That night at Neuschwanstein Castle, nothing happened. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info

Leaving Munich and heading north with the only two remaining girls around him, Gu Mojie came to the last stop of his trip to Germany this year - Hamburg, an industrial port city on the coast of the North Sea.

Germany is a very funny country, with more than 300,000 square kilometers of land and more than 80 million people, but it has done a really good job in preventing "megacity disease".

In the whole country, there are only three cities with a population of more than one million: Berlin with 3.5 million, Munich with 1.9 million, and Hamburg with 1.4 million.

In France, the next door to the neighbor -- more than 500,000 square kilometers of land and more than 50 million people, one-third larger land than Germany, one-third less population than Germany, but the Paris metropolitan area is stunned by 20 million people. Every day, various anti-congestion policies change tricks, and in the end, they still don't budge.

The gap is clear.

Gossip, Gu Mojie's main purpose in coming to Hamburg is to get the 3D printing giant EOS company, which ranks among the top three in Germany.

Hatsune Smart and this company have a history of happy cooperation for three or four years. At the beginning of the establishment of Hatsune Intelligence, before entering the mobile phone industry, it did more than a year of simple smart hardware training. At that time, Hatsune had purchased a lot of 3D printing equipment from EOS and introduced some technology licenses, which was equivalent to one of the major customers of EOS.

Today's drama is that a major customer comes to the door and asks the supplier to buy shares.

So as soon as he arrived in Hamburg, Gu Mojie didn't have time to play or buy first, but plunged into work.

Held a meeting with Lei Jun, Gu Yongjiang, and Zhang Tuohai who played the front station to understand their preliminary situation in order to make a final negotiation decision.

Before coming, Gu Mojie only knew in general terms that EOS was one of the top three companies in the German 3D printing industry. After Lei Jun and others did their homework, it became clear: this top three does not mean that their skills are only the top three.

EOS's technology is very powerful, and Germany can almost be said to be tied with CL for the first place.

The reason why the comprehensive ranking only modestly says "top 3" is because its things are expensive to sell and technical support fees are more expensive, so the sales are not good, and it is dragged back by the market score. If there is a way to make EOS things cheaper in the future, the future of the company is limitless.

What's more, 3D printing is a big category, and there are many subdivisions, and it is actually meaningless to talk about the comprehensive ranking alone. Gu Mojie wants to acquire the company, and what he needs to see is whether it fits the business needs of Hatsune Intelligence.

The strength of EOS lies in the two small pieces of powder sintering metallurgical printing and high-strength ABS engineering plastic printing in 3D printing. In these segments, EOS technology is not only the first in Germany, but also the first in the world.

For example, another CL company that is close to EOS in terms of comprehensive strength is its strength in fast and high-precision 3D printing of plastic materials. That technology, Hatsune Intelligent will not be used at all when making customized Porsche smart cars in the future.

So, if you want to buy it, you can only buy EOS.

Once the partner is locked, the next step is the cooperation mode.

Did you buy buy and buy the other company directly? Or is it a stake in a partnership? Or is it just a technical layout to buy licensing?

A month ago, when faced with giants like Porsche and Siemens, Hatsune had no choice but to choose the second and third paths.

Now, in the face of EOS, the coffee position situation is obviously an order of magnitude smaller than Porsche, and Gu Mojie naturally moved his first thought.

……

"Is this EOS company listed? What is the valuation of the entire equity? Does the founding team have any desire to cash out? ”

The Hanseatic Hotel where Gu Mojie stayed, in a rented conference room. After listening to the reports of his subordinates, Gu Mojie didn't pick others, just stared at his CFO Gu Yong, and threw out a concise and clear triple question.

Of course, the investment veteran Gu Yong has already answered these questions.

"It's not listed. According to the valuation of the last capital market financing before the European debt crisis, it was 2.7 billion euros - more than half a year ago. EOS has not been exposed to the financial sector since then, so there is no updated valuation.

Judging from the consistent style of the founder team, if there is an opportunity for business development and financing is needed to seize the opportunity, then they will be integrated, but there is a scale, that is, they will never give up the decision-making power of the company's operation and management. ”

Well, the hard bones of international conventions.

Gu Mojie took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Over the years, he has seen a lot of hard bones, but many of them have not resisted him as a barbarian in the end. Some are smashed with money, and some are forced to limit the other party's market space, and in the end, they all complied.

EOS is such a little fresh, how to make it compliant?

"What is the current annual market data for their company? What percentage of our revenue does Hatsune Smart pay for equipment orders and technical support? ”

This time, Gu Yong thought about it a little: "The annual marketing volume is more than 500 million euros, and last year's profit was 70 million euros." The orders we give them every year are only tens of millions of euros, accounting for less than 10%.

After all, the amount of smart hardware customization we do has not been large, and we rely on a small number of high-end customers to support it, so it is impossible to buy too much equipment and technical support for EOS. If it weren't for Hatsune's platform, which already covered hundreds of millions of people, we wouldn't even be able to capture this demand for 'differentiated consumption upgrades'. ”

It seems that it is unlikely to rely on market-side threats.

Gu Mojie thought about it for a while, and asked tentatively: "If our intelligent Porsche customization business is carried out in the future, the demand should increase greatly, right?" ”

"That's a must, Porsche sells more than 150,000 vehicles a year worldwide, and the first batch of high-end smart cars in the future will be 50,000 a year in the world - that are all luxury cars with more than one million yuan and more than 200,000 euros. Each car adds tens of thousands of euros of 'private customization' interiors, interiors, or shell fine-tuning, which is not just like playing. ”

People who can afford to buy millions of cars buy them just to pretend to be used. In order to reflect personalization, many people also look for 4S shops or car repair shops to renovate when they buy them, and the picture is different.

If the original factory can use high-tech means to make each of these luxury cars different, the local tyrant is absolutely willing to pay an extra 100,000 or even hundreds of thousands of yuan directly for this "unique" design attribute.

Everyone understands this.

"Then let's talk about it in this tone first - tell them that let Hatsune take a stake in it, so as to ensure that the equipment orders and technical support orders needed for that business in the future will belong to him."

The negotiation team immediately took note of the boss's opinion.

After talking about the threat from the perspective of the market, the next is technology.

Gu Mojie's thinking is still so clear: "The old rule, we provide 'i', EOS provides '3D'. Let's see what shortcomings they have, we can make up for them by relying on artificial intelligence or data advantages, and let's engage in complementary technologies. ”

Everyone here didn't know why, but they had a strange feeling. Every time Gu Mojie spoke, their brains became fat.

There are many large-scale crooked moves, and the boss doesn't dare to think about it if he doesn't speak.

Lei Jun and Gu Yong don't understand technology, and this second half is obviously reserved for Zhang Tuohai to perform. Otherwise, he would have been in vain with the Munich Polytechnic University and Siemens.

"The 3D printing of the Germans, especially the EOS family, is the first in the world in terms of accuracy, structural strength and process requirements. We will not do this, and we will continue to copy the Germans when the time comes.

The simplicity of 3D model modeling, the writing language of process details, and the writing operation are cumbersome, which is also a common problem of Germans. Since the era of CNC machine tools, the programmability is not as good as that of the Japanese and American systems. If we cooperate, we rely on the longboard of Hatsune Intelligence to make up for the shortcomings of the Germans, which should be quite effective. ”

Decent strategy, but a bit of a cliché. This thing EOS is lacking, but Hatsune is not the only one that can provide it on Earth.

"If the idea is good, if it is not unique enough, it will not play a decisive role. You go back and have a good technical investigation and make a differentiation analysis report. I'm going to see the final results in 3 days. ”

After estimating and explaining, the meeting was dismissed.

With such a big business, it is unscientific to expect a flash of inspiration to brainstorm at a meeting.

If it had been useful at the meeting, big data would have died a long time ago.

Affirming the achievements that the other party has achieved, pointing out the direction of future efforts, and letting his subordinates continue to model and go to big data, that is what Gu, Ma, and Li should do.

……

Then Zhang Tuohai and his team didn't sleep much for 3 days.

Finally, he sent a detailed report to Gu Mojie.

"Compared with other AI/big data providers in the world that can cooperate with EOS, we have a unique advantage - we do 3D scanning modeling, and the snowball effect of algorithm optimization and data accumulation is the easiest to roll."

At the beginning, Zhang Tuohai put out the conclusion concisely.

It's kind of interesting.

"Go on."

"For this matter, I have also asked Yan Lei for remote meetings several times in the past few days, and I also found someone from the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. In the field of 3D printing, the aspect that can be combined with deep learning artificial intelligence is mainly in the 'data model modeling' stage.

At present, 3D printing data modeling is done by using modeling software such as 3DMax or software such as Dialux to draw a 3D model, and then import it into a file format supported by a 3D printer and input it into the printer for typing.

However, 3DMAX is not used by everyone, and the modeling cost is still relatively large and cumbersome, which restricts the demand for 3D printing's 'private customization'. At present, when building a data model, dozens or hundreds of products will be produced in small batches to amortize the design cost of modeling, and it is impossible to achieve the real 'one customer and one customization'.

Therefore, I think that 'scanning the sample object directly into an editable data file' will greatly reduce the modeling effort for some 3D printing tasks. Moreover, whether this scanning algorithm is accurate or not, in fact, needs to be accumulated, and the larger the data practice sample, the easier it is for the company to snowball the accuracy of the machine in this regard......"

"Okay, don't say it, I get it." Gu Mojie interrupted Zhang Tuohai's continued thoughts, "What you mean is equivalent to that in the field of 3D printing, there is 3D printing first, and if there is no 3D copying, you have to make up for the copying function." And to keep the data-based model while making a copy - it's like scanning. ”

Zhang Tuohai scratched his head: "It seems to mean this." 3D Copy ...... Well said image. ”

Gu Mojie smiled slightly: "In the future, you have to learn how to communicate with people, and change your way of expressing yourself as a technical nerd." ”

In the flat era, people always felt that printing was more difficult than copying, because human beings had photocopiers for a long time, and in the era of computer popularization, there were printers. Therefore, when we first arrived in the 3D era, it was easy to think by inertia, thinking that after printing, there was no need to pay attention to 'copying' technology.

However, these erroneous ideas accumulated in the first 20 years of the printing development process ignore a problem: when the user has a doll, he wants to 3D print it; At this time, is it faster to use 3DMax to model the doll, or is it faster to 3D scan the size of the entire doll, and then automatically model the data, and then use the data model to type it out again?

Obviously, the latter is countless times faster.

In the 2D era, a person writes a page by hand and copies it; It's definitely slower than a person typing a page in Word and printing it.

This kind of erroneous experience has killed people in the 3D era, so that many people do not pay attention to the importance of scanning and the accumulation of deep learning in the accuracy of scanning algorithms.

In this case, let Hatsune Smart make up for this shortcoming.

If you want to do it, you have to do something that only you can do alone.

Throw what anyone can do to the supplier.

"Cheng, this matter is perfect, and the negotiation has given you a reward of 1% bargaining range."

……

The entrepreneurial team at EOS isn't stupid either.

The 3D printing industry is not a new industry in Germany, but has a history of 20 years - EOS's early plastic 3D printers were produced in 1991.

Because it is not considered an emerging industry, the German government has never provided industry support funds.

It will not be because "although no one uses this technology now, it is likely to be used in the future, and the government should pay money to help entrepreneurs survive and play a big game of chess".

Most of the things like "spending money to subsidize a big game of chess" will only appear in the system of "concentrating on doing big things."

Of course, at some point, the superpowers that are responsible for "carrying the flag for the free world" also have to play chess with their competitors such as China and the Soviet Union to show the superiority of the free world.

Germany was a defeated country in World War II, and the task of demonstrating the superiority of the free world did not come to it. As a result, the 3D printing high-tech enterprises in Germany have relied on the pure market economy and order profits to support them all these years.

The trick of "I don't make any money, but I tell stories and draw visions" doesn't work for an industry that has been around for 20 years.

Hatsune is very practical, directly talking to the Germans about the market, about profits, about bundling cooperation, and about technical complementarity.

"Want an order for smart Porsche Custom 3D technology starting in 2013? You don't let me buy shares, why should I hand over this big order to you? What is your current annual sales of 500 million euros? If the global automotive customization market is made up by Hatsune Intelligence, it is possible to double and rise! ”

"Do you want to bring 3D printing into the field of 'celebrity figures'? Do you want to do the field of 'fans and celebrities taking photos and scanning figures'? Come, use Hatsune Intelligence's new 3D scanning modeling algorithm to match your 3D printer data with absolutely high accuracy! Want to use it? Do you really want to use it? Let's talk about shareholding. ”

"Afraid of snatching the company's business decision-making power? It's okay, we Hatsune Smart can take Class A shares, and the voting rights will still be entrusted to you! ”

Lei Jun, Zhang Tuohai, and Gu Yong took turns attacking from three angles.

So EOS finally fell.

Gu Mojie's 10% non-profit shares of Hatsune Entertainment, which was lifted this year, have finally been used up nine times out of ten. (To be continued.) )