Tech startup: I really do make mobile phones!

Chapter 86 A Small Goal: 100 Million Units
Zhao Tiezhu sent a message in the wholesalers' QQ group for oranges.

Zhao Tiezhu (CZ-002):
Dear brothers and sisters! Great news!
Orange 1 shipments have surpassed 30 this week! To thank everyone for their support, starting tomorrow, orders of 100 units or more will receive 10 free silicone protective cases! Limited quantities available, first come, first served!

Mr. Huang (New Star Communications): What kind of protective case is it? Does it have any special features? (Raises eyebrows and grins.jpg)
Zhao Tiezhu (CZ-002): Mr. Huang! This pure silicone protective case is for protecting your phone from drops. It's printed with our orange logo, and various generic cartoon designs are available. The quality is top-notch! It makes your phone look amazing, and young people love it!

Sister Li (Lili Digital): Tiezhu! You only gave me 10? I'm taking 300 units tomorrow, what do you say?
Zhao Tiezhu (CZ-002): Sister Li is so straightforward! I'll give you 20 more! These protective cases make your phone look really high-end!

Wu Ge (Deep Blue Technology): Stop bragging. There's a factory that's released the 'Orange 1' now, with the same configuration, it's 150 cheaper than yours.

QQ chat notification: Brother Wu has been banned by administrator Zhao Tiezhu (CZ-002).

Zhao Tiezhu (CZ-002): Let's all be fair! Our Orange comes standard with a gaseous lithium battery, fully charging in 30 seconds – that's unique! Those knock-offs charge slowly and have laggy systems; I wouldn't even want them for free!

Mr. Zhang (Feitong): I'll bring cash to your little workshop tomorrow! Reserve 200 white units for me. Is your General Manager Chen now pushing protective cases?
Zhao Tiezhu (CZ-002): Don't worry! Brother Zhang, you're here, so everything will be arranged perfectly! Our Brother Chen isn't here to promote protective cases, but to give everyone a chance to make money.

Zhao Tiezhu (CZ-002):
I have something to officially announce!
Starting today, for any wholesaler who buys more than 1,000 Orange 1 units, we will provide them with official free authorization for Orange 1 protective cases and also offer generic molds. No matter how many or how few units you sell, we will not charge you a single penny.

The group chat was immediately flooded with "666" and order messages.

An anonymous message that read "Your Orange 1 is just trash used to buy people's hearts" had just popped up when it was immediately drowned out by the follow-up question, "What time do you start picking up the goods tomorrow?"

Zhao Tiezhu chuckled as he looked at his phone screen, then casually pinched the different patterned protective case samples on the table.

This is actually what we now call a phone case.

Of course, Chen Mo can't be called that now.

Nowadays, a phone case refers to the entire glass cover covering both the back and front of the phone.

In the highly competitive and unpredictable market of North China, what earns the trust of most wholesale stall owners is not hype, but tangible and visible benefits.

Jinli initially brought wholesalers under its control by giving them pricing power.

Today, Chen Mo followed suit and offered up the profits from the Orange 1 component to win people's hearts.

The Orange 1 is priced at only 399 on Taobao's official store, but after a week, it has only sold a paltry 5 units.

The online shopping system is not yet mature enough, and online shopping also requires a computer, which naturally excludes most users who do not know how to use the internet.

Therefore, the sales of Orange 1 still rely heavily on the offline channels of the strong distribution system in North China.

Chen Mo did his best to win over wholesalers and maintain his mobile phone sales channels, something that every mobile phone manufacturer must pay attention to in this era.

In the early stages, these wholesalers might not become completely dependent on oranges because of these small favors, but as these small favors accumulate, will they still be willing to cut ties with oranges in the future?

I'm asking you, you've made money selling orange phone cases and subsequent orange accessories, so shouldn't you try harder to get more people to buy orange phones so you can sell even more accessories?

As for selling pirated other mobile phone accessories, Pingguo will quietly collect evidence and bring down a group of counterfeit phone case manufacturers. Then they will realize how good Chengzi is.

Piracy is wrong, but others have indeed improved the user experience of the product through some accessories, indirectly increasing Pingguo's sales.

It seems that Chen Mo lost money on the generic phone case molds and the money he could have made from selling phone cases, but the user experience and sales of Orange 1 have both improved.

In the long run, this is a win-win situation.

Wholesalers at the stalls can earn more, while Orange only needs to grant authorization, without incurring too much cost, to improve the user experience and capture more market share.

This past week, once the first batch of 1000 Orange 1 units were all sold, Chen Mo no longer needed to worry about the future of Orange Technology's small workshop.

So now I finally have the leisure to make some preparations for the first major smartphone battle in China, which will begin in the second half of the year.

The current shipment volume of Orange 1 in North China is far from saturated.

This week's shipments have only been circulating among the primary distributors at the wholesale market.

In other words, Orange Phone never even left Shenzhen.

These wholesale stall owners can make money right at their doorstep, and they don't even have enough to sell for themselves, so they have no incentive to promote to second- and third-tier distributors in second- and third-tier cities and towns across the country.

Chen Mo needs to expand the orange business as soon as possible, first satisfying the market in Shenzhen.

It's not just about securing a firm grip on the 400-600 yuan price range ecosystem in North China; it's also about taking advantage of the current inflated prices of feature phones and the fact that other smartphone manufacturers haven't yet entered the market to quickly expand the Orange 1 beyond North China and Shenzhen. The goal is to distribute the Orange 1 through the wholesale distribution network of wholesalers in North China to counters in second- and third-tier cities and towns.

Once these users get used to the satisfying feeling of a 30-second fast charge and become familiar with the simple logic of Orange OS's "desktop as application entry point," those counterfeit phones that advertise "low price and high configuration" but secretly have sluggish systems will naturally find it harder to pry open up market gaps and survive.

Taking over the rural markets where these manufacturers have excess capacity and produce low-spec, high-priced knock-off phones is a win-win situation.

One reason is to prevent these rural users from being ripped off by low-spec, overpriced knock-off phones.

It's important to know that popular and easy-to-use knock-off phones are so popular that even top-tier distributors in North China can't keep up with demand, so they have no incentive to push them to second- or third-tier township distributors.

Therefore, the products that can be distributed to second- and third-tier towns are all counterfeit phones that are not easy to sell in first-tier cities.

Mr. Liu, the general manager of Jingdong, once said that the poorer the place, the more expensive the same industrial products will be, and the quality will not be guaranteed. This is the original intention of him to establish Jingdong.

Secondly, Orange 1 has established a user base by leveraging the usage habits of consumers in rural markets, where competitors haven't yet focused on the most profitable areas.

Orange will then be able to take the lead and face later challengers more calmly in the first smartphone war in China.

In the next six months, in the battlefield of rapidly evolving smartphones, winning over user habits will be even more important than stacking hardware specifications.

After all, at this time, Lei Jun, the CEO of Xiaomi, had not yet started to put in the effort to educate users about mobile phone configurations in an entertaining and educational way.

People's impressions of smartphones don't come from their specifications, but rather from their subjective feelings.

The first Orange OS system to make users remember "all apps are visible upon startup" will imprint the anchor point of "this is how smartphones should be" in their minds.

When Orange's OS system's logic of "desktop → applications" and "fully charged in 30 seconds" becomes the subconscious standard for users.

Therefore, the competitor's "desktop → drawer → application" and "4-5 hours to fully charge" design becomes an "anti-human operation" with a learning curve.

Once this habitual barrier is formed, it will become an invisible moat in future price and technology wars.

These unseen habits actually influence users' choices of smartphones.

After all, no one wants to abandon the habits their body has formed and adapt to something new just to save a few dozen yuan.

Any technology that existed when I was born was commonplace.

Any technology that is invented between the ages of 15 and 35 will be a revolutionary product that changes the world.

Any technology that is developed after I turn 35 is against the laws of nature and will be punished by the heavens.

"Laziness," the unwillingness to learn new things, is human nature.

If you don't believe me, just look at the full-screen era that followed. How many people still have the virtual three-button navigation at the bottom of their screens?

Chen Mo gave up the profits from phone cases not only to protect the distributors, but also to boost the sales of Orange 1 in the short term.

This accelerated the saturation of the orange 1 market in Shenzhen, causing wholesalers to start distributing the goods to their respective downstream distributors after finding no profit in the local market.

Chen Mo put a lot of effort into the sales of Orange 1, since sales were directly related to the core R&D points of the phone's cutting-edge technology system.

The retail price of Orange 1 is 499. This was something Chen Mo had thought about carefully that night, so that it could also cater to the 6 million people with a monthly income of less than 1000 yuan.

After all, rich people can be down-to-earth and buy cheap goods out of curiosity but never use them. But truly poor people really can't afford to buy luxury goods!

What Chen Mo needs to do is to make the pricing of Orange mobile phones more accessible to a wider range of people.

To maximize the reach of the target audience for terminal pricing.

Making money is not Orange Phone's primary goal; sales volume and R&D are.

As technological levels of gaseous lithium battery products emerged, Orange Mobile could use the most advanced technology to sell products with slightly less advanced technology, thereby generating revenue and supporting its core mobile phone manufacturing business.

Let's set a small goal first.

In the Shenzhen market, we will distribute one million units in the remaining two weeks of June!
(End of this chapter)