You have to invest 654.38+000 billion in chip research.
But if you buy from Qualcomm, you only need 50 billion yuan.
You got it?
This is how foreign countries praise your scientific and technological development. When you see that you are going to succeed, you will immediately reduce the price. Short-sighted people will not invest in research. Buy buy will buy it.
This is why Huawei is awesome! ! Where to support Huawei. . . Otherwise, I will still get stuck in the neck in the future. .
In fact, according to the domestic atmosphere, independent research and development is generally the right choice, with no return and high investment for more than ten years. What enterprise would make such a decision? But Huawei did it, so it was awesome.
Text/talk about technology
There are many reasons why domestic mobile phone manufacturers are afraid to make chips, which can be roughly summarized as follows:
① Large capital consumption, high technical threshold, long research and development cycle and high time cost. The company can't afford it
② product positioning.
(3) communication baseband limitation.
④ Pressure from Qualcomm.
As a result, these mobile phone manufacturers dare not develop chips, not only before, but now.
0 1. The threshold for developing chips is too high for ordinary mobile phone companies to bear.
Chip research and development is a project that needs long-term reinvestment. First of all, you need to recruit a large number of talents related to semiconductor circuit design to form a team, and you need to dig an experienced boss to be the helm of this team, master the overall situation, design the architecture and manage the team.
Such talents are very scarce, and most of them will be well protected by other chip design companies, and their annual salary is quite high.
Take Jim Keller (the founder of Apple A series, AMD Zen series and Tesla FSD chip), who is called "Silicon Fairy" by the industry. Although his annual salary is not known to the outside world, according to anecdotal evidence, it is at least at the level of 10 million dollars. In other words, to raise such a person, the annual salary alone will be nearly 100 million yuan.
Of course, you can also choose to train your own chip design team from scratch, just like Huawei, but it also takes a lot of time and capital costs. Moreover, this also requires the company to have a strong technology research and development atmosphere and be able to retain these people. Otherwise, the technicians can't stay at all. As long as you are a little better, other companies will come and dig for you. You have to start training from scratch.
Chip research and development itself is an industry that needs long-term accumulation. For a long time, it will be in a situation where there is only input and no return. If there is no other business line as a support or the enterprise itself has no technical genes, it is difficult to persist. The most terrible thing is that the R&D team lost confidence, and it's really over.
Moreover, the design of chips is an extremely challenging project for teamwork, especially for complex chips. Once the team is not running in enough, the chip can't be designed at all. Because a chip wants to be designed, many variables need to be considered, such as signal interference, heat distribution, the influence of different processes on the chip, magnetic field interference and so on. This requires a large number of different teams to work together, and the design of the chip cannot be flawed. If there is a problem, it needs to be completely reinvented, and personnel need to be reorganized for research and development, which is very big for the team's resource consumption and psychological blow.
In addition, the design of the chip also needs to buy licenses for various architectures, the simplest ARM architecture, and the license for the kernel, right? Another tens of millions of investments. After the design of each chip is completed, the software should be checked and simulated immediately to find out the errors, and the cost of each verification is tens of millions of dollars (one dollar for each door, at least tens of millions of mobile phone chips are needed at present, so you can calculate the cost yourself).
Then the chip test. The cost of a piece of film is about four or five million yuan, and it needs not only one time but also many times, which will cost tens of millions of dollars.
In a word, the design of the chip is still a very complicated system engineering that integrates various high-tech technologies, and the general company really can't play it.
Once, Xiaomi Lei always said that the price of chips in the future would be sand. However, when Xiaomi actually made the chip, he found that the chip was really difficult to make.
02 product positioning problem
Huawei entered the smart phone market as a high-end business machine from the beginning. The first generation of Huawei Mate was released on 20 13, and the price was 2699 yuan, which was higher than the domestic smart phone at that time. This is Huawei's positioning of its own models. In this case, Huawei can and must have more sufficient reasons to create certain differentiation. It is a good selling point to develop your own chips and pay attention to information security.
On the other hand, at that time, other domestic mobile phone brands mainly took cost performance as their main selling point. For the products of these companies, they only need to ensure the cost performance and popularity of mobile phones, and do not need to think too much about the so-called exclusive technological advantages. For them, technology will never be valuable in marketing.
03. Limitation of Baseband Chip
If the first few dimensions can be solved, baseband is a difficult threshold to bypass. The main reason why many chip design companies fail in mobile phone chips is that they can't play baseband. The well-known giants, including NVIDIA, Broadcom and Texas Instruments, have successively launched mobile phone chips, but all of them ended in failure.
Because the design of baseband chips not only needs strong chip design ability, but also needs design companies to have a lot of practical experience and good cooperative relations in the communication field, because any baseband needs large-scale compatibility testing with global operators.
Moreover, baseband also involves extremely complicated patent issues. Many early communication patents were occupied by Qualcomm. If you don't have a good communication patent to cross-license with Qualcomm to reduce the patent fee, the cost of the baseband chip you developed is very high. In this way, the cost of the chip you make may be higher than that of Qualcomm, and its performance may not be as good as others'. What do you want to do?
Look at these domestic mobile phone companies. In addition to Huawei, only VIVO can be regarded as a company with certain precipitation in communication (once a communication company under BBK), and other mobile phone brands have little precipitation in communication. In this case, is it possible for you to let him make his own baseband chip? Not much better than apples.
At that time, the baseband of the 2855438+0 chip produced by Xiaomi was the baseband of Lian Xin, and its performance was very weak, as shown in the following figure, which could not be compared with other baseband.
04. Pressure from Qualcomm
The relationship between domestic mobile phone brands and Qualcomm is too deep now. It can be said that once Qualcomm gets stuck in the neck, these domestic mobile phone brands will be finished immediately. In this case, they have to consider Qualcomm's attitude, and making the chip itself is a challenge to Qualcomm. In this case, do you think Qualcomm will be a good man and a good woman? Watching the chip you developed confront him? Forget it. Although it is impossible not to sell you chips, it is easy to beat you. Are you uncomfortable with delaying the supply time of chips, reducing the supply quantity and raising the price slightly? Domestic mobile phone companies can organize a boycott, but you may not have organized it before. This is the status quo.
Huawei is different. Initially, Huawei did not intend to cooperate deeply with Qualcomm in the production of smart phones. Qualcomm was the first supplier of low-end chips. After the rise of Kirin's low-end chips, even the low-end chips were not needed. This is the difference.
In short, it is too difficult for domestic mobile phone companies to independently develop chips, especially in a short period of time, it is impossible to have a second Huawei HiSilicon.
It's just skin. There is no need to blow. No one else thought of it before. The skin is studied by ourselves.
Everyone knows how high the cost of self-developed chips is.
First of all, the research chip is a bottomless pit, and it can't be supported without a certain amount of capital investment. Huawei is the leader in the communication industry, and Huawei is willing to invest in Hisilicon to be Kirin now.
Secondly, entering the chip circle is not necessarily a cost. Every time the chip is streamed, it is basically in billions. Few companies can stand the failure several times. After all, there are only a few companies with sufficient cash flow now.
Finally: research and development takes a long time, and it is not successful as soon as you enter the circle. After investing money, it may take several years to see the effect, or it may disappear directly.
So Huawei can have HiSilicon Kirin, or a mature chip. Everyone should be proud. Of course, now Xiaomi oppovivo and other companies have grown up and started to want to invest in this area. This is a good thing, but don't be partial.
Not now! Have a PPT conference and the stock price will go up. Whoever has nothing to do that dirty work smells good.
The general psychology of people is "why do you have to do it yourself when you are ready?"
Off-topic, I have worked in China for more than six years, and I have seen a common phenomenon: "If you can be lazy, you will be lazy, but if you can't be lazy, you will procrastinate." Some customer service materials are ambiguous, so that they can communicate clearly with customers. Nine times out of ten, they don't communicate with customers, or say "I guess it should be …" in person, or they will tell you what to do every few hours. In the end, most of them are wrong and need to be corrected. Some of them are that customer service doesn't communicate well with customers, and some customers are also believers in "being lazy if you can, not being lazy". Anyway, what they are best at is to let themselves do less. There is no shortage of such talents in the production department. Some materials are used by others, and they will wait for others to make them first, and then pick them up for use.
To get to the point, the above digression just wants to illustrate the mentality of most people. "If you can't do it, try not to do it." As simple as the above, people can still be lazy. The most difficult part of the mobile phone chip is already available. Why work hard on yourself?
Maybe everyone has heard the logical statement: "It is impossible to get this thing. If it's so easy to do, and everyone else is doing well, which is our turn? " This negative psychological suggestion. In fact, there are not a few such people. They all believe that they can't do it, so they will only do their own processing plants with peace of mind and dare not dream of chips.
Finally, research and development funds and talents. Basically, as an enterprise, not an academic institution, R&D must be funded by itself. As we all know, Chip R&D is a huge financial black hole. You only have R&D talents without profit support and R&D. In a few years, the company will lose money. How many companies can sustain this investment? At present, there is only Huawei in the mobile phone circle in China.
Many years ago, there was no major conflict between China and the West. The west pays attention to Russia and the Middle East, but they are really developed. Universities in China should study western economics as long as they are related to the economy. It can be said that China really wants to learn from the West. Many entrepreneurs in China also sincerely believe that building is better than buying, and buying is better than renting. Lenovo used to have it, but now Xiaomi has it. Both executives have said similar things and can be said to be good students of western economics.
A start-up enterprise, with limited funds, needs to buy all kinds of raw materials, artificial wages and so on. And there is really little money to invest in R&D, and there are mature and reliable raw materials on the market. If you invest in R&D yourself, you may have just fallen behind, and the money has basically reached Shui Piao. As a company decision-maker, it is foolish not to buy other people's products directly. Ni Guangnan and Ren Du were therefore spit out, so it is not difficult to understand the choices of Lenovo, Xiaomi and other enterprises. One way is to invest 654.38 billion yuan every year for five consecutive years, with a success probability of 5%. If successful, there will be a profit of 65.438 billion yuan. If you don't succeed, you won't get a penny back. The other is to buy directly without investment, with a success probability of 95% and a profit of 654.38+00 billion. If it were you, what would you choose?
Perhaps these enterprises attracted western economics so well that they forgot the first lesson, that is, the whole theory of western economics. There is an assumption that people are rational people and there is no external intervention in the market, but it does not exist in reality. However, some business owners still believe in the theory of buying better than building better, fail to realize the reality and act as thugs of western capital. I believe it will not come to a good end.
Of course, most enterprises wake up from a dream around 20 18. The United States also provides China with leading enterprises, universities and individuals in science and technology. Now everyone in China knows that it is better to rely on others than on yourself. It's a little late, but it's better than nothing.
Eating meat costs a lot of money, and it's enough to have someone else's bones to chew on. Huawei's current situation is that rich people don't sell your pork, but they have to consider raising pigs themselves.
Chip talent investment is very large, without a good talent incentive mechanism, no matter how rich you are, you will get twice the result with half the effort, and the failure rate is very high. No one doesn't want to make chips. Look at Motorola, look at Intel, and look at AMD.