You promised to build cars, so why did you go into the military industry?

Chapter 81 The Largest Accessory Supplier for Fruit

On July 1, the Chang 6-1, after thorough cleaning and maintenance, reappeared in the public eye.

Unlike the first test, the rocket body was not repainted this time. The marks left by the high-temperature burning on the core stage shell were completely preserved, and only the areas where the heat protection layer was burned too deeply were repaired.

From the transfer to the erection, the entire process was filmed by cameras, and the comments section in the online live stream was filled with messages.

At 8:00 a.m. sharp, the news channel's live broadcast officially began.

Three hours later, the Long March 6-1A rocket took off smoothly.

Within three minutes of takeoff, the core stage was successfully recovered quickly, and the landing accuracy was significantly improved compared to the previous one. The rocket body landed almost squarely on the charred mark in the center of the landing site.

The upper stage once again demonstrated the feat of launching twenty satellites in one go. Twenty satellites at different orbital altitudes were deployed in sequence after the separation command was issued, and the ground control station confirmed the orbital accuracy of each satellite one by one in the following hour.

The launch date happened to fall on the first day of July, which added a layer of commemorative significance to the mission.

Lin Yu and his team watched the entire recovery process in the testing and launch hall.

After confirming the separation of the star and rocket, he gave each of the engineers around him a high-five.

At noon, the employees held a simple celebration banquet in the internal canteen.

After the banquet, Lin Yu led the team back to Gaolu Town.

Before parting, Lü Chaoping held his hand and said, "I'll finish up the remaining work here, which will take about a week."

I'll come find you guys then, and we can sit down and have a proper chat about how to design this ZK-308.

On July 18, United Industries suddenly increased its purchases of photoresist.

Feng Manjie noticed this unusual behavior.

The purchase volume suddenly jumped up significantly without any new production lines coming online. This is either because the existing chip production lines are operating at full capacity or because a new chip model has started trial production.

Both possibilities warrant reporting back.

Just as she was figuring out how to subtly find out the specific reason, Chen Shu brought something up during dinner.

That evening, the two ate at Feng Manjie's home in the staff quarters. On the table were three dishes and a soup that Feng Manjie had prepared herself, and the air conditioner was humming and blowing cold air.

"Do you remember the phone we use internally?" Chen Shu put his chopsticks down on the edge of his bowl, his tone casual, as if he were talking about something trivial. "The company plans to officially release it to the public at a suitable time. I'll be stationed at the factory for the next while to oversee the production line debugging, so we'll probably be apart a lot. I wanted to let you know in advance."

Feng Manjie paused for a moment as she picked up the braised pork, the chopsticks making a soft, crisp sound against the rim of the bowl.

She picked up the piece of braised pork and put it in Chen Shu's bowl, saying with concern, "Don't overwork yourself. Take a break when you need to. Your health is the most important thing."

After the phone that I had just received was stolen, a few days later, a fire broke out at Apple's headquarters with an unknown cause. The official report said it was caused by an employee's violation of electricity regulations.

The coincidence of this event made her uneasy.

Later, Chen Shu brought her a new cell phone and told her that the one from last time had been found.

This made her think for a moment that she had been exposed.

It wasn't until the National Day holiday, when the two of them took a ferry to Hainan Island, that she used professional testing equipment provided by her superiors to carefully scan their mobile phones.

Fortunately, after confirming that there were no listening devices, she was finally relieved.

At that time, she had even prepared a plan to find an opportunity to escape on Hainan Island, and had prepared a backup identity and a route to leave the island in advance.

Thankfully, it was just a false alarm.

But now United Industries is officially entering the smartphone industry.

While washing the dishes, Feng Manjie went through the whole thing again and found that there was one problem she just couldn't figure out.

A heavy industrial company that manufactures cars and rockets is clearly emulating Elon M's development path.

Why are you suddenly starting to make consumer electronics?

It's not that it's impossible, but why do we have to make our own chips when we're just selling a mobile phone?

In this industry, whether it's a well-established manufacturer or a newcomer, no one would choose to enter the market in this way.

Qualcomm's solutions are mature and stable, MediaTek's prices are so low that there is almost no barrier to entry, and if all else fails, you can find TSMC to manufacture a custom-packaged chip.

The cost of purchasing and maintaining lithography machines alone is astronomical, not to mention the waste wafers burned during the yield ramp-up period.

If Mr. Lei heard this question in Feng Manjie's mind, he would probably give a serious and "necessary" answer.

Since United Industries sent test prototypes to dozens of mobile phone and digital bloggers for evaluation, news has also circulated in the industry that United Industries has made large-scale purchases of photoresist, instantly plunging the entire mobile phone industry into a state of high tension.

Those competitors who were forced to survive by Xiaomi's cost-effective smartphones felt a sense of suffocation upon hearing this news.

They've seen what United Industries has done in the automotive industry before: developing their own electric drive systems, powertrains, vehicle bodies, vehicle infotainment chips and operating systems, and then driving down the price of the whole vehicle to a level that competitors simply can't keep up with.

Now it's going to use the same strategy to enter the mobile phone industry.

What made some of our more powerful competitors even more uneasy was that the tech bloggers they were collaborating with successively sent back their test results and even sent their phones to them:

The chip used in this phone from United Industries is indeed completely different from mainstream products on the market. The instruction set architecture is self-developed. The benchmark scores are not impressive, and are even much lower than those of flagship chips of the same period. However, the actual user experience is very smooth, and the opening speed of daily applications is not noticeably different from that of Qualcomm's flagship chips.

One point repeatedly mentioned by bloggers is: "Performance is not outstanding, but it will definitely not lag."

If this chip is officially labeled as a "domestic chip" and "aerospace quality" upon release, and capitalizes on the growing nationalistic sentiment and aerospace boom of the past two years, its sales are likely to be quite good.

What surprised reviewers and competitors the most was the phone's operating system.

It can even make iOS and Android apps run smoothly at the same time, without the need for an emulator or translation layer. Both can be opened and switched in the same desktop environment, with almost no difference from the native experience.

In a review video, a blogger simultaneously opened the Apple App Store and a third-party app market on Android, downloaded the same game on both, and ran both versions at the same time, with the screens displayed side-by-side in a split-screen format.

The video garnered over 300,000 views in less than 24 hours.

The comments section was in complete chaos. Some said it was implemented using a virtual machine, others said that United Industries had created its own complete API translation layer, and still others confidently claimed that someone inside Apple had leaked some of the underlying code.

Lei learned about this from a post on his WeChat Moments.

He had just finished a supply chain coordination meeting and was leaning back in his office chair when he casually scrolled through his phone and saw that a colleague had forwarded a review.

The title reads "Joint Industrial Mobile Phone First Review: Cross-System Compatibility Test".

He opened and watched the whole thing, then put down his phone and remained silent in his office for a long while.

At that moment, he almost experienced what Boss Wang felt at the launch event for the Lingyun SU7.

As an entrepreneur who has always wanted to integrate the upstream supply chain to increase his bargaining power, he understands better than anyone how significant the cost advantages of a full industry chain layout really are.

The mobile phone industry is ultimately a war of supply chains: screens, chips, memory, cameras, batteries —

Each and every one of them is controlled by the upstream suppliers.

While manufacturers may appear to be selling phones, they are actually working for the supply chain.

United Industries' combination of self-developed chips and self-developed operating systems effectively bypasses the two biggest hurdles: Qualcomm and Android.

It's not just a matter of saving a little bit; it's about the other party taking control of the entire pricing system.

He used all his connections and successfully obtained a test unit from a review blogger in one day.

After playing with it for a whole morning, he took out the Migraine Note from the drawer and placed it next to him. The two phones were placed side by side on the table, with the same software running on their screens.

Seeing that the United Industries test machine was rendering at a speed comparable to his own phone, he subconsciously complained, "They always say we're the biggest accessory supplier for Apple, isn't that just nonsense?"

We still can't achieve a seamless experience for cross-platform file transfer, let alone system-level compatibility.

United Industries is the real largest parts supplier.

It not only integrates with Apple's app ecosystem, but also conveniently includes Android apps.

He flipped the test machine over and glanced at the solar panel on the back, which had undergone a special coating treatment.

The patch is very thin, flush with the back panel of the vehicle body, and appears as a very low-key dark purple under indoor lighting, exactly the same color as the solar panel on the roof of the Lingyun SU7.

This detail added another layer of concern to Mr. Lei's mind.

United Industries isn't just selling phones; it's trying to use a complete ecosystem to retain consumers.

Cars, in-vehicle infotainment systems, mobile phones—will we see tablets, computers, and wearable devices coming out next?

He handed the test unit to the R&D manager beside him, his tone carrying a complex emotion: "Let the reverse engineering team dismantle it."

Let's see how they actually did it.