bacchusnovels Chapter 140 Different Views
Chapter 140 Different Views
"I feel like Xiangyu Drones got ripped off this time."
On Zhihu, the most upvoted comment under a popular post titled "Low-Altitude Economy Observation" came from an anonymous user with the ID "Former Drone Industry Practitioner".
Xiangyu UAV can integrate its own flight control system, so why would it spend two million to become a strategic member of Hongyuan Feiniao? In the eyes of a "former UAV practitioner," this is simply a case of paying an intelligence tax.
According to a report he had previously seen on 36Kr, the core demand of Xiangyu Drones in joining the Feiniao Industry Alliance as a strategic member was to obtain priority supply rights for Feiniao S1 modules and priority adaptation rights for future Qixin MEMS sensors.
In other words, Xiangyu Drones is currently charging a membership fee of two million yuan per year!
If a membership fee of two million a year is acceptable, then what else could Xiangyu Drones be but a victim of exploitation?
"Speaking of those companies that signed strategic membership agreements, what's the background of one called Tianyu Aerospace Technology?"
Immediately following, a user with the ID "Shenzhen Low-Altitude Entrepreneur Dog" posted a question in the comments section, which instantly sparked a wave of discussion.
Among the nine strategic members, Tianyu Aerospace Technology is the least noticeable. The other eight are all well-known companies in the industry, such as Zhongyi Aviation, China Southern Power Grid, JD Logistics, and SF Express. Aren't they all famous names?
The only exception is Tianyu Aerospace Science and Technology, which most people have never even heard of.
Soon, an anonymous user claiming to be an "insider" responded:
"The founder of Tianyu Aerospace is Lu Ming, who was previously the deputy director of the marketing department at Hangxindatong. He was laid off during an internal restructuring at Hangxindatong last year. Afterwards, he pulled together two other technical staff who were also laid off to start their own business, securing angel investment to specialize in agricultural drones for Southeast Asia."
Upon seeing this, the "Shenzhen Low-Altitude Entrepreneur Dog" nodded and replied:
"I know about the layoffs at Hangxindatong last year. Many people were quite moved at the time; He Zhiqiang's management style was indeed aggressive."
After making a remark, he pressed on with another question:
"So, in what scenarios will Tianyu Aerospace Technology use its strategic membership? Power line inspection? Logistics?"
"Tianyu Aerospace mainly deals in agricultural drones for the Southeast Asian market; they don't have much business in China. It's said they joined as a strategic member primarily to secure one of the first trial slots for the G1 industrial gateway."
"what?"
Upon seeing this reply, several people in the comments section expressed their doubts. Tianyu Aerospace actually spent two million yuan on strategic membership fees just to get a trial slot for a gateway?
Although Tianyu Aerospace's market is mainly in Southeast Asia, as everyone knows, the agricultural plant protection market in Southeast Asia is fiercely contested by Geek Drones and DJI, and profits have been squeezed very thin.
The strategic membership fee alone is two million. Add to that the equipment procurement and operating costs, can Tianyu Aerospace, a small company that has been established for less than a year, afford to burn through all that money?
As everyone knows, DJI's T series is sweeping across the Southeast Asian agricultural plant protection market. With its mature product line and after-sales network covering various countries, it has left many smaller brands struggling to survive.
At this point, Tianyu Aerospace Technology is trying to compete with DJI with a G1 gateway that hasn't even been officially released yet? Can it beat DJI's T series?
Thinking about this, the comments section was filled with doubts. Everyone was very curious about whether Tianyu Aerospace could gain a foothold in Southeast Asia and whether the two million would go down the drain.
After a long while, a user with the ID "Low Altitude Industry Researcher" sighed and posted a long comment:
"Sigh! No matter what, I still hope that the Hongyuan Feiniao industry alliance can succeed. After all, Qixin MEMS needs a lot of funding to support the research and development of its independent DRIE etching process. If the industry alliance can't hold on, the path for domestically produced MEMS sensors will truly be cut off."
This comment received a lot of likes. As practitioners who focus on the low-altitude economy, most of them were not optimistic about Hongyuan Flying Bird's proposed high membership prices.
The industry alliance's upgrade rate was considered too low, and the results proved it to be indeed dismal—only 44 out of 371 partners upgraded to paid memberships.
Even so, they still hoped that Su Chen could create a miracle, since Qixin MEMS's independent DRIE R&D required a huge amount of funding.
After a long while, another highly-rated comment appeared:
"I just don't know what that 'game-changing product' they're going to announce at the Flying Bird Technology Summit on October 28th is. If it really can change the landscape, it means Hongyuan Flying Bird will have a new profit growth point, and they won't have to worry about funding for MEMS R&D anymore."
……
Shenzhen, headquarters of Hangxindatong.
"Haha, this Su Chen is simply delusional! It's like heaven is helping me!"
At this moment, He Zhiqiang looked at the industry analysis report pushed to his tablet and burst into laughter.
To be honest, when Hongyuan Feiniao announced the establishment of the industry alliance, he was indeed quite nervous for a while.
He reasoned that if Hung Yuan Flying Bird promoted the industry alliance with a low-price strategy, a large number of companies would flock to it, thanks to the performance advantages of the S1 module.
Ultimately, Hongyuan Flying Bird will build an unbreakable ecological barrier with its huge membership base, making it extremely difficult for LDCL 3.0 to penetrate the market.
At that time, Hongyuan Flying Bird will not only avoid financial difficulties, but will also obtain a continuous cash flow due to the scale effect of the ecosystem. In the end, it will invest all the money it earns into MEMS research and development. Once the independent DRIE process is successfully developed, the supply chain pattern of the entire low-altitude industry will be completely rewritten.
But now, seeing Su Chen's outrageous pricing strategy, daring to set the price of strategic membership at two million, He Zhiqiang naturally laughed heartily, inwardly mocking Su Chen's naivety.
"Since Su Chen is so ignorant of market rules, then let my Hangxindatong LDCL 3.0 sweep the market like a king."
Hangxindatong's LDCL 3.0 has now been licensed to twenty-two drone manufacturers, making it an undisputed leader in the open-source protocol market.
He Zhiqiang was initially worried that Hongyuan Feiniao would use the ecological advantages of the industry alliance to form a monopoly, which would greatly reduce the promotion space of LDCL 3.0.
But seeing that Su Chen had set such an outrageous membership price, He Zhiqiang had even bigger ideas—he wanted to take advantage of the unstable foundation of the Hongyuan Flying Bird Industry Alliance to accelerate the promotion of LDCL 3.0 and seize those hesitant small and medium-sized enterprises.
With this in mind, He Zhiqiang has already begun to formulate the "100 Enterprises Plan" for LDCL 3.0 - the goal is to expand the number of authorized enterprises to 100 by the end of the year!
He wants to overwhelm quality with quantity and make the entire market use Hangxindatong's protocol stack!
As for Tianyu Aerospace, which spent two million to become a strategic member, He Zhiqiang smiled disdainfully. Tianyu Aerospace, ha, just an ant.
Although Lu Ming, the founder of Tianyu Aerospace Technology, was once the deputy director of marketing at Hangxindatong, he had some connections in the Southeast Asian market before he was laid off.
However, as DJI fully expanded into the Southeast Asian agricultural plant protection market, it crushed a host of smaller brands with its T-series drones and comprehensive after-sales service system.
Tianyu Aerospace Science and Technology is barely surviving, and now they're putting all their eggs in one basket by betting on Hongyuan Flying Bird—it's practically suicide.
……
While He Zhiqiang of Hangxindatong was preparing to launch a major promotion of LDCL 3.0, in an office building in Suzhou Industrial Park...
A middle-aged man named Fang Zhiyuan breathed a long sigh of relief when he saw that Hongyuan Feiniao's industry alliance had only 44 companies upgrade to paid memberships because of its high pricing.
Fang Zhiyuan is the general manager of Suzhou Bowei Sensing Technology Co., Ltd., a company that specializes in industrial-grade MEMS pressure sensors. Although it is not large in scale, it has a place in the niche market.
The relationship between Fang Zhiyuan and Su Chen is quite complicated.
Before founding Hongyuan Technology, Su Chen worked as a technical consultant at Fang Zhiyuan's Bowei Sensing for six months. At that time, Su Chen was just a young man who had just graduated from Southeast University, and his mind was full of ideas about MEMS sensor fusion algorithms.
During his time at Bowei Sensing, Su Chen independently developed an algorithm framework for multi-sensor data fusion. This framework was later directly used by Fang Zhiyuan to apply for a company patent, without even Su Chen's name being listed in the patent.
Not only that, Fang Zhiyuan also dismissed Su Chen on the grounds that he was "not suitable for the company's development direction".
Although Su Chen was furious at the time, as a young man who had just graduated and had no resources, he was powerless to fight back and could only leave with a lot of resentment. Later, he founded Hongyuan Technology.
Later, Hongyuan Technology rose rapidly, and Fang Zhiyuan panicked for a time. This was because after Su Chen founded Qixin MEMS, he had sent a lawyer's letter to Bowei Sensing, demanding that they negotiate the ownership of those patents.
To put it bluntly, Su Chen wanted to take back what belonged to him.
When Fang Zhiyuan received that lawyer's letter, he felt like the sky was falling. The algorithm framework was indeed independently developed by Su Chen, and if a lawsuit were to break out, the evidence he had would be completely untenable.
Even more critically, those patents were the core technologies that Boway Sensing used to secure its Series B funding. If the patents are revoked and investors pursue the matter, Fang Zhiyuan's life will be in serious trouble.
However, Hongyuan Feiniao was later attacked by DJI and Hangxindatong. Su Chen was busy dealing with market competition and MEMS self-development and had no time to pay attention to the patent dispute of Bowei Sensing. So the matter was gradually put aside.
Thinking of that lawyer's letter, Fang Zhiyuan felt both hatred and relief. He hated that Su Chen had almost driven him to the brink of despair, but he was relieved that Hongyuan Feiniao was currently preoccupied with its own problems.
Just in case, after receiving the lawyer's letter, Fang Zhiyuan spent a lot of money to hire a professional intellectual property law team to "improve" the application materials for those patents and add a lot of false evidence that Fang Zhiyuan "participated in the research and development".
This operation cost him nearly 800,000 yuan, which is more than the amount he lost from the technical consulting fees he received for that algorithm back then.
It could be said that not only did he not gain any advantage, but he actually lost a lot of money. Thinking of this, Fang Zhiyuan truly hated Su Chen.
"If you're going to set a good price, you should set it high; you might as well ruin it!"
Fang Zhiyuan muttered with a face full of hatred.
.........
The news that Hongyuan Flying Bird's industry alliance only had 44 upgraded paid members has sparked widespread discussion in the low-altitude economic circle.
Some believe that Su Chen has finally reaped what he sowed. He priced it so high, now he knows the market isn't buying it.
So far, there are only 44 paid members, and only 9 of them are strategic members. Although the specific membership fee income has not been disclosed, it is easy to calculate that even if all members are charged at the highest standard, the annual income would only be 30 to 40 million.
After all, these paid members are either small and medium-sized enterprises spending 500,000 yuan to test the waters, or large enterprises spending 2 million yuan for peace of mind. No one can say for sure how many actual orders Hongyuan Feiniao will actually bring.
Of course, some people agree with Su Chen's strategy of not engaging in price wars. Because if Hongyuan Feiniao sets its membership fee very low, relying on the technological advantages of the S1 module, then drone manufacturers from all over the industry will probably flock to it.
Ultimately, Hongyuan Flying Bird will become the monopolist of the entire low-altitude air transport industry chain, and all companies will be dependent on its ecosystem. But would that really be a good thing for the industry as a whole?
A single dominant player monopolizes the supply chain, ultimately forcing all other companies to rely on Hongyuan Feiniao's whims. Is this the kind of Hongyuan Feiniao that the industry needs for healthy development?
Therefore, they agree with Hongyuan Feiniao's approach of providing differentiated technical services, rather than using low prices to drive out all other suppliers and ultimately make themselves the only option.
Hongyuan Feiniao's high-pricing strategy not only generates sufficient profits to support MEMS R&D but also leaves room for LDCL and DJI to survive. This allows suppliers and their customer companies to have more diverse options.
Therefore, they agreed with Su Chen's pricing strategy. In their view, it was reasonable for Hongyuan Feiniao to be a little more expensive, given the technological leadership of its S1 module and the unique value of its Feiniao ecosystem.
However, such voices of approval are few and far between. Most industry professionals do not agree with Hongyuan Flying Bird's high pricing.
Normally, how Hongyuan Flying Bird sets its prices is their own business, and outsiders have no right to interfere.
The problem is that Hongyuan Feiniao is now shouldering the heavy responsibility of overcoming the bottleneck of independent DRIE etching technology and breaking the bottleneck of the MEMS sensor supply chain.
At this point, with Hongyuan Flying Bird's pricing so high, making enemies everywhere, how can it gather enough industry resources to support the "long march" of self-developed MEMS?!
Therefore, they were not optimistic. They all felt sorry for Su Chen's strategy, believing that Hongyuan Feiniao's high pricing would eventually push potential allies into the arms of DJI and Hangxindatong.
Just like there are only 44 paid members now, those companies that have tried it out will soon find that the cost-effectiveness is not high enough and will definitely not renew their subscriptions. In the end, Hongyuan Feiniao will lose in the competition due to insufficient ecosystem scale!
In mid-October, less than two weeks after Su Chen announced the Flying Bird Technology Summit.
Wu Zheng's hardware team delivered a stunning result—the engineering prototype of the G1 industrial gateway was completed three days ahead of schedule.
From finalizing the plan to creating a working engineering prototype, Wu Zheng's team only took eleven days.
Eleven days!
When Su Chen saw the test video sent by Wu Zheng in the virtual disassembly lab, he was stunned for several seconds.
In the video, three silver-gray G1 engineering prototypes are neatly arranged on the test bench. The body is made of aviation aluminum alloy shell, with a 3.5-inch industrial touch screen on the front and various interfaces on the back - RJ45 Ethernet port, RS485 serial port, CAN bus interface, USB 3.0, and two detachable high-gain antennas.
The entire device is only the size of a hardcover book and weighs less than 800 grams.
"The delivery cycle for Cambricon's MLU220 is six weeks, so we're using the MLU210 as a makeshift solution for these three prototypes," Wu Zheng explained in the video. "The core functions are all running smoothly, and the latency for edge AI inference is around 18 milliseconds. Once the MLU220 arrives, we can reduce it to below 12 milliseconds."
After watching the video, Su Chen immediately sent Wu Zheng a message:
"Prototype allocation plan: one unit will remain in the lab for ongoing testing, and the other two will be sent to Xiangyu UAV and Zhongyi Aviation respectively. They need to test them in real-world scenarios; I need their feedback before the summit."
After sending the message, Su Chen leaned back in his chair, looking at the 3D holographic model of the G1 gateway in the virtual laboratory, a slight smile playing on his lips.
People outside are discussing whether his pricing is too high, whether it's wishful thinking, and whether the industry alliance is doomed.
But what they didn't know was that industry alliances were never Hongyuan Flying Bird's ultimate weapon.
G1 is the one.
And G1 is not the end.
Qixin MEMS is the one.
The industry alliance is the entry point, G1 is the lock, and Qixin MEMS is the key.
Three nested layers, each interlocking with the next.
While everyone was busy discussing the ticket prices at the entrance, the lock had already been quietly installed.