Super Tech Library

Chapter 397
With the T800 liquid robot classmate Daniel, Mu Bai finally got rid of the trouble of driving himself.

No, when Mu Bai came to the company, he received the attention of many people in the company. After all, in the past year or so, their big boss was all alone, and now they even hired a bodyguard?
Of course, Mu Bai didn't care about the employees' thoughts. When he came to his office, Mu Bai first opened the reports of the heads of several subordinate companies. Among them, the two subsidiaries of Shinhwa Display and Shinhwa Battery gave Mu Bai good news.

In terms of Shinhwa display, the perfect display manufacturing technology has fully matured, and the pass rate has been controlled at more than 90%, which has reached the level of mass production!

As for Shinhwa Battery, the manufacture of graphene-based lithium batteries is no longer a problem, and it can enter mass production.

In other words, the two key technologies of the Zenith mobile phone that Mu Bai values ​​most are fully mature, and the production date of the Zenith mobile phone should also be put on the agenda!
Generally speaking, a mobile phone has at least several hundred parts, and it is impossible for a mobile phone company to produce all parts by itself.Especially the most important components in mobile phones: baseband, CPU, motherboard, display screen, battery, etc., are basically in the hands of major technology factories.

For example, the core component of mobile phones - CPU, almost all mobile phones in the world use Qualcomm's CPU chips.More importantly, Qualcomm also holds the world's top baseband core technology!
So what is baseband?
The baseband is actually the communicator for the mobile phone to communicate with the outside world. It determines what standard network, frequency band, call quality, network speed and signal strength your mobile phone supports.Without the baseband, the mobile phone is like an isolated city, in a stand-alone state.

On a global scale, only major manufacturers such as Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei, and MediaTek can master the core technology of baseband, among which Qualcomm is in a leading position in the entire industry.

Even Apple 7 uses Qualcomm's baseband plug-in solution.

It’s okay if Qualcomm’s technology leads the world, after all, there are leading companies in every industry.For example, isn't his Zenith Star company leading the world in the field of virtual technology, and then monopolizing the entire virtual industry? !
However, Qualcomm is different. After he monopolized the CDMA technology patent, he took a large part of the profit of mobile phones by means of patent licensing fee, patent anti-licensing, Qualcomm tax and selling baseband for SOC!

In 2014 alone, it achieved a revenue of US$264.9 billion (equivalent to more than 1900 billion yuan), and a net profit of US$79.9 billion, half of which came from China. "Once you enter the telecommunications industry, you will be troubled, and you will never be able to buy a mobile phone" has become the catchphrase of many telecommunications users.

These days, there are people who get the wrong name, but they will never be called the wrong nickname again.

Making huge profits through high patent licensing fees, patent anti-licensing, and Qualcomm taxes has earned Qualcomm the notoriety of "patent hooligans", "industry cancer", and "baseband madness".

For example, high patent authorization fee: Because the CDMA patent monopoly has been realized, the CDMA authorization fee is naturally expensive.Even Qualcomm also took advantage of its monopoly position in CDMA to collect patent fees for expired patents from others in the form of bundled licensing of patents and expired patents.

There is also patent anti-licensing. Qualcomm relies on its monopoly on CDMA and requires all manufacturers that have obtained CDMA standard patent authorization to provide all communication patent authorizations to Qualcomm free of charge. Because WCDMA also uses part of the CDMA underlying technology, Ericsson, Nokia, A Lang and other manufacturers involved in the formulation of the WCDMA standard, as well as domestic manufacturers such as Huawei and ZTE that produce CDMA standard communication equipment and communication terminals, had to license the communication patents developed by themselves to Qualcomm for free.

At the same time, Qualcomm can also rely on the patents obtained by anti-authorization to provide patent umbrellas for some manufacturers who lack patents, so as to avoid patent litigation.For example, Rice relies on the patent umbrella provided by Qualcomm to avoid patent disputes caused by the use of ZTE and Huawei patents, and Rice must pay back huge returns to Qualcomm.

For example, Rice sells mobile phones in India, using MediaTek SOC was immediately sued by Ericsson, but using Qualcomm SOC is unimpeded. important reason.

The third point, which is the most disgusting and hated point of Qualcomm, is the Qualcomm tax: Qualcomm mandates that mobile phone manufacturers who use Qualcomm SOC must pay a huge amount of Qualcomm licensing fees. 5%-10% of the mobile phone price is used as patent fees.

What kind of concept is this, that is to say, for a 2900 yuan mobile phone from Rice Company, the Qualcomm tax for Qualcomm alone is as high as 300 yuan or more!Think about how many mobile phones the rice company ships in a year...

Because Qualcomm provides a complete set of SOC solutions, and most mobile phone manufacturers do not have the technology and capabilities of SOC integration, they can only be slaughtered, and the profits of mobile phone manufacturers are cut by Qualcomm.Huawei uses HiSilicon chips in all its mid-to-high-end models. In addition to supporting HiSilicon, avoiding Qualcomm tax is also one of the reasons.

In addition, Qualcomm takes advantage of its monopoly position in CDMA and never authorizes other IC design companies to integrate CDMA baseband in mobile phone SOC or baseband.

In addition, Qualcomm has also adopted a very clever pricing strategy - pricing the baseband fee to be similar to the SOC price.

In this way, if you buy the baseband separately, you have to integrate a CPU and GPU yourself, which is time-consuming, laborious and expensive, and most mobile phone manufacturers do not have the technology and ability to integrate SOC. Qualcomm can do it all at once, which greatly reduces the cost of manufacturing mobile phones. Even the English teacher can make mobile phones.

Qualcomm's sales method is jokingly called "buy baseband, get SOC".This sales strategy not only drove Texas Instruments, the No. 1 mobile chip, out of the mobile phone chip market, but also complemented Qualcomm's tax, enabling Qualcomm to obtain high profits in China.

It can be said that Qualcomm is a hurdle that all mobile phone manufacturers cannot get around!

Of course, fortunately, because of the outrage of Qualcomm, coupled with Qualcomm’s lack of progress, it can no longer repeat its status in the 4G era in the 3G era. After China and European communication manufacturers jointly “de-Qualcommized”, Qualcomm The right to speak has been weakened by more than half.

For example, after the anti-monopoly case, the high patent licensing fees, patent anti-licensing, Qualcomm tax and other means it maintained have been weakened a lot.

And now, Zenith Star Technology, which has the strongest technology, has also set its sights on the field of mobile communication...

'

(Cough, 400 chapters, please subscribe, please support! Recently, the code words are weak, and I urgently need blood transfusion from all the big guys~~)

(End of this chapter)