Those Years When I Was Forced to Top the Forbes List

Chapter 256 Growing Enterprises
The next day.

MediaTek has begun to take steps to mitigate the negative impact.

They bear subjective responsibility for this time lock incident. Their agent management was also not standardized. They took advantage of the lack of alternatives to arbitrarily raise prices for a long time, which aroused public anger.

Without saying a word, they quickly brought in a software team from Taiwan, and in just over a week, they cracked several backdoor programs set up by Lin Bin and began to unlock those "time-locked" phones.

Seeing that Spreadtrum was gaining market reputation through various services, MediaTek issued a security commitment statement to all customers.

We promise that we will never set time locks for customers again, and we will be responsible for unlocking the locked devices with MediaTek chips this time, and will subsidize the shipping cost by 50 yuan.

Starting with the latest batch of chip serial numbers, if a chip-related malfunction occurs again, it will be repaired free of charge. If the malfunction is MediaTek's responsibility, it will be compensated at 300% of the chip price.

Below is a disclaimer in parentheses:
(If the chip failure is detected to be caused by the following behaviors: disassembling and reassembling under the guise of "3G upgrade", modifying the circuit using non-MTK certified EDA tools, reverse engineering to capture GDSII files, implanting malicious code through third-party IP cores, etc., no compensation or repair will be provided, and technical evidence will be collected and the case will be reported to the police.)

The big companies are still very meticulous. They did not admit that MediaTek was at fault, and the 50 yuan was a "shipping subsidy" rather than "compensation".

Not wanting to escalate the situation by getting entangled with Spreadtrum, MediaTek did not mention Spreadtrum's name in its statement, but instead revealed their methods, thus intimidating MediaTek's customers: We can find out the reason, so don't cooperate with Spreadtrum in causing trouble.

At the time the statement was issued, MediaTek's sales team had also found new distributors and started contacting major markets and manufacturers to lower prices in preparation for regaining lost market share.

The market turmoil subsided within just one day of the statement being issued.

"We still didn't get enough! Over a hundred thousand units simply aren't enough!"

Huo Xiaowen ran to Chen Xuebing's office, cursing: "This morning I took a few bosses to them to unlock the devices and demand compensation. We were planning to make a scene, but they just plugged in the data cable, and the signal was back on in just over ten seconds. They were too quick! I reckon they'll be free to fight us in a few days! They only paid a few million. We should have gotten a million units from them in the first place, fifty yuan each, ha! Let's see if they dare to pay!"

Chen Xuebing was chatting with Lu Weibing and Lin Bin when he heard him come in complaining, so they all smiled and didn't say anything.

Huo Xiaowen stared wide-eyed and said, "Aren't you worried? You promised Spreadtrum that you wouldn't engage in a price war, and now we've run out of leverage. They've started lowering prices again. What are we going to do?"

The three of them laughed again.

Huo Xiaowen was getting a little anxious.

At this moment, Chen Xuejin, who was sitting behind Chen Xuebing's desk playing on the computer, suddenly said, "You guys have MediaTek chips? So many!"

Huo Xiaowen was dumbfounded: "Where did these chips come from? Goods flow out of Huaqiangbei extremely quickly. They waited more than a week before issuing the announcement, and by then, most of the machines that were working properly had already been sold. The new chips all have new serial numbers, and now we can't even buy them back! We can't just buy back all the machines that they've already sold, can we? Chips only cost a hundred or so yuan, while machines cost hundreds or thousands of yuan each! That would be a huge loss!"

Chen Xuejin looked at Huo Xiaowen with suspicion. After a long while, realizing that he wasn't pretending to be stupid, she spoke again:

"They were taken out of my 3G phone after I upgraded! Weren't they all piled up in the warehouse after I took them out?"

"Oh no!!" Huo Xiaowen slapped his forehead: "Those phones, a lot of them were probably from big manufacturers, right? They don't have time locks! Will they even recognize them?"

Lin Bin then laughed and said, "It's not some high-end technology, just a time verification program for the baseband. They've already cracked the encrypted signature they locked. I'll just install one for them and give them a new trigger program. That should keep them entertained for a few days."

Chen Xuebing also smiled:

“We took advantage of the time difference. When we upgraded to 3G, we released a batch of time-locked devices. They thought we were doing something with these replaced chips. They calculated how many phones we upgraded and the number of problematic devices on the market. They thought we had no stock, so they issued this announcement.”

“We’ve been waiting for them to promise to take responsibility. This time, we’ll catch them off guard, put the replaced chips back into the machines, and take a batch of them every day to have them unlocked. If they can’t unlock it, we’ll make them pay three times the compensation. If they don’t pay, we’ll make a scene.”

"Holy crap!" Huo Xiaowen's expression instantly turned to surprise: "How many chips does Spreadtrum have?"

Chen Xuebing chuckled: "Nearly 30 yuan. If you use it sparingly, it'll be enough for you to cause trouble for a month."

The original batch of replaced chips could only be sold cheaply, while the customized second-hand chips could not fetch much price.

联发科2G集成是0.18微米主制程，成本最多7-8美元，卖11-13美元。

Second-hand items that have been dismantled are also bought, but they only fetch a maximum of twenty or thirty yuan, which is equivalent to a little over three US dollars.

Spreadtrum's 3G chip integrates a 0.13-micron tri-band baseband chip, a 0.18-micron application processor chip, an RF chip, a power management chip, etc., with a manufacturing cost of $13, not including R&D costs. The normal market price is over $20.

Each generation of manufacturing process has its own price. With the 90nm process, the manufacturing cost of a single baseband chip can reach more than ten dollars. The cost of 65nm is even more exaggerated. In addition to the cost, the most advanced process also has an extremely high premium.

Spreadtrum was originally going to subsidize a large portion of this batch of 3G chips.

That's great, they've guaranteed a minimum subsidy of 50 yuan.

The exchange rate has just broken 8, which is equivalent to 6.25 US dollars. In addition, after unlocking, the chips can be sold back, and most of the cost of this batch of chips has been recovered. If we make a fuss, we might be able to both annoy MediaTek and raise the price, directly covering the cost of Spreadtrum's subsidies.

"Ha, if he can't untie it, I'll make him take it back for the original price of one hundred yuan!" Huo Xiaowen felt emboldened and went off to cause trouble with great fanfare.

None of the three cared about the few tens of dollars; their main concern was to keep MediaTek's reputation bad and create market space for Spreadtrum.

Lin Bin looked at Chen Xuejin with a touch of emotion: "Only seven years old?"

Chen Xuebing nodded: "He's not full yet. He'll be full when he's in second grade."

"What a genius!" Lu Weibing said. "He just started school late. Many of my classmates started elementary school at four or five years old. He's skipping grades now, but it's not too late."

Lu Weibing is from the Department of Chemistry at Tsinghua University and has seen many young geniuses. It is extremely difficult for him to say such a thing.

During this time, Chen Xuejin's intelligence had become known throughout the company. Although Chen Xuebing told his younger brother to talk less and observe more, the two girls in the IC department gradually discovered his unusual nature when they tutored him.

He knows the answer to any question.

Human curiosity is like playing with that punching machine that's all the rage on TikTok. If you put a piece of iron on it and it's easily flattened, you'll want to try a piece of steel. If that's broken too, you'll try something strange like cannonballs or grenades.

Chen Xuejin's academic knowledge was not actually very deep; he had no background in physics or chemistry. However, his breadth of knowledge and comprehension were his strengths. He knew a little about anything you asked him. He could talk about the class, order, and genus of plants and animals, as well as their characteristics, habits, and some unique phenomena. He had a basic grasp of high-frequency English vocabulary and could even guess the meaning of some words that required specific analysis based on the relevant content. He could explain some classic problems in Hua Luogeng's Mathematics, which even top students had forgotten how to solve and needed to ponder for a long time.

And she's also learning piano.

The two girls tried to teach him the basics of C language, including conditional statements, loop control, and some logical operators. He was very interested and spent an afternoon learning. He even managed to write a calculation program that included addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. After studying it for a short while, he wrote a 21-line "guess the number" program. The program could randomly generate a number between 1 and 100, and would prompt the user if the input was too big or too small.

The usually quiet IC department was extremely excited. They called Chen Xuebing over to play, and he guessed the answer more than ten times before finally figuring it out. The program then prompted, "Anyone who takes more than seven tries to guess it is an idiot."

The people in the IC department weren't stupid. Starting from the middle of 100 numbers, they could guess the exact answer in at most six tries. Everyone got the same result: "Congratulations." Only Chen Xuebing was ridiculed.

Chen Xuebing was very happy.

My family has a programmer now!

7 years old!
Those things weren't that complicated. After Chen Xuebing looked into them, he felt that the vocabulary and logic they contained weren't too complex, and he could learn them too, it would just take a little longer.

By yesterday, Chen Xuejin had already managed to create a basic interactive interface for an ATM machine that included functions such as "input validation," "error handling," "menu-driven," "log recording," and "UI beautification" by referring to reference books, and it ran successfully. The total code was 500 lines, but Lin Bin personally guided him and reduced it to 465 lines after removing some redundancies.

Chen Xuebing could no longer understand the logic behind it.

This kid isn't just making progress, he's evolving.

Yu Chunyan was overjoyed when she heard this. She had originally planned to stay for a few days and then take Chen Xuejin away, but now she said goodbye and went back to Chongqing, telling Chen Xuejin to stay until before the start of the semester.

Thinking of this, he couldn't help but smile.

"Hey, what's the point of skipping grades? In our family, we've always valued happy growth. We want him to be able to express his nature and play with his peers!"

Chen Xuebing slapped his thigh and stood up, chuckling, "Xuejin, come on, I'll take you out to play!"

"Where to?" Chen Xuejin asked without looking up. "Teacher Lin assigned me a task, and I haven't finished it yet!"

"Tsk, this is really interesting. Aren't you curious about how I invest and make money? I'll have an international professional accountant explain it to you!"

Chen Xuebing now truly understands how his uncle felt about him when he was reborn. With this child around, he has a good chance of retiring to the second line at the age of 40. Without the prophet, he might not be able to do a better job than Chen Xuejin.

Thinking back to his past life, the founders of those mega-companies were all worried about finding successors. He was so lucky, being groomed from a young age, and his own younger brother was no exception.

"Let's go, let's ask Teacher Lin for leave." Chen Xuebing waved his hand, very excited.

Chen Xuejin ran out from behind the desk, politely asked Lin Bin for leave, and then followed Chen Xuebing to find his finance teacher.

Lin Bin hesitated for a moment before choking on his words, but still waved him off.

Lu Weibing was also completely speechless.

Doesn't your family value natural instincts?

Going to the finance office to play?

Chen Xuebing and his younger brother had just reached the door, and before they even knocked, they heard someone being scolded inside. "What are mid-level thinking and low-level thinking?"

"What would you do if your CEO asked you to provide human resource cost data?"

"The underlying idea is like what you're doing now: put employees' salaries, social security benefits, etc., into a table."

"A good accountant will divide the work into departments, with one table per department, and then create a list line by line for each month."

"But these are all accounting approaches, not CFO approaches. You are the deputy chief financial officer, you need to learn financial management approaches! Don't just jump straight into financial accounts! These are things accountants do, not things you, as the deputy chief financial officer, should be doing."

"As the CFO, you first need to determine the CEO's motives and purpose in making this request. I'm asking you for this form now, so you should first determine what stage the company is currently in: is it growing, stable, or declining?"

"If it's a growth phase, my goal might be to increase performance and make the performance system more flexible and impactful. At this time, what you should be doing is not statistics, but the system."

"If the company is in a downturn, then I might need to reduce personnel costs, which could involve layoffs. You need to provide me with a solution. If you don't know how to provide a solution, you need to learn more about advanced cases and ensure that the business staff have a unified message. From the company's perspective, you need to proactively communicate with General Manager Lu to understand his recruitment, training, and other costs, clarify the overall costs, know which departments cannot be changed, which departments need to be merged, and whether the organizational structure needs to be adjusted. Otherwise, the results you produce will get you scolded by the CEO, the chairman, and the management."

"Compliance regulations also need to be understood."

"Financial management, the most basic thing is accounting, the second is tragedy, the third is internal control, the fourth is tax planning, the fifth is investment, mergers and acquisitions and financing, and the sixth is financial analysis and budgeting. Accounting is just the most basic manual labor. You only need to be able to understand accounting! The last five are the knowledge that the finance boss needs."

“A CFO (Chief Financial Officer) who has gone through the IPO stage can be transformed into CEO at any time. The company is definitely heading towards an IPO. You should adjust your mindset as soon as possible. You should at least consider how to assist the CFO. Don’t take an executive’s salary, do the work of a laborer, and still feel that you are very tired and making a great contribution.”

He received a merciless and harsh scolding.

Zhang Hang remained silent while being reprimanded by Cai Zhijian inside.

This time, Cai Zhijian led a team to audit Qidian Finance. The CFO, Lao Xiao, was in charge of lending to Chongqing companies and couldn't leave, so he brought Zhang Hang and three accountants with him.

Cai Zhijian is a rather lazy person who is used to directing others. This time, he was inevitably angry because he didn't have a suitable deputy to run the errands for him.

Criticism is good; it helps you improve quickly.

Chen Xuebing was actually listening to the reprimand outside the door.

After several seconds of silence inside, Chen Xuebing coughed and pushed the door open to enter.

"Chairman, you've arrived!" Cai Zhijian instantly wiped the speechlessness off his face and put on a smile.

Zhang Hang immediately stood up and stood to the side, looking like he had made a mistake.

Chen Xuebing patted Zhang Hang on the shoulder and smiled at Cai Zhijian, saying, "Thank you for your hard work. Please teach me more."

These four words were the most frequent thing he said to these managers who brought their abilities into the company.

Teach them more.

The company needs to train new employees; it needs more fresh blood.

He also needs to teach those he promotes a few trusted informants.

If these brothers were spoiled and arrogant, he would have let them go, but they've all been behaving quite steadily and without any trouble. So as long as they keep up with the work schedule, that's fine.

Upon hearing this, Cai Zhijian stood up and chuckled dryly, "Chairman, Mr. Zhang is actually quite good. I just think he's a rare talent and want to teach him more."

If he were an ordinary chairman, he wouldn't need to say such insincere words.

This chairman is different.

dictator.

Cai Zhijian was well aware of whether he had the power to serve as president and whether he could complete the three-year term, get paid, and leave smoothly—it was all up to Chen Xuebing to decide.

"No need for all this formalities, just criticize." Chen Xuebing smiled and waved as he walked in, leading Chen Xuejin to sit down on the sofa. He then asked:
"After listening to you talk about the CFO, what do you think of Lao Xiao?"

He immediately changed the subject, indicating that he didn't mind what had just happened.

Cai Zhijian hesitated for a moment.

"Very professional."

Chen Xuebing raised his eyebrows and then smiled, "Don't worry. I told Lao Xiao when he first joined the group that the most capable people would be promoted. He joined because of the high salary. I promised that if we had to fire him, we would give him a good retirement pension. When the company goes public, we can replace him in advance."

From startup to IPO, and then to becoming a leader in the industry, how many veterans can stay in the company until the end?

Before a company plans to go public, there is usually a major reshuffle of personnel, because once the company is in the process of going public, it is not advisable to move people in important positions casually, as this involves many issues of responsibility.

However, after thinking about it, Cai Zhijian still denied it, saying, "The group company only holds a controlling stake and will not be the listed entity. President Xiao is currently competent enough. However, we need to carefully select the CFO of the listed entity's subsidiary. We can decide on the group's CFO when we have more outstanding subsidiaries."

"It won't be long. You need to pay attention to the selection of Qidian's CFO, and also equip Gu'an Construction with a team," Chen Xuebing instructed.

As for the Long March, since Lao Kan is a strong-willed person, he plans to give Lao Kan some space to try it out himself and see how it goes.

Cai Zhijian gleaned some information from Chen Xuebing's words and, after some consideration, said, "If Gu'an Construction wants to expand vigorously, we can appoint General Manager Yu as Chairman and pair him with a capable General Manager, preferably a professional manager with relevant experience in managing large enterprises. This will facilitate the future division into different management models, such as engineering, technology, finance, and labor. We will need many subsidiaries, and there are many intricacies involved. We need to plan ahead."

"Hmm." Seeing that he understood what he meant, Chen Xuebing gave him a clear deadline: "Find this person by the first half of next year. By the way, you've been involved in quite a few restructurings before, right? Could you spare some time to help Changzheng Capital look at a few of the larger companies and do some restructuring planning for them?"

There are still a few decent-sized companies in the bundled bonds that are qualified for debt restructuring. It's just that the management thinking of the people in charge is too outdated. If those companies can be saved, he can recover his 400 million yuan cost of buying the bonds and make a lot of money.

“I’ve looked at a company, Chunying Special Steel, which owes us 2.2 million yuan and has a total debt of 5.6 million yuan.”

Cai Zhijian recalled the situation and slowly said:
“They have a separate audit report, which I took a look at. It doesn’t actually belong to small and medium-sized enterprises, but now there aren’t many workers left, and most of them are idle, so it was assigned to us. There was a situation of blind expansion before, and a new production line was built, which happened to coincide with the industry cycle downturn, so the capital chain broke.”

"The industry cycle is now recovering, and it can actually be saved completely, but the funding gap is too big."

"If the joint finance and legal team negotiates with the other bank they owe money to, offering installment payments with preferential interest rates, and discusses with the shareholders to borrow some money to pay off the first installment, thus enhancing their creditworthiness, and then negotiates with their previous suppliers to use land use rights as collateral and ask them to provide guarantees, along with the equity pledge of the company's actual controller, to apply for a special loan from the Agricultural Development Bank for green production subsidies, they might be able to completely revitalize their cash flow."

Chen Xuebing scratched his head, "Is a loan really that complicated?"

“This is not a large enterprise. Many state-owned enterprises have much more complicated debt restructuring than I described. They need to design several debt reduction strategies, and there are many techniques involved. Even this company needs an expert to be stationed there to provide guidance. You just happened to take Rong Xianwen away from me. If he were here, this company would actually have a lot of hope.”

"Heh, I'm relieved to hear that. It means Rong Xianwen is capable. But he can't come back for the time being, and things still need to be done. Why don't you use your connections to find me a few more suitable people?"

Chen Xuebing adopted an attitude of eagerly seeking talent and a smile that brooked no refusal.

"Okay, I'll get in touch with them."

Cai Zhijian smiled wryly. He knew many talented people, but given the speed of Gu'an's development, he didn't know how many capable people would be left after he left to start his own business in three years.

Rong Xianwen probably can't take it with him.

Chen Xuebing was also troubled by the lack of talent. He turned to Chen Xuejin and smiled:
"If you want to attend a prestigious university in the future, it's best to go to different schools for your undergraduate, master's, and doctoral degrees, understand?"

Chen Xuejin grinned: "Got it! I'll bring back some more talent for you!"

Having heard of Chen Xuejin's reputation these past few days, Cai Zhijian couldn't help but exclaim, "What a clever little genius! What brings you here?"

"Study! Teacher Cai, my brother says you're an international professional accountant!"

"Oh," Cai Zhijian's smile softened. "So, what do you want to learn from our conversation?"

Chen Xuejin had been wondering about this for a while and blurted out, "You just mentioned six elements of financial management. Shouldn't accounting be the foundation of the last five? Why do you think the last five are the most important? Shouldn't the foundation be laid first?"

Cai Zhijian smiled.

He glanced at Zhang Hang, hesitated for a moment, then patted Chen Xuejin's head and said directly:
"Because these basics should be learned in school. Once you enter society, everyone else is running hard, and no one will stop to wait for you to learn to walk."

"Oh," Chen Xuejin said thoughtfully.

Zhang Hang's expression changed slightly.

He suddenly understood the significance of his boss telling them to study hard.

Chen Xuebing felt instinctively embarrassed.

Then I suddenly remembered that I've been a top-tier university student my whole life, so what's so embarrassing?
Although I only spent a few days at university, I never stopped learning!
　Damn, I spent the whole night studying materials to continue the syllabus. If I had studied this hard when I was in school, I would have gotten into a top university. I didn't sleep all night, so I'm going to catch up on some sleep. I might update again tonight.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)