On October 25, 1994, Japan's NEC Corporation announced that it would stop production of a part of its loss-making DRAM plant. In addition, the DRAM market has rebounded slightly after the news that it plans to sell its DRAM business to semiconductor companies (Japanese companies are preferred) for no less than $300 million.

But in fact, NEC is the tail of the crane in the DRAM market, and the top 10 in terms of market share is not ranked. Even if it is completely discontinued, it will not have much impact on the supply of the global chip market, and to a greater extent, it will have an impact on market psychology.

After frequent sad news about manufacturers in the DRAM market, Samsung Semiconductor and Xinchuang Xin also stopped further price cuts.

Maintaining the current price can force some production capacity to withdraw. Forcing more production capacity to withdraw is for its own long-term interests. But there is no need to make the current life too difficult for the sake of production interests.

Of course, it is actually Samsung Semiconductor that has a more difficult time, because Samsung Semiconductor mainly produces DRAM chips. Unlike later generations, sensors, flash memory, ARM chips and other fields have been involved, and gradually created a chip ecosystem, which will not rely too much on the DRAM market.

"DRAM chips continue to grow, and it is expected that in October, the sales of DRAM chips alone will exceed 800 million yuan. The strategic loss in October was 50 million yuan...... At the same time, the new innovation of other chip projects, with a monthly revenue of 3.75 billion yuan, is expected to generate a profit of 300 million yuan. After deducting the loss, Xinchuangxin is still making money. After Hu Weiwu took the report, he reported to Lin Qi and said, "Basically, DRAM can't lose anywhere, even if it increases its market share by 5 times, the monthly loss is estimated to be 300 million yuan." Other chip projects, CPU, motherboard chipset projects, profits are very stable, MCU projects, the profits are meager, but the future prospects are objective, for example, the State Grid has begun to cooperate with us to develop chips and technologies in power grid automation. This piece of market cake is expected to be less than 10 billion yuan in China alone, and the market size in the world is estimated to be 100 billion yuan. Of course, it is impossible to eat all of them, we don't understand the power grid technology, the project is still based on the power grid, we only provide cheap chips, it is estimated that it will be eaten completely, and hundreds of millions of profits a year can be made. ”

Lin Qi said with a smile: "When cooperating with the power grid, don't pay too much attention to the initial profits, and more importantly, accumulate technology and experience." In the future, long-term profits are more critical. Preferably, set up a joint venture where we have a small stake and State Grid takes the majority of the stake. In this way, in the future, not only can we get cooperation in chips and technology, but also in terms of equity, with a special joint venture company as a platform, the interests of orders can be more durable and stable, and after the domestic market has accumulated experience and technology, in the future, it can also make money in the international market. ”

"This ...... Guodian does have an invitation, and there are some power equipment companies in Nanjing, which are interested in joint ventures with us, but not only need technology, but also require capital injection. ”

"Nanjing?" Lin Qixin said, most of them are the predecessors of Guodian Nanzi and Guodian NARI. In later generations, among the suppliers of power grid automation equipment and technology, Nanjing's suppliers stood out, and Guodian NARI and Guodian Nanzi were both from Nanjing. At the beginning, many enterprises from all over the country competed together, and in the end, the top giants that grew up were mainly those companies in Nanjing. In particular, NARI was almost unbeatable later, because after the scale advantage was formed, the R&D investment was evenly apportioned, and the cost was lower than that of other peers, so most of the other peers were very meager or lost because of the huge R&D costs. However, NARI is far ahead of the order because of the order, so it is a profiteering enterprise that is envied and hated by peers.

Compared with the financial statements of other peers, NARI can say domineeringly that the industry leader is different from ordinary miscellaneous fish.

Of course, NARI is not awesome at the beginning, in fact, it is mainly the rise of China's economy and the rise of various market segments, and the lucky ones who eat the cake of a certain industry.

Since the 90s, the domestic national grid has gradually realized automation and intelligence. In this field, in the 80s, China still relied on meter reading and manual fault discovery, and the efficiency and speed of solving problems were very slow, so there were frequent power outages in the past. In addition to the lack of power generation, it is largely because the power grid is not automated and intelligent enough, and after a failure, it takes too long to troubleshoot and repair.

However, after rounds of investment and technological transformation of power grid, the system is gradually automated and intelligent, and what ordinary people can see is that the electricity meter is probably different from before, and it has been replaced by a smart meter that does not need to read the meter. In fact, the entire power grid system is not just as simple as changing the meter, but using a large number of chips, sensors, software programs and Internet technology to continuously transform the power grid. This greatly improves its stability. The efficiency of detecting and resolving grid faults is also better than before.

Later generations of China's power grid technology, can be said to be the world's power grid model, especially, large populations and vast territory of large countries and regions, want to use the most cost-effective advanced power grid technology, but also can choose China's technical solutions. In this regard, the standards of China's power grid and electricians were once so strong that the power grid electrician industry in the United States sometimes does not work well in English, and needs to speak Chinese for technical communication. Because a large number of Chinese skilled workers are active in the maintenance market of power grids and power-related equipment in various countries, although the manuals of various power-related equipment are in both Chinese and English, the Chinese instructions are definitely clearer than the English instructions.

Of course, it is China in the 21st century, it is the State Grid that has invested a large amount of money, and continues to carry out rounds of power grid transformation and upgrading, the most intensive project in the short term in human history, and the largest amount of work in China's power grid transformation, which has cultivated more professionals than the sum of other countries' power grid electricians. The talents cultivated are not only to serve their own countries, but also to be absolute authority in the field of power grids around the world. When it comes to solving power grid and power problems, if electricians in other countries say they are very professional, Chinese electricians will tell jokes to their counterparts......

Of course, in 94 years, China has not been able to achieve the same stable supply of electricity as in later generations, and it is the result of crazy playing with the power grid and repeatedly upgrading standards. Without a large number of orders and projects, the experience value of China's power grid industry will not be upgraded to a leading level so quickly.

It only provided automation and intelligent chips for the power grid, and then it was a large market of tens of billions. NARI, a leading enterprise, is also from an obscure small company, benefiting from the investment of the State Grid year after year, only eating a small part of the small market such as chips and meters, and achieving an annual income of more than 10 billion yuan, moreover, the gross profit margin is extremely high, and the certainty of market orders is also extremely high.

Just like Huawei's market orders for communication equipment provided to domestic telecom operators, because it is a domestic company, the certainty of this part of the order is extremely high.

The same is true for the power grid, where a large amount of investment and most of the orders are delivered to domestic enterprises, incubating a large number of market segment giants with core technologies.

Later generations of power grid automation companies such as Guodian NARI and Guodian Nanzi basically started from scratch, and the technology was very backward and inexperienced at the beginning. However, relying on the orders of the State Grid, it has gradually become a technologically leading giant.

Although the fame of these companies is not as dazzling as that of star companies such as CRRC and Huawei, their leading positions in the market segment are almost very similar. The development trajectory is also very similar, all because China has the world's largest electricity demand market, so the orders are handed over to domestic enterprises to do, and a batch of them are very competitive, so they are very weak and grow into the world's leading first.

It is the same as Huawei's telecom equipment market in later generations, which needs to use a large number of chips. In fact, there is a large demand for chips in the power market every year, and when many factories are very skeptical about automation and intelligence, the power system is actually a field where more chips are actively applied earlier, faster and actively, and automation and intelligent improvements are actively carried out.