEC to seize a part of the market share in the upgrading and transformation of China's telecommunications industry. However, due to the continuous strengthening of the yen in the foreign exchange market in recent years, China's original yen borrowings have suffered huge losses in the exchange rate alone.

Under the malicious spreading of rumors by people with good intentions. NEC's matchmaking was thought to be a conspiracy. As a result, NEC's brand image in China's entire telecommunications system plummeted, leaving the company's office in China at a loss for words!

After combing through it, Tadahiro Sekimoto found out that all of this thing was directly related to the Eastern Bloc. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Eastern Group is the biggest nemesis of NEC in the past decade, which also makes Tadahiro Sekimoto can't help but pay the highest attention to the Eastern Group.

With the exception of emerging markets such as China, the traditional telecommunications market with telephone as the core is basically saturated. However, with the advent of mobile phones, it has suddenly opened up a new blue ocean for the entire telecommunications industry. It is precisely because of this that European communication giants such as Siemens and Ericsson. We will spare no effort to compete for the core patents of GSM standards.

As Japan's largest communication equipment giant, NEC is one of the most important behind-the-scenes promoters of Japan's second-generation digital cellular mobile communication technology - PDC. However, the PDC standard is still in the laboratory research and development stage, and the Eastern Group is once again taking the lead. The CDMA standard was developed, which made Tadahiro Sekimoto not shocked!

NEC's technical experts have conducted a comprehensive technical analysis of the newly published CDMA standard of the Eastern Bloc. According to the analysis report obtained by Tadahiro Sekimoto. The technical level of CDMA is much higher than the PDC standard developed by Japan. If the CDMA standard has really matured to the stage where it can be put into commercial operation, then the PDC has almost lost the value of continued development.

CDMA technology has really arrived. What level can be put into commercial operation? Tadahiro Sekimoto does not think that the Eastern Group will joke with its own credibility! After carefully studying the Eastern Group. Tadahiro Sekimoto finally saw some opportunities at NEC.

The strength of the Eastern Group in the field of communication equipment manufacturing is actually very weak, including the DS series digital telephone program-controlled switches that gave NEC a head in the past, and they are also directly licensed to Chinese joint ventures for production. Therefore, it is very likely that NEC will obtain the relevant patent authorization of CDMA technology from the Eastern Group.

So Tadahiro Sekimoto personally flew from Tokyo to Hong Kong with a delegation to negotiate the licensing of CDMA's technology, and he also wanted to take a closer look at the company, which has risen for less than a decade, but has attracted the attention of the whole world.

Under the impact of emerging companies in the mobile Internet era such as Qualcomm and Cisco, as well as Chinese companies such as ZTE and Huawei, NEC has already fallen out of the ranks of the world's top ten communication equipment manufacturers. But in 1988, NEC was still the largest in Asia and one of the top five communications equipment giants in the world.

The Eastern Group attaches great importance to the visit of the NEC delegation, and Han Peng, the president of the group, personally greeted him at the airport. After that, Li Xuan also specially held a family banquet to find distinguished guests from Japan. But Li Xuan's actions are limited to this, since he has stepped down as chairman of the Oriental Group, he simply let go of his hands and let Han Peng, Bradshaw and other old foxes deal with Sekimoto Tadahiro.

The arrival of NEC has made Li Xuan full of confidence in the patent licensing model in the field of mobile communications. He never thought of cherishing the CDMA technology for himself, but it was certain that he would take advantage of it to kill him. Qualcomm's monopoly on CDMA technology can support the company's market value of more than 100 billion US dollars in another time and space, which shows how huge the benefits are!

When Tadahiro Sekimoto arrived in Hong Kong, Walker, the chairman of MCI, also flew from the United States to Hong Kong. Compared with the previous small Japan, Li Xuan is undoubtedly much more polite to the CEO of this holding company.

Walker's invitation was sent by Clarion, the president of Huaxing, and he hoped that he would accept Huaxing's plan to promote CDMA technology in the United States through his trip to Hong Kong. But in fact, after Walker arrived in Hong Kong, he was most interested in the development of Hong Kong's Internet industry.

The last time Walker met Li Xuan was when Oriental Group took a stake in MCI. At that time, Li Xuan's words had a great impact on him, especially Li Xuan's optimism about the Internet industry, which made him completely determined to invest large-scale funds in the Internet infrastructure - optical fiber cables.

You must know that the reason why MCI was willing to let the Oriental Group Company buy shares in the situation of exchanging shares was because they fell in love with the Oriental Satellite Communications Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of the Oriental Group. At that time, MCI was eager to have its own satellite navigation network, which was to use satellites instead of fiber optic cables for long-distance data transmission, so as to save a lot of costs for laying optical fibers.

However, due to optimism about the development of the Internet, Walker finally persuaded the management and the board of directors, with the support of its controlling shareholder, Oriental Group, to start laying out its own fiber optic data transmission system again. This is tantamount to rendering the satellite company that it had previously acquired from the Eastern Bloc at great cost useless.

As a result, Walker decisively divested and sold the satellite business in exchange for a large amount of cash to support MCI's large-scale investment in infrastructure construction. In this one in and one out, MCI did not lose much in this capital, but Walker himself became a laughing stock in the industry.

It's just that a person who can climb to the CEO of a listed company must be strong in his heart. What's more, he has the full support of the controlling shareholder behind him, and Li Xuan even promised that if MCI's stock price falls because of this, Oriental Group is willing to increase its holdings of shares to support the market.

However, the worst-case scenario did not happen, and MCI's stock price fluctuated, but soon leveled off. Because the profitability of MCI itself has not declined, but because of the large cash income from the sale of the satellite business, the financial statements are even better!

Walker came to Hong Kong this time, not only to discuss with Huaxing Company to bring CDMA technology to the United States to open a test site, but also to inspect the actual development of the Internet in Hong Kong! )