In the middle of the wide road, the black Maybach moves smoothly.

Recovering from his contemplation, Atletico turned his head and smiled, "Hey, this leak is not easy to pick up!"

Wei Huailiang was full of curiosity, and asked, "Boss, what are you worried about?"

Atletico didn't answer directly, but pointed to the roof of the car.

The latter understood in seconds, and asked tentatively: "The problem with the road should not be big." Let's start now, taking advantage of the low stock price of imgtech, the market value is less than half of the previous one, whether it is to directly apply for a small road, or to make a big road for the record, it should not be too difficult. If the funds exceed the plan, you can still use overseas funds, and you can still get it smoothly. ”

A road slip is a road permit, which usually refers to the approval document of the NDRC agreeing to carry out the preliminary work of the project. As a macroeconomic regulator in the economic field, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is in charge of the life and death of major projects, and is the most important examination and approval authority in the project approval stage.

Not only domestic projects must be managed, but overseas projects also fall under the jurisdiction of the NDRC. Of course, if the project is not connected with China, uses overseas funds, and the operating entity is also abroad, there is no need for this procedure, which is the reason why the Internet companies engaged in VIE (protocol control structure) in the first place.

The purpose of a VIE structure company for overseas listing and M&A is actually a shell company registered abroad, which obtains revenue from the domestic company through a control agreement. Because they didn't think about taking venture capital and ringing the bell, Bee did not adopt the VIE structure, but it has a large scale of overseas business and assets, and these assets are all earned overseas.

Even without killer apps and games, thanks to the accumulation of a large number of free and high-quality apps, Beesoft and Beegame have achieved an astonishing amount of revenue in overseas markets. For some reason, not all of this money was remitted to China, and a considerable part of it was left overseas for local investment, and in a few years it has exceeded $1 billion.

With funds in hand, even if you don't apply for exchange, Bee can complete the acquisition with overseas assets alone, but this part of the assets is not in the form of cash, and if you want to raise funds, you must sell it with a temporary mortgage, which also requires considerable time and cost, which is far less convenient than getting a road.

Projects below US$300 million need to be reported to the local development and Reform Commission for the record, which is called small roads, and more than 300 million US dollars need to be reported to the National Development and Reform Commission for the record, and more than 1 billion US dollars need to be approved and approved, these are called big roads. There is no doubt that the small roads in the hands of the local government are easier to obtain, and the whole procedure can be completed in a few days at the earliest, while the large roads, especially the super-large projects that need to be approved, are much more troublesome, and if you are not careful, they will become New Year's Eve projects.

IMGTECH had revenues of more than $100 million last year and a market capitalization of more than $1.5 billion at one point. However, he made his own death, blindly exaggerated a large amount of investment, and as a result, he had to lay off employees to save himself by losing money year after year, and recently he was "abandoned from the beginning to the end" by Apple, and the shareholders sold out in panic, and the stock price fell sharply.

Fortunately, as time passed, the market gradually returned to calm, and the company's market value began to slowly recover, rising from a "floor price" of $450 million to a little more than $500 million. With imgtech's statement that it will abandon the peripheral business that led to losses, the market has been significantly encouraged, and the market value has soared to nearly 600 million. Coupled with factors such as the acquisition premium, it is almost impossible for Bee to acquire the company at a low price of less than $1 billion, and it needs to prepare an additional amount of capital as insurance.

Hearing Lao Wei mention the road, Atletico shook his fingers, "I'm not worried about the NDRC, but Buckingham Palace." ”

Seeing him like this, Wei Huailiang was also a little unconfident, "Britain is not the United States, it shouldn't stop it, right?"

"Under normal circumstances, they shouldn't block it, GPUs and whatnot, after all, are not sensitive technologies. However," Atletico shrugged, "these are not normal times, the Prime Minister's Office is busy implementing the Brexit process and dealing with Stepphobia, and it is likely that the acquisition will be halted in order to accommodate national sentiment." ”

Wei Huailiang heard the song and asked, "Worried that IMGTECH will become the second arm?"

"Yes!"

A year ago, the pound was hit by a bearish sell-off that fell sharply as the UK was about to exit the European economy through the Brexit referendum. Then SoftBank Masayoshi Son saw an opportunity and bought Arm, Britain's most successful technology company, with a large sum of dollars. If the imaginary technology company suffers this time, if it is bought by foreigners at a low price, where will the face and pride of the British people go?

"How much is face worth?" Wei Huailiang pouted disdainfully, "It's a big deal to take out a few more engineers." Anyway, the pound has not risen yet, and it is very cost-effective to buy a British company with dollars. ”

In 2011, the Bank of England issued a new version of the £50 note, with the Queen's portrait on the front unchanged, but the figure on the reverse changed from the first governor John Hobrun to two engineers: James Watt, who invented the practical steam engine, and his investor, Matthew Bolton, giving this large-denomination note the nickname "The Engineer".

Atletico Madrid nodded and affirmed: "Indeed, as long as you sincerely use money and promise to invest more and not lay off employees, the British will definitely be relieved, after all, no one will get along with actual interests." But so why bother? The price to pay is too great, and it's easy to lose more than you gain. ”

"How can the gains outweigh the losses?" Lao Wei tried to persuade again: "Who doesn't know that the boss of the bee horse is the holy hand of acquisition, and there have been more than 30 mergers and acquisitions in seven or eight years, and none of them have failed." The success rate of other investment projects is also very high, according to the textbooks that have entered the Harvard Business School!"

"Hey!" Atletico laughed and shook his head, "It's different!"

"The previous projects were very small in scale, with little capital and few people, so of course it was easy for us to integrate. However, imgtech is a large company with a history of 30 years and thousands of people, including several teams from different sources, and it is not good to eat indigestion. ”

Interestingly, imagining technology itself is the opposite of merging failure.

In 2012, because of the hot sales of iPhone4S, Podosigma was taken under its umbrella, trying to use "buy GPU and get CPU Bluetooth and BSP; It's a pity that their efforts were unsuccessful, but they lost their wives and soldiers.

MIPS was once the most successful Reduced Instruction Set (RISC), and everything from SGI's supercomputers to Sony and Nintendo's game consoles, as well as Cisco's routers, all use this open-license architecture. The well-known "Loongson" in China is also derived from the MIPS architecture. However, these are all yesterday's waste, the supercomputing market is now the world of x86, Sony and Microsoft use x86 processors to make new game consoles, routers and other embedded markets are also being snatched up by less power and cheaper ARM. Although there are still 300 million units shipped each year, MIPS is declining, and in the end it only sold 100 million dollars.

When IMGTECH got the MIPS, it had to spend huge resources to update the architecture, and then integrate it into various functional SoCs and sell them, but the R&D cost was very large, but the initial benefits were very limited.

To add insult to injury, they annoyed their big customer Apple because they did not do their duty and did not develop better and cheaper GPUs, which made the latter think of starting a new stove instead. After several years of accumulating people and technology, Apple's GPU is close to maturity, which is why there was a face-turning incident some time ago.

The incident also reminded Atletico that cross-border mergers and acquisitions are really difficult, so he was not interested in making a big news acquisition of IMGTECH.

As for the bees' previous achievements, he knew his own family affairs and knew that it was all the result of e7u's help.

Many start-up teams are transformed from interest groups or campus research groups, and they often have a strong technical and technical atmosphere, and it is easy to worship the guys with stronger technology and greater influence, and then it is easy to be convinced.

For the team in the IT field, Atletico Madrid is such a super bull, and it is easy to be impressed by his strong knowledge reserve, quick reaction ability, rich development experience, and the volume of works on the vehicle. If you provoke him, just roll up your sleeves and go out, everyone will wait to be unemployed!

"Personality charm" or something, can only be used for a slightly simple start-up team, mature commercial companies are used to the wind and waves of old fritters, but it is difficult to be moved by these spiritual things, although many people are asked about the reasons for job hopping and merger, they must say that they have the same concept and the same dream.

Atletico concluded: "Big companies have mature teams and sophisticated technology, making it easier to do what they can do, but the price they need to pay for this is also higher. ”

"In my opinion, instead of buying imgtech as the icing on the cake, it would be better to take the money and stock up on the chips. ”

Seeing that the boss was on this, Lao Wei had no choice but to withdraw his troops, give up this tempting idea, and instead report the stocking of key components, "The supply of C touch s is sufficient, the company only retains the amount of about a week, and the storage particles are relatively large, and if the production plan remains unchanged, it can be used until the beginning of July." ”

Atletico gasped and quipped with a smile: "Hey, you've been hoarding for nearly three months, no wonder people want to scold you!"

Because of the fragmentation of the Android system, it is difficult for application developers to optimize applications, applications are becoming more and more bloated, and startup is getting slower and slower. Because blindly increasing the main frequency of the processor is easy to bring heat dissipation problems, manufacturers have to use high-speed storage particles such as LPDD and UFS2 to improve application performance.

Although the Apple, Bee, and WP camps have better optimizations and can run smoothly without large memory and high frequency, the atmosphere of the arms race has been formed, and it is no longer possible for individuals to reverse it. In the face of the social cognition that "large memory is good, high pixels are wonderful, and more running scores are smoother", they have also increased the hardware specifications of the new machine, and the increase in memory configuration is especially obvious.

As a result, the price of large-capacity and high-speed storage particles is naturally rising, coupled with popular components such as high-pixel image sensors and A-touch LED screens, the life of many mobile phone manufacturers is really not easy.

Relatively speaking, the situation of bee mobile is quite good, and the suppliers of core components such as butterfly screens, bee core processors, and ultrasonic fingerprint devices are all brother companies, so they will naturally not mess around. This allows the company to free up its hands and invest more money to compete for high-end memory chip production capacity, and it has really stocked up on a lot of goods. It's just that in this way, the bees are comfortable, but their counterparts at home and abroad are pitted, and they inevitably curse and anger Lao Wei and even Atletico Madrid in private and in public.

It's nothing to attract hatred, what Wei Huailiang really cares about is actually the cost pressure and price reduction risk brought by the huge inventory. If the prices of the two types of storage particles continue to rise, the bees that have stockpiled a large number of goods will naturally make a lot of money, and vice versa. Although the price increase of storage components is a high probability event, he is still a little uneasy.

Atletico Madrid was also not at ease, after listening to the briefing, after a little thought, he said: "In this way, it is best to press the inventory to less than a month, and the excess can be sold to partners. ”

"What about the CPU? Would you like to help them restock some of the Snapdragon inventory?"

"Haha!" Atletico laughed, "What's the matter?

"No," Wei Huailiang smiled bitterly, "it was a mistake to use the 820 on the Bee One in the first place. ”

"But it's a worthwhile mistake," Atletico smiled and nodded, "You can give it to them, even if you use it for Android." ”

The Snapdragon 820 is, of course, an excellent SoC, with good performance features and battery life. However, for the bee ecology, this mobile phone chip is obviously not adaptable.

Limited to the performance of mobile phones, mobile GPUs place special emphasis on TC (texture compression) capabilities, and different manufacturers use different solution formats. In addition to the more general ETC1 format, Qualcomm Snapdragon supports ATITC and ATITC derived from ATI, and Bee Core supports its own BEETC2, which is based on artificial intelligence and human body bionic with outstanding compression effect.

If the app developer uses the etc1 format to process the texture file, both processors will support it well, but if some unique format is used, it will immediately fail to interpret. There are a large number of games on the bee platform that only support BEETC2, which is really miserable for 820, which is a foreign monk. Even though some developers have solved the problem by porting the Android version of the ATITC/ETC1 texture pack, the bad impression left on users cannot be cleared immediately.

Small problems continued, the price was still a cut higher, consumers were naturally not willing to buy it, and then the 820 version of the Bee No. 1 was decisively unsalable, and the batch of 820 purchased at the beginning has not been used up. Fortunately, this processor is relatively classic and long-lived, and some manufacturers in the Android camp are willing to accept it, but of course, the discount is inevitable.