On the eighth day of Luo Sheng's arrival in Japan, the two sides finally reached a very important consensus, and Sony's board of directors met frequently in the past few days, and finally decided to sell the Cell business to the Cote d'Azur.

Concessions were also made on price, with Sony offering $2.188 billion.

Luo Sheng was actually acceptable to this price, but he still bargained with the other party, and during the last negotiation, the two sides mediated for about three and a half hours, and finally reached the company on the merger and acquisition price.

$1.685 billion!

At the same time, the prerequisite for Sony to accept this price needs to put forward an additional condition, that is, the PS3 game consoles currently supported by the Cell chip, the Cote d'Azur does not share the profit of Cell, otherwise Sony's PS3 game consoles will lose $350 per unit sold, because the R&D costs are evenly amortized and become higher.

This point Luo Sheng "very reluctantly" agreed, in fact, the Cell processor is not worth a few dollars in his eyes, and after buying it, he will completely redesign it from the bottom.

After the two sides completed the initialing, Luo Sheng also set off to return to China.

It will take about a month or even two or three months to complete this M&A transaction at the earliest, but it is basically a certainty.

……

Day 3, Côte d'Azur CEO's office.

"Mr. Luo, our company is going to spend $1.685 billion to acquire the complete Cell business of Sony, Toshiba and IBM, I'm afraid the funds may not be enough, and we need to find a bank loan." Yao Jianhong entered the office and said.

This time is different from the past, it is to start from the underlying architecture to make its own chips, and it is a very ambitious plan, intending to subvert the domination of Intel x86 and end the dark era of the "toothpaste factory".

And it is completely different from Azure-X mobile phones, although its AP processor is designed by Bluestar Technology, it still uses Qualcomm's authorized technology, and the baseband is still Qualcomm's, but Qualcomm baseband alternatives, Huawei is also working hard to smash the communication baseband, and the R&D funds smashed into it are rising year by year.

And this time the Cote d'Azur opened up a new business, and the investment is undoubtedly astronomical, and the more than one billion dollars smashed into it is just a start. It's just for the company's highly confidential [ACC] program, and the follow-up investment is the big one, and the scale of the burn is billions of dollars.

The Côte d'Azur company's business is now relatively simple, and the main source of revenue is the Azure series of smartphones, and the AOS app store.

Since the first generation of the Azure series of phones was released, the total number of sales so far is 26.89 million units, the total sales are 18.7 billion US dollars, and the revenue of the AOS app store has exceeded 1.5 billion US dollars.

This report card is not the results of the Côte d'Azur in 2008, but the total achievements created by the company from its inception to today, this year's performance has not yet been counted, and there is still more than a month to go in 2008.

There is no doubt that this is a very impressive result, but the company's profit is only about 8%.

Because the money earned was smashed into R&D investment by Luo Sheng, the Cote d'Azur has no heritage, and if you want to have enough technical precipitation, you must invest a lot of R&D, and the company has now launched two new hardware projects.

One is the development of the next generation of Azure phones, and the other is the [ACC] program, which aims to penetrate into the hinterland of the Intel kingdom.

The huge amount of R&D investment is evenly shared, and the profit is of course low.

The Côte d'Azur is now in great need of a primitive accumulation of technology.

"Don't worry about the problem of funds, if the bank does not lend to the company, I will personally lend money to the company."

Hearing Luo Sheng's words, Yao Jianhong had no doubts, and if you pay attention to some of his news reports, you will know that he has sold his Bluestar Technology shares many times in the past few years and cashed out more than $5 billion.

This money is the money on the surface, and Luo Sheng can use it in a high-profile manner.

But in fact, in less than a year, the $5 billion has become more than $48 billion through the bet on the North American housing market, and about 10% can be taken directly from it.

Luo Sheng added: "The problem of funding is secondary, as soon as possible to recruit talents in Japan, and the construction of R&D centers as soon as possible. ”

Yao Jianhong nodded: "Understood!" ”

After explaining the matter, he also left Luo Sheng's office.

Pocketing the other party's talent for your own use will not only strengthen you, but also stifle potential competitors in the cradle, and since Japanese companies have given up on smartphones and mobile Internet, they are trying to pick it up again.

Even if Sony and other Japanese companies get involved in the smartphone industry, they will only be reduced to a niche, and they will not have a say in this industry at all.

Luo Sheng stayed in his office for a while and also went to the Cte d'Azur laboratory, and in the afternoon he presided over a meeting of the technical department, where Bai Lang, Lu Siming, Li Chunsheng and others were all listed.

After a series of grinding, they are now qualified to take on the role of product manager, leading at least two development projects under their hands, and directly managing a team of more than 100 engineers.

"The acquisition of Sony's cell business and the establishment of an R&D center in Japan are great opportunities." Luo Sheng said to the technical directors attending the meeting: "There are too few engineers in our country, and excellent engineers are even more scarce. Therefore, we also need to find talented young engineers from within and train them. ”

After a pause, Luo Sheng added: "There are still one to two months to end this year, I decided to start from next year, and start preparations at the end of this year, we have to keep selecting outstanding young engineers from within the company every year, especially young engineers with pioneering spirit, and sponsor him to send him to study abroad, to study at the R&D center we established in Yokohama, Japan and outstanding engineers in Japan, and to the R&D center in Austin, Texas, North America and outstanding engineers in the United States." ”

Of course, Luo Sheng is not stupid, the company pays money to fund and send a large number of employees to the channel to study abroad is not driven by emotion.

Instead, you have to sign a contract and a non-compete agreement, and you can't leave your job or change jobs immediately after returning from your studies, you must stay in the company for at least eight years, and after the lock-up period expires, the employee can decide to stay on his own.

Otherwise, if the company spends a lot of time, manpower, material resources, and financial resources to carefully cultivate a talent, and as a result, he does not contribute any value to the company after completing his studies, and directly leaves his job or changes jobs, or even competes with the parent company in turn, then it will not become the "Huangpu Military Academy in the IT industry", and shoot himself in the foot.

Although the treatment of the Cote d'Azur company is already in line with international standards, the world's top level, the company is in a period of rapid growth, and the company itself is a huge stage to display personal talents, the probability of job hopping or going it alone is very rare.

Rarely does not mean that there is none, there are still some.

Therefore, one code is one code, and none of the agreements that should be signed can be saved, which is a reflection of the responsibility of both parties, and the protection of a layer of contractual relationship can eliminate the potential crisis of trust between each other.

The talent problem in Luo Sheng is the key issue that he will always be concerned about, the domestic talent base is too small, the outstanding talent is even less, and there are a large number of outstanding talents running abroad.

No matter how talented Luo Sheng is, he is a person after all, and people's energy is limited, but his career is unlimited.

Today, the total number of employees in the global group has exceeded 70,000, and the Cote d'Azur company has also exceeded the 30,000 mark.

Luo Sheng needs talents from all aspects, scientific research talents, management talents, legal talents, sales talents, etc., to gather under his command, so that he can steer these two giant ships smoothly.

Foreign talents should find ways to hire them for their own use with high salaries, and at the same time, they should actively cultivate talents internally, send them out for further study, and then give back to the company after returning from their studies.

The internal cultivator formulated the issue of the company's subsidy for employees to go abroad for further study, and Luo Sheng made a very decisive decision.

It was a win-win situation and it didn't take long to delay and a week later it was made public within the Cote d'Azur.

The company decided to spend 1 billion yuan from next year to start an internal talent training program and subsidize its employees to study abroad.

The size of the budget expenditure is determined according to the company's development needs and actual situation, but it is not surprising that it will be increased year by year as the company grows and grows.

For a while, it caused a huge response from the employee group, especially some young research talents, who can get the opportunity for a second further study, which is undoubtedly a personal sublimation.

The point is, company funding.

The employees of Bluestar Technology Group saw the news that broke out "next door", and also began to discuss, it is obviously impossible not to envy, the employees of Bluestar Technology are also the elite of the industry, and the more excellent people are, the more clear they will be eliminated by the times.

Whether it is the Cote d'Azur or Bluestar Technology Group, there are internal anonymous employee community forums, and anonymity is to encourage employees to express their thoughts in the editorial forum to promote improvement and perfection in all aspects of the company.

If it is a real name, everyone is afraid that they will offend the leader, so they dare not tell the truth.

After the news came from next door, the anonymous community forum on the side of Bluestar Technology also began to discuss, and they petitioned the ultimate boss Luo Sheng, hoping that Bluestar Technology could also launch such a welfare system, and could not favor one over the other.

In fact, they are too anxious, but they can understand their feelings.

Of course, Luo Sheng will not forget that he is still the boss and founder of Bluestar Technology, and the palms and backs of his hands are full of meat, of course, he will not favor one over the other, and Bluestar Technology is also facing the problem of lack of talents.

No one, no good people, certainly not.

The day after the announcement of the Cote d'Azur, Bluestar Technology Group also issued an announcement within the team that the group company will also spend 1.2 billion yuan on internal talent training plans from next year to fund its employees to study abroad.

The same standard as the Cote d'Azur, but all employees of the company can submit a written application, which needs to be reviewed by the relevant departments of the company and all the qualifications can be obtained.

However, at the same time, there are exceptions, and employees with less than three years of service also have the opportunity to obtain quota qualifications, but this needs to be stamped and approved by the president's office.

This exception is to take into account some gifted talents, give them a better environment to grow faster than the average person, and contribute greater.

The news quickly spread from within the company to the outside world, causing huge attention in the industry and society.

……