Countercurrent 1982

Chapter 2094 Large Server

Gerstner obviously couldn't give Duan Yun an answer right away. The reason is very simple. On the one hand, IBM has never had any business consulting business before. On the other hand, the quotation for training requires careful calculation, including investment The cost of manpower and material resources, plus the company's due profit ratio, can finally get a relatively accurate quotation.

Duan Yun naturally knew that it would take a certain amount of time to coordinate this matter, including the other party's quotation, payment, reception of IBM's US personnel, and drastic personnel changes within the company. The group has brought about earth-shaking changes.

That night, Duan Yun and Gerstner talked for a long time. Both are high-tech companies located in different countries, so they are still very interested in each other, especially Gerstner, who is interested in Chinese companies and even China. The market is very interested, so there are more inquiries about this matter, and they also intend to expand cooperation channels with Tianyin Group.

In fact, companies in China and the United States are very interested in each other's markets, but there are some essential differences. If Tianyin Group wants to open up the American market, it must come up with its own best technology, the best Only in this way can we gain a firm foothold in the US market.

As for high-tech companies in the United States, especially companies like IBM, they are more interested in dumping some sub-standard products and technologies that have not made much profit in the European and American markets to the Chinese market. At the beginning of the reform and opening up, foreign companies had the same attitude towards Chinese consumers, because considering that the level of national consumption is not at the same level, products that are too expensive and too high-end can only be popular in China. Few people can afford it. On the contrary, some technologies and products that are about to be eliminated, because they can be industrialized and mass-produced, the cost and price are relatively low. Best seller.

IBM's largest agent in China was Lenovo, but the cooperation between IBM and Lenovo has begun to shrink in the past two years. On the one hand, it is because Lenovo's sales in the domestic computer market have declined sharply. The main reason is that the past two years The sound group has risen strongly, taking away many purchase orders from the government, enterprises and institutions that originally belonged to the Lenovo Group. Compared with simply acting as an agent for IBM computers, the profit is much higher, and it can also be branded as a "national computer brand" in China. This is why IBM computers began to decline year by year in mainland China. , can only open a branch in BJ, but because of the limited domestic sales channels, the number of computers sold every year is limited.

However, Tianyin Group can be said to be the most powerful private enterprise in China, and has unparalleled sales outlets and channels in mainland China. If they can cooperate with Tianyin Group, it will be very helpful for them to expand the Chinese market.

But the problem now is that IBM's computer business is in a competitive relationship with Tianyin Group's computer business, so from this point of view, it is impossible for Duan Yun to help his business competitors.

However, IBM has many business projects. In addition to personal mainframe computers, he also has many other business projects.

In fact, in the 80s and 40s, IBM's main business was mainframes and its software. These almost monopoly businesses could generate $[-] billion in profits every year, and life was quite prosperous.

But later, the development of the computing industry was completely beyond IBM's expectations.

In the 90s, IBM invested heavily in the development of personal computers, but unfortunately, it did not foresee the growth potential of this personal computer. It did not expect that these computers would one day replace IBM's competitive mainframes and microcomputers. .

When IBM came back to its senses, it failed to control the two most valuable key parts of the PC-the operating system and the computing chip. The former was controlled by Microsoft and the latter by Intel.

Throughout the 90s, in the rising wave of PC computing, IBM watched the rapid rise of Intel, Compaq, Apple, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, etc., and could only swallow the bitter fruit of strategic decision-making mistakes.

In 1993, IBM fell into a huge loss, with a loss of billions of dollars. The organization was bloated and faltering, and it was facing the danger of being split. The media described it as "one foot has already stepped into the grave".

Also in this year, IBM's legendary CEO Gerstner entered the company and began a nine-year corporate reengineering.

Under the leadership of Gerstner, IBM carried out drastic reforms.Eventually, the elephant danced again, becoming the number one in IT services, hardware, enterprise software, and custom-designed and high-performance computer chips.

Therefore, IBM's personal computer business is now gradually marginalized. Although it still occupies a lot of market share, in fact, because it does not have the most critical chip technology and operating software for personal PC computers, to a certain extent, IBM is in the business. The personal computer business is more like an assembly dealer. Most of the profits are shared by Microsoft and Intel. The computer business is like a chicken rib, just like IBM working for these two companies.

Therefore, after the sharp-minded Gerstner discovered the problem again, he began to focus the company's development on other businesses, especially mainframe servers and software projects, which have gradually become IBM's new profit pillars in the past two years. , the PC business still exists, but many of its core backbones have been transferred to other departments.

Therefore, what Gerstner really wants to cooperate with Duan Yun is his large-scale server and software projects. China is developing rapidly and the Internet has just entered China. If we can seize this opportunity and introduce IBM's server and software business into the China has a preconceived advantage, and with IBM's huge advantages in these two projects, it can completely get a big piece of cake in the Chinese market.

And this incident also reminded Duan Yun that Tianyin Group also has a great demand for large-scale servers and related software applications. The bigger it is, but Tianyin Group has no business in this area, and it also lacks relevant technology accumulation. If it can cooperate with IBM, it will definitely gain some related technology and profits. This is definitely a meaningful and win-win situation. business.

(End of this chapter)