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Lee Jae-so was a little excited when he left the hotel where Chairman Park Jin-chang of Hanheung Bank was staying, and some words were not clear, but Park Jin-chang's attitude was quite obvious, and Hanheung Bank would not pay for the overall interests of the so-called HG electronics industry. Pen ~ fun ~ Pavilion www.biquge.info unless Samsung Electronics or any other company comes out halfway and buys Hyundai Semiconductor's LCD business in front of Kumho. However, the core assets of Hyundai Semiconductor's LCD business are the third-generation TFT thin film LCD production line that Samsung Electronics plans to reduce its production capacity in the near future, which is of little value to Samsung Electronics, and even has to pay a burden. It is impossible for Samsung Electronics to pay $400 million or more for the attack on Kumho, not to mention that even if Samsung Electronics chooses to do so, it will not completely block Kumho's way into the LCD electronics industry.

A total of 18 electronic companies in the world have TFT thin film liquid crystal technology, because TFT thin film liquid crystal is a high investment, technology, capital intensive industry, and because the TFT thin film liquid crystal market has not really opened, so far there are few companies to obtain a stable scale of profits, Samsung business in this area has also lost money for seven consecutive years, only slightly improved last year.

On the other hand, in the flat-screen TV market, plasma still has certain technical advantages compared with LCD, and it is too early to make a conclusion about the two display electronic technologies in the future.

Even if it is certain that TFT thin film liquid crystal is the king of the display electronics market in the future, but in the face of such intensive high capital investment, technology and capital competition are so fierce, and finally there are only five or six LCD manufacturers that can really achieve scale profits, and eighteen is indeed a bit much.

In this case, as long as Kumho can come up with a high enough bargaining chip, there will definitely be other electronics companies willing to give up the LCD business.

Lee Jae-so sat in the car, squeezed his eyebrows with a headache, and thought to himself: What we need to do at this time is to delay Kumho's entry into the thin-film LCD industry as much as possible, so that Kumho can pay more for entering the thin-film LCD industry and compress Kumho's competitive potential.

Although Samsung Electronics has been losing money on thin-film liquid crystal for seven consecutive years, with the advantage that the Korean won has depreciated sharply in the Asian financial crisis in '97 and is favorable to exports, Samsung Electronics has risen to the first place in the global LCD market, and it also successfully achieved a profit last year.

In the market of disc players, digital mobile phones and portable music players, Samsung Electronics has fully appreciated Kumho's magnificent competitive potential once it explodes, and in Lee Jae-so's view, every time Kumho enters a new field, especially in the field of competition with Samsung, it must be very careful.

Kim Nam-yong was sitting in the passenger seat, his mobile phone rang at this time, he picked it up and looked at it, turned around and said to Lee Jae-so, "The call from Hongxin Yan Wenjie......" and sat in the passenger seat to pick up the phone, and after a while, he held the microphone and turned back to Lee Jae-su and said: "Yan Wenjie is also in Beijing, ask if it is convenient to meet." ”

Lee Jae-so shook his head slightly, and Kim Nam-yong said into his mobile phone: "I'm really sorry, Lee Jae-so's schedule in Beijing is full, but I'm just looking for a chance to meet after returning to Jianye......"

Seeing Kim Nam-yong hang up the phone, Lee Jae-so explained to him the reason why he didn't meet with Yan Wenjie and others: "Even if Hongxin can succeed in Haisu Technology, it is not qualified to compete with Kumho at all - although there was no extravagant expectation for Hongxin before, but I thought that Hongxin could at least contain Kumho a little bit in China, who would have thought that they would be so mentally retarded?" Since we already have such a large-scale industry, we still can't find a balance between industrial investment and securities speculation, and it's really disappointing that such a partner is a partner......"

"Even so, Samsung Hongxin's project still needs to be carried out, and Horizon also needs to be perfunctory." Kim Nam-yong said.

"That's only perfunctory," Lee Jae-so said indifferently, "but we have to hold the control of the Samsung Hongxin project tightly in our hands, and we must not drag down the stupid partners......"

Kim Nam-yong nodded and sat up straight.

Lee Jae-so leaned back on the soft back of the chair, silently recalling the rise of Kumho over the years, and there was a kind of regret that Samsung had the opportunity to strangle Kumho to death in the cradle.

Samsung, as one of the world's earliest disc player manufacturers, launched VCD disc players in China as early as the end of 94, and quickly replaced Wan Yan, almost monopolizing the disc player market at that time. At that time, Samsung China was too eager, perhaps too underestimated the market potential of VCD disk players as a transitional product, and did not invest too much technical force at that time, so that Samsung's disk drive products had frequent quality problems in 95 years, and in order to maintain Samsung's brand reputation, it was forced to withdraw from the disk drive market. Kumho promptly adopted the latest VCD decoding technology to fill the gap left by Samsung's withdrawal and became the hegemon of the VCD disk market.

The VCD disc player was originally a transitional technology before the launch of the DVD disc player, and the technical threshold for entry was very low, and there was a problem of excessive competition, even if Kumho became the hegemon of the VCD disc player market, it would not have much influence in the global electronics industry.

Who would have thought that Kumho would cooperate with Deyi and Scober to upgrade VCD drive technology and develop a new generation of SVCD drive technology? Although SVCD disc players are still inferior to DVD in terms of technology, Kumho has carried out a multi-faceted industrial layout for SVCD in 97 years, using a variety of advantageous channels such as the production and marketing of VCD disc players and even the pirated disc industry chain, and has carried out the upgrading of the whole industry with lightning speed when DVD disc players are long overdue. At least until more advanced technology becomes widespread, Lee Jae-so doesn't see the possibility of SVCD being replaced in the disc player market. In addition to emerging countries and regions, SVCD disk players

At present, the global sales of SVCD have reached 28 million units per year, and the sales volume has reached 40 billion, and AIDA Electronics, a listed company under Kumho, directly controls 26% of the market share of disc machines. In addition, Lee Jae-so knows that Kumho also controls 80% of the supply of SVCD decoding chips in the name of overseas companies, and the joint venture factory between AIDA Electronics and Deyi also controls 60% of SVCD's movement control. In addition to SVCD, Kumho has also been involved in the DVD player market, becoming one of the world's top eight DVD manufacturers.

Kumho's layout in the disc machine industry is directly in the name of Aida Electronics, and some are carried out in the name of other joint ventures and wholly-owned companies, but in the eyes of the public, Aida Electronics still concentrates Kumho's main resources in the disc machine industry.

Although the competition in the disc drive market is quite fierce, the net profit of AIDA Electronics last year still reached as much as HK$1.2 billion.

When Aida Electronics was backdoor listed in May 97, its market value once exceeded 10 billion Hong Kong dollars, and due to the Asian financial crisis, its market value fell below 5 billion Hong Kong dollars, but in the past two years, it has been stimulated by the new economic wave, and the market value of Aida Electronics in the new technology category once exceeded 38 billion Hong Kong dollars.

Of course, even if the market value of Aida Electronics exceeded HK$38 billion, the price-earnings ratio was still less than 32 times, which was far lower than the average price-earnings ratio of 46 times for the new technology sector of the United Securities Market at that time. This is mainly due to Kumho's scrupulous responsibility as a controlling shareholder and actively restraining the excessive rise in the stock price, which is also disliked by speculators. Although it is destined to be affected by the Internet bubble crisis this time, it is believed that the market value of Aida Electronics will not fall too deep with its steady profitability, its advantages in industrial layout and cost advantages, as well as its excessively high price-earnings ratio.

In this regard, Kumho has shown a very different temperament and ethics from Horizon, and Kumho has always resisted the fluctuations in the stock prices of its listed companies as much as possible, and has never thought of manipulating the stock prices of its listed companies to make profits. Of course, Lee Jae-so believes that this has a lot to do with the strict regulation of Hong Kong's stock exchange, but Kumho also disdains the low-level method of enriching money by manipulating stock prices to make profits, the most direct example of which is that Kumho has never made any effort to get its companies publicly listed on China's securities market.

Lee Jae-so has come to realize that Kumho is a group that is very different from other Chinese companies, and that it is more than the previous perception of Chinese companies. This is especially the case, especially to pay attention to, not to mention that this company is much stronger than ordinary people think.

Kumho launched the DMP-iPLAYER portable music player technology in 98, which directly launched a charge against the MD player camp of Japanese electronics companies. Through extensive technology licensing, only two years later, DMP-iPlayer has taken the lead in sales, and in North America, Europe and even in Japan, DMP-iPlayer sales have surpassed MD one after another. With the upgrade of flash memory technology, the storage capacity of high-end DMP-iPlayer has reached 1G, and the low-end DMP-iPlayer, which is easy to have small storage, has even caused a strong impact on cassette portable music players. Kumho launched a low-end iPlayer in the Chinese market this spring, priced at about $120, and began to compete with Sony Walkman for the high-end market of portable music players in China.

Between DMP-iPLAYER and MD technology, Samsung Electronics also chose to fall into the DMP-iPLAYER camp very early, and its global sales ranked fourth only after Kumho, Toshiba, and Scooper, but its market share was less than one-third of Kumho. Kumho iPlayer even has a larger share of the global portable music market than Toshiba, and even if the DMP-iPlayer technology originated from Kumho, this is a result that no one expected at the beginning.

On closer inspection, Global Music Online, which aims to build an online music store, and Kumho, the six-month infringement officer commander with the Recording Industry Association of America in '99, soared in the portable music player market.

At the beginning of the year, it was still predicted that the trend was quite obvious at this time, and Kumho's cumulative total sales of iPlayer this year are likely to exceed 5 million units, and it is expected that Kumho's global net profit on iPlayer products will exceed 400 million US dollars, and it is more likely to exceed 600 million US dollars next year.

Since Kumho's two core members, Aida Group and Kumho Corporation, are private companies and are not required to disclose financial data, and because Kumho uses the many leafy and intricate companies in its system to undertake business between different links, it would not have been possible to estimate Kumho's profit scale in iplayer products if it were not for Samsung's internal production organization model that is similar to Kumho's and Kumho's many similarities and at the same time attaches importance to the iplayer market.

Kumho also obtained a full license for non-volatile flash memory patents from Toshiba through a technology exchange, thereby separating the non-volatile flash memory market with Samsung and Toshiba. Before the advent of iPlayer, the demand for flash memory was extremely limited, and the popularity of iPlayer products has directly contributed to the development of the non-volatile flash memory market, which is expected to be nearly $3 billion this year.

Kumho, Samsung, and Toshiba will split 90 percent of the $3 billion market equally, and Lee Jae-so is certainly well aware of how impressive Kumho's profit margins on non-volatile flash memory are, at least not lower than Samsung's 40 percent profit margins.

Perhaps Kumho's total profit from iPlayer is not necessarily lower than that of the mobile phone business, but it is Kumho's mobile phone business in China that has attracted public attention. Last year, Aida mobile phones had a 17% market share in the Chinese market, second only to Motorola and Nokia, and Samsung ranked sixth in the Chinese market with only a 6% market share. In the past six months, that is, in the first half of the 2,000th year, Kumho has sold 4 million mobile phones in the Chinese market, increasing its market share by 3 points, while Samsung has worked hard for half a year to increase its market share by 1 point. In addition to the Chinese domestic market, Kumho ranks fifth in the Southeast Asian mobile phone market, and Samsung ranks fourth; It is difficult for external mobile phone companies to enter the Japanese market for development, and Kumho and Samsung are no exception; However, for the development of developed markets in Europe and the United States, Kumho and Samsung have achieved quite good results, especially Kumho's mobile phone sales in North America have gradually improved since last year.

Because Kumho's electronics industry is a high-margin industry, and Kumho's electronics industry is dispersed among several member companies, Kumho's annual profit in the electronics industry is relatively amazing, but its sales are still some distance from the standard of the world's top 500. Of course, if all of Kumho's businesses were included, it would have been among the top 500 companies in the world.

With such Kumho's eyes aimed at the LCD industry, how can people not worry?