Ling Shizhe opened the sales report and found that since the disintegration of the gold dollar, the sales of computer cameras in North America alone have dropped by 15 percent, a lot of drops. ◆ Top ◆ point ◆ small ◆ said, w≧wwc√om

The sales of "Transformers" have not been affected much, after all, they are only toys, and the price is not expensive, but the growth has been significantly slowed down.

Sales of scientific function calculators fell the most, by 30 percent.

Alison saw Ling Shizhe's eyes staring at the column of the scientific function calculator sales report, and explained to him: "Boss, since the collapse of the gold dollar, many American companies have closed their doors, which has caused a decrease in the demand in the calculator market. ”

At this time, computers are far from being popularized, only strong large enterprises and institutions are used, small and medium-sized enterprises generally use calculators, and now there are many small and medium-sized enterprises that have gone bankrupt, and the demand for scientific function calculators will inevitably be greatly affected.

"Alison, how's the sales in Europe?"

"Boss, the sales data in Europe has not yet been counted, and it will take a few days, but I called the person in charge there, and he told me that during this time, the sales of computer cameras and calculators have slowed down significantly, and sales in some areas have begun to decline."

Ling Shizhe put down the sales report and said complainingly: "Alison, sales have dropped so much, but you just said it was a good thing." ”

"Boss, I understand your feelings, but you have to look at this thing the other way around, we have been desperately building factories and increasing production capacity in recent years, but people's annual demand for computer cameras and calculators has grown much higher than the growth of our production, and as a result, in order to ensure sufficient chip supply in the market over the years, we have to find more third-party chip manufacturers to OEM, so we have sacrificed a large part of our profits.

To what extent have they been sacrificed so far, we only have to authorize their second production now. If the market continues to grow like this, we can only open up the production authorization of chips, otherwise we are likely to face antitrust prosecution by the Ministry of Justice, which will cause us huge losses no matter what.

But now that the Bretton Woods system is disintegrating, the gold dollar is collapsing, and demand is slowing down, we don't need to face as much pressure as before, and the opening of the second factory production authorization, we can launch some days, and of course we will eventually open up the production authorization to avoid antitrust prosecutions. ”

When signing a supply agreement with a chip manufacturer, IBM strongly requires that the chip company must authorize the second party factory, and once the supply of the chip company cannot meet the demand, IBM can directly place an order with the enterprise that has opened the production authorization, without the consent of the first party.

When IBM produced PCs, it was worried about the lack of CUP production capacity of Intel and asked them to find one or two second-party production licenses.

Intel didn't want to lose IBM, a big customer, so he searched and searched, and finally found AMD and VIA as the second producer of Intel, so there were two strong PC CPU manufacturers in Intel and AMD, as for VIA, he later changed his career and left the CPU manufacturing field.

It didn't take long for these companies to find that the method of opening up the second producer could effectively avoid international anti-monopoly investigations, so the opening of the second production authorization became a common business model for semiconductor companies.

The second factory is not so easy to find, first of all, his technical level cannot be too high nor too low.

It's too high, and the open licensing factory can't be countered by the authorized second factory, and AMD's K6, K7, and K8 series CPUs almost overturned Intel, resulting in AMD being the CPU overlord of personal computers for a long time.

If it weren't for the firm implementation of Dawei's Law, and the major mistakes that AMD made later, AMD would have had a good chance of becoming the world's largest semiconductor company.

If it is too low, he will not be able to keep up, and the CPU produced will seriously lag behind the mainstream of the market, and will eventually be ruthlessly eliminated by the market, and then they will face a headache of antitrust prosecution. Like VIA is like that.

"Do you have any thoughts on the second factory?" Ling Shizhe asked.

"We have been inspecting the second factory for a long time, and at present, Texas Instruments, VIA and international intelligent companies meet the requirements."

"When are you going to sign a contract for them?"

"On the whole, it has been almost negotiated, only some details are missing, the two sides have not yet negotiated, and if you want to sign a contract, you will have to wait until May."

"What do you think of the current situation, Allison?"

Alison thought for a moment and replied: "Boss, I asked those economists in the economic research department, combined with their analysis and my personal opinion, the current computer camera and scientific function calculator are far from reaching the saturation of the market, and there is still a lot of room for market growth in the future."

Now the disintegration of the gold dollar, although there is some impact on the company, but are temporary, the market has not shrunk, just a temporary slowdown in sales, the opinion of the economic research department is that while the current sales are slowing down, not only can not reduce the output of chips, but also to increase the output as much as possible, they believe that the crisis will soon pass, once the US petrodollar system is established, the world economy will soon recover. ”

Ling Shizhe smiled, these economists can calculate accurately, but they didn't calculate the oil crisis, in order to establish the petrodollar, the United States provoked several wars in the Middle East, and the oil crisis broke out one after another, it can be said that the entire seventies have been spent in the oil crisis.

It is quite remarkable that they can analyze this step, and Ling Shizhe will not be too demanding of them, but Ling Shizhe still wants to give Alison a reminder and said: "Alison, have you ever thought that the petrodollar of the United States cannot be established in a short period of time, and he needs the support of many countries, such as European countries...... and oil-producing countries in the Middle East. ”

Allison disagreed, and said proudly: "Boss, you have to believe in the United States, although the gold dollar has become history, the United States is still the most powerful country in the world, and there is no problem in supporting Europe, as for the Middle East, ......"

Apparently he also knew what was going on in the Middle East, and after a while Allison added, "If they don't do it, beat them until they agree." ”

Ling Shizhe smiled, and Alison also smiled.

Allison is not wrong at all, the United States in history really did this, but instead of the United States running to beat them personally, Israel was asked to beat them, and the United States only provided weapons to Israel, and the Middle East was beaten into a pot of porridge, and it was really unbearable, so it had to accept the so-called mediation of the United States.

And the Soviet Union did not have a navy to dominate the world, and the Middle East was too far away from him, so he could only watch the United States succeed.

In order to prevent the further expansion of US influence in the Middle East, the Soviet Union brazenly launched a war of aggression against Afghanistan in the 80s.

What was the purpose of the Soviet aggression against Afghanistan? It's not about going south into the Middle East.

Forget it, Ling Shizhe doesn't want to mention the oil crisis.

Anyway, after the outbreak of the oil crisis in history, semiconductor companies were not affected, but the bigger the crisis, the more prosperous semiconductor companies became, otherwise Microsoft and Apple in history would not have grown up in the mid-seventies.

Deciding to change the topic, Ling Shizhe asked: "Where is the third phase of the chip factory project in Canada?" ”

"A third of the construction has been completed, and due to the use of the new process, the construction cost of the new factory is much higher than that of the previous factory, so his current construction progress is not very fast."

"How much can it be produced?"

"If you still use the previous three-inch wafers, after all are completed, the annual output of the entire chip industrial park can reach up to 60 million per year, but now we have 24-inch wafers, as long as the wafer supply is sufficient, the output can be increased by nearly ten times in an instant, that is, the output of more than 500 million per year.

Boss, I plan to wait until the third phase of the project is completed, and then temporarily stop the construction of the factory. I'm afraid I won't be able to digest such a large capacity. ”

"Okay, I agree." Ling Shizhe nodded in agreement.

Don't think Alison is bragging, know that the larger the wafer size, the more chips will be produced per wafer. For example, a 300mm wafer produces more than 400 chip cores than a 200mm wafer, and a 300mm wafer is more than 2.5 times the output of a 200mm wafer.

Now using a 24-inch wafer to directly mention a three-inch wafer, a tenfold increase in output is still Alison's conservative statement.

With such a large production capacity, there is definitely no such a large demand on the market, and when the extra production capacity is reached, Ling Shizhe can engage in other projects, such as flash chips for solid-state drives, as well as DDR memory, and control chips for floppy drives.

The market demand for the first and third is huge, and as for the second, the demand for DDR memory will not be raised until the PC completely opens up the market.

However, Ling Shizhe has already planned to launch PCs and learning opportunities on the market.

Now that the Atari console has been launched, the market has responded well, and many third-party game companies have signed contracts with Atari to make games for the Atari console.

If Ling Shizhe launches a game console now, without the support of a third-party game maker, his game console will only fail.

Rather than this, it is better to simply launch a learning machine and compete with Atari in disguise.