Image source @Visual China
Text | Cube Zhifa Bureau, Author | Li Yun, Editor | Sun Pengfei, Tang Xiaoyuan
Liang Zhaoxian Realize: Three generations of people step into the same river.
As the second generation chairman of Galanz , after experiencing the turmoil of the era such as microwave oven sales miracle and price butcher controversy, Liang Zhaoxian is facing the next generation of handovers of huge industrial changes.
He and Galanz were both born in Shunde, Guangdong.
In the 1980s, during the summer vacation of college, every time I returned from Guangzhou to my home in Shunde, my father always asked me to go to the down factory to dry sunflower fans. The poisonous sun in Guangdong lifts up a layer of transpiration oil film on the gray-cyan cement board. Liang Zhaoxian walked past, and the soles of the feet were itchy.
Ten years ago, on the river beach in Guizhou Town, Shunde, my father guarded the surrounding desolate village scenery and several shacks and started his business. First there are chicken feathers and duck feathers, then feather dusters and down... This is why the current factory is available.
Liang Zhaoxian cannot understand why his father wanted to let the top students go to the factory to suffer. Later, the down factory transformed into the home appliance industry and renamed it "Guangdong Galanz Enterprise". The name was chosen by the father of the junior college diploma: "Galanz". "Shining" in Greek , "G" represents Guangdong and Guizhou.
Shunde, The green plains bred by the Pearl River and its tributaries are connected to Guangzhou in the north and Zhongshan in the south. The waterways in the domain are crisscrossed and are once famous for their fish ponds and silk.
In ancient times, this kind of scene was common in Shunde: ships of platinum silk were gone; on the ship that was sailing back, the stacked silver ingots trembled slowly and fell to the hull.
Nowadays, home appliances have replaced silk reels and become the currency produced in Shunde. As the home appliance town of China and the world's home appliance capital, the air conditioners, microwave ovens, coffee machines and other products manufactured in Shunde account for the world's largest share.
According to online data from this year's "Double Twelve" Suning.com , the sales growth of the new generation of refrigerators and air conditioners was 58% and 89% respectively, ranking among the top in the category rankings. Home appliances have become the most popular consumer product on Chinese e-commerce platforms today.
In this hot Chinese home appliance market, the figure of Shunde cannot be ignored. In half a century, Shunde has bred leading companies such as Midea, Kelon, and Galanz, and has also produced new companies such as Bear , Yunmi , and Delma .
As of December 10, a list of listed companies in Shunde home appliances A shares Data source: Tonghuashun iFinD Drawing: Cube Zhizhuan
From the era of Industry 2.0 to Industry 4.0, Shunde home appliance companies started with parts and experienced a double stagnation period of market and technology. After years of tolerance and accumulation, we finally found a new direction in intelligent innovation.
The story here contains various emotions such as 's excitement, depression, alertness, confusion, and confusion. Home appliances in Shunde once worked in a manual workshop filled with hammers and hammers, and were also shuttled through high-tech scenarios where robots responded to.
Facing the surge, as long as you continue sailing, there will always be new opportunities.
01 Local troops in the "Little Tigers"
1 In 987, Guangdong's "Little Tigers" was officially established in a report titled "The Four Little Tigers in Guangdong Leaping Up" by Xinhua News Agency. The four little tigers include Dongguan, Nanhai , Zhongshan , and Shunde."tigers" have their own outstanding economic performance.
sociologist Fei Xiaotong came to inspect the country and summarized the development characteristics of the four little tigers: Dongguan is foreign gun team , the South China Sea is guerrillas, Zhongshan is the national team, and Shunde is the local army. means that Dongguan relies on foreign business operations; Nanhai relies on village-run small enterprises; Zhongshan relies on municipal enterprises; Shunde relies on town-run enterprises.
Fei Xiaotong came to Guangdong for inspection Source: "Outlook Weekly"
The predecessor of Shunde Town-run enterprises was a community enterprise that quietly developed in the commune era.
968. Young people from all countries migrate among the red storm eyes like migratory birds. At this time, in Shunde, a 26-year-old street cadre, He Xiangjian, found 23 villagers, built a 20-square-meter factory with bamboo and wood asphalt paper, and established a plastic production team in Beijiao Street Office to specifically press plastic bottle caps.Seven years later, the investment of the production team's 5,000 yuan became 100,000 yuan. The product also changes from bottle caps to plastic hoses to auto accessories. In 1980, the first metal electric fan in the group was released from the factory, and the production team was renamed Shunde County Beijiao Commune Electrical Factory. , the appliance factory, later became Midea Group , with a market value of 500 billion.
Midea's first electric fan: Mingzhu brand Photo source: Sohu.com
Also in the 1980s, in a simple work shed of a town-run enterprise in Ronggui Town, Shunde, workers used hand hammers and hand files to knock out the first two-door refrigerator in China. At that time, people from Shunde would bring back an electrical appliance when they went to Hong Kong and Macao to visit relatives. After dismantling and imitating the small workshop, it found the production program of home appliances, thus cultivating the first batch of local home appliance manufacturers.
0s Rongsheng Refrigerator Advertising Photo source: Shunde Roaming In the early days, Shunde's economic conditions were not good and the original capital was limited. Take Rongqi Town as an example: there are more than 30,000 local residents, of which 7,000 have no jobs. People can only split bamboo to subsidize their household income, and earn a penny with one chopstick.
has nothing, only one pair of hands. This situation has also led to the development mode of " three to one supplement ", that is, processing of incoming materials, assembly of incoming parts, processing of incoming samples and compensating in . Overseas Chinese and Hong Kong businessmen provide technology, equipment, and raw materials, and workers and factories in Shunde provide them. The two parties agreed to repay the equipment payment based on processing fees. In this way, Shunde had China's first "three come and one supplement" factory - Large Crop Garment Factory.
Dajin Garment Factory Jeans Production Workshop Photography: Li Erkuan
From 1983 to 1988, Shunde set off firecrackers every day, celebrated and started construction ceremonies, and enterprises opened almost every day. By 1990, the county's fiscal revenue was 497 million yuan, ranking first among the county-level fiscal in the country. Among the top ten township enterprises in the country selected by the Ministry of Agriculture , five are in Shunde.
The name of "Little Tiger" seems to mean: in the eyes of outsiders, the outbreak in Shunde is a typical adolescent adventure story - young people are the first to enter the new world because of rebellion, courage, and opportunities.
However, after getting ashore, the story has just begun.
02 The fate of an air conditioner factory
No one expected that the first stone that stumped Shunde home appliance companies was the asset reform that the local government had been looking forward to for a long time and the market-oriented competition that followed.
In the 1990s, people walked out of the doors of state-owned factories and into self-employed pavers and shops. Businessmen who lack capital operation experience step into unknown currents full of risks and opportunities, the first thing they feel is the coldness of the sea water.
993, property rights reform. The people of Shunde, who are in the limelight, hope to get greater help from external capital, and the county government first thought of Hong Kong businessmen. After all, Hong Kong businessmen are close to each other, have strong strength and a foundation for cooperation.Stills from the Hong Kong drama " Great Era ". The fierce capital games in the 1990s were pouring in.
In this way, the Shunde government sold 644 million yuan of shares of Huabao Air Conditioning Factory to Hong Kong Shell Electric. According to the development plan, the output value after the joint venture will reach 5 billion.
Huabao Air Conditioning Factory is the producer of China's first split air conditioner. In 1993, the air conditioner output value reached 2 billion. However, in less than a year, China's number one air conditioning brand terminated its contract because it could not be run-in with Hong Kong capital.
Huabao split wall-mounted air conditioner KF-19G1A Source: Beijiao neighbor
Shell took over Huabao and proposed the "You ask for money, I ask for strength" . The old employees lost the initiative in decision-making, and "entrepreneurs" became "workers". , and the problems of Shell's shortage of funds and differences in production regulations during the period, there have been constant conflicts between China and Hong Kong. In November 1994, Shell announced its withdrawal from 60% of the property rights. The olive branch issued by grafting technology and capital once gave Shunde a shortcut; however, the incompatibility and inequality of the business models of both parties on this road have pushed entrepreneurs away from this road.
The gravity and repulsion coexisting in external capital surfaced for the first time at this historical turning point.
capital law seems to have laid the foreshadowing here.In several years, Shunde's electrical appliance manufacturing industry will face the magic and traps from external capital and markets more than once.
Shunde bought Huabao again, and lost 340 million yuan in one round. Before I could breathe, time had arrived in front of the Millennium.
Hong Kong sunset ceremony in 1997, and then to Faye Wong and Na Ying sang "Meet the 1998" together. The reason why these classic moments of the late 1990s were circulated was due to the popularity of home TV at that time.
From 1999, the number of TVs per 100 households in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou was 131, 137 and 152 respectively. What reflects the supply relationship of domestic home appliances, especially the "three major items", has become saturated. In order to seize the tight market share, a game of big fish eating small fish had to begin.
In this fish tank, Huabao was not spared.
On August 1, 1998, in the gymnasium of Rongqi Town, Shunde, nearly a thousand Huabao employees held the last employee meeting in silence. Walking out of the hall, some people quickly stuffed the Huabao employee logo on their chests into their pockets.
They are going to work at Kelong Air Conditioning Factory, which is separated by a bridge.
03 Turnaround after the millennium
Shunde’s home appliance industry is in a cage, in 2001, news that China joined WTO came.
Kelong, Midea, Galanz, and 0,000 Carre have become the first brands to go abroad. From 2001 to 2005, Shunde's total export trade volume was more than US$3 billion each year, of which the home appliance industry accounted for about 50%.
However, the industry is not optimistic about the development of China's home appliances after joining the WTO. Paler Consulting Company once made the prediction that China's home appliance brands will die on a large scale within about 5-10 years after joining the WTO.
has a reason to say this: after joining the WTO, some local home appliance companies will break away from the protection of local governments and face capital competition independently; at the same time, high-quality and high-tech foreign home appliances will actively intervene in the domestic home appliance market and weaken the already immature domestic brands.
prediction happened as scheduled. Taking refrigerators as an example, domestic brands still accounted for nearly 80% of the market share in 1999; however, by 2002, the share of domestic brands had dropped to less than 62% - nearly 18% of the market was lost in just three years.
is now the honeymoon period between Chinese and foreign brands. Walking on the street, there are advertisements for L'Oreal Paris everywhere; the classic ringtone of Motorola sounds from time to time from pedestrians to pockets; IKEA and Starbucks gather the most fashionable dates for men and women.
In addition to the advantages of the product itself, the foreign brand in the early 21st century was more like a dreamy telescope, providing various novel scenery for the people who are curious about the distant mainland.
In the situation where foreign brands are strong and eye-catching, Shunde home appliance companies must take advantage of the international trade gap to survive.
two ideas are in front of you: first, provide OEM services. Second, fight a price war.
In 2002, at the second Shunde International Household Appliances Expo, more than 130 companies participated in the exhibition. Deputy District Mayor Wang Ganlin said that the "Oriental Cologne Exhibition" should be created in Shunde. However, compared with Cologne Exhibition, there are particularly many OEM companies participating in the exhibition, with more than 40 companies.
Scene of the Second Shunde International Household Appliances Expo Picture source: "Electrical Appliance Manufacturer"
In the same year, China's home appliance exports have reached US$8.75 billion. Many people have not seen this excellent transcript, and there is a line of small words attached to it: processing trade accounts for 76% of the total.
Even if the company has already used a complete whole machine production line and a mature brand line, the technical bottleneck is a threshold that cannot be overcome. In 2006, my country has become the world's largest air conditioner production base. But in fact, manufacturers still need to continuously import the scroll compressor of the US Gulun Company and rely on Japan's core technology.
In Shunde, many home appliance companies like Galanz are falling into a vicious cycle:
has no money to do research and development, and it is difficult to make breakthroughs in products, so they have to lower prices, which will affect profits and even the entire company's operations.Galanz has long become the world's largest microwave oven manufacturer, and its key components of the product, magnetron , has been relying on imports for many years.
For a moment, China's home appliances fell into a price war. The 21-inch TV was once sold for 518 yuan in Chengdu; the market price of color tubes was 600 yuan at that time. In other words, when a manufacturer sells a color TV, sometimes even the money from a color tube cannot be recovered.
"Office Factory" and "price war" are as low as crows in the airspace of China's manufacturing industry, indicating the ominous prospects of domestic brands. Nowadays, when people look at it with a longer and more holistic perspective, they realize that this is not only a game to seize market share, but also inadvertently adding variables to the global market and reshaping the right to speak in chaos.
Let’s tell a story first.
Xinbao Electrical Appliances was once one of the OEMs in Shunde, and was doing well on the road of OEM processing. As the world's largest small household appliance OEM company, , there is a saying within the company: 100 million products exported each year can be placed on the equator every meter, and can be placed 2.5 circles.
But as soon as the private brand of Xinbao was put on the supermarket shelves, it became the unknown one. has accumulated more than 2,300 patent production technologies in recent years, all of which have been used to create other people's brands.
However, since 2016, the "Mofei Brand" Suitable Cup Juicer, multi-function pot, and portable charging juicer launched by Xinbao have become popular online one after another. After years of silence, Xinbao entered a period of rapid growth of its own brands.
"Mofei" was originally a high-end British electrical appliance company with a history of more than 70 years. In the last two decades, the company's production scale in the UK has been shrinking. Close factories, fire employees, and eventually, it has to use brand distribution as the company's main means of profitability.
Xinbao's hot product "Mofei Pot" Picture source: Mofei Electric Appliances China official website
Mofei first found Bajaj, an Indian electrical appliance OEM company, and agreed to manufacture, sell and market products under the brand name. Ten years later, Mofei reached an agency relationship with Xinbao. Mofei only charges a fixed brand usage fee, and Xinbao is responsible for the research and development, production and management of products in China. Behind the OEM from
OEM to the agent's self-operation, behind the sharp rise in profit margins and the increase in product autonomy is the long-term slow transformation of the world's home appliance manufacturing pattern by China's OEM experience and price sacrifice. Xinbao's offensive and defensive transformation is the result of some foreign brands similar to Mofei's market being replaced by mature and cheap products from China and other regions in Asia.
The industrial upgrading of Shunde home appliances is a group frame -
looking horizontally, it involves China and other labor-intensive countries, and has used quantity, price and labor to enhance its status in the global manufacturing territory;
looking vertically, 's previous generation overseas market precipitation will feed back the next generation's brand autonomy.
On the one hand, the early capital accumulation can promote the cooperation between home appliances and international high-end manufacturing technology holders in the later stage and improve the lack of old technology.
After 2010, as the capital chain tends to stabilize, more home appliance companies have withdrawn from price wars and move towards technological innovation. For example, in 2011, Midea and Toshiba Carrier established a joint R&D center for frequency conversion technology to master the " black box " technology of variable frequency air conditioning , making up for the long-term core technology shortcomings.
On the other hand, Xinbao's example also illustrates: using the overseas market advantages of domestic brands in exchange for domestic market experience of foreign brands, it will help domestic brands open up the domestic market.
The "China Home Appliance Market Report" shows that the retail sales of China's home appliance market reached 833.3 billion yuan in 2020. In 2020, Xinbao Company's domestic sales revenue increased by 67.00% year-on-year, and the domestic sales of other home appliance companies in Shunde have also increased steadily in recent years. Thirty years after being released, the Shunde home appliance industry began to enter the internal circulation stage.
Retail sales of China's home appliance market in 2020 Source: China Electronic Information Industry Development Research Institute
04 Robot is in Shunde
Shunde, a normal day.As usual, Liang Zhaoxian set out from Galanz headquarters and went to the factory for a meeting. After counting 34 traffic lights, the car finally arrived at the Zhongshan base. At this time, two hours had passed since departure.
In industrial clusters centered on Shunde, long-distance commuting like this is very common. This stems from the tension in industrial land in Shunde. On 70% of the industrial land, more than 19,000 small and medium-sized enterprises are gathered, but only contributes 27% of the industrial output value, making it a typical high-consumption and low-output plot.
Since 2018, Shunde District has begun to transform village-level industrial parks and regard it as the number one project to eliminate high-pollution, high-emission, and high-energy-consuming enterprises, and make room for to develop with high quality.
What Shunde does is not just a village reform and demolition project. On this construction map, most areas will be replaced by smart factories.
Shanghuacun Industrial Park Renovation Picture Source: Foshan Information Assistant
In recent years, European countries have generally implemented the " re-industrialization " strategy. IFR data shows that with the continuous development of my country's manufacturing industry and the promotion of the "Made in China 2025 Plan", China's manufacturing industry in the future will need nearly 3 million industrial robots to replace human labor, with a market size of hundreds of billions of yuan.
After half a century of twists and turns, corporate competition finally returned to the issue of labor and operational costs. This time, the hope of winning fell on the robot.
Shunde government encourages enterprises to transform themselves, and enterprises will provide a 10% subsidy if they buy a robot. At the same time, Shunde has also introduced more than 80 robots and related companies, including world robot industry giants such as Kuka , Fanac, and Kawasaki, as well as local robot companies such as Longshen, Jiateng, and Lixunda.
For different industries, intelligent manufacturing must find the right connection point. In other words, we must allow the intelligent technology that overflows in the intelligent transformation of the production line to be used for the upgrading of the native industry. For example, for the steel industry, raw material and energy consumption data are top priorities, and intelligent manufacturing has created "digital steel coils", and machines simulate in-depth application scenarios of products while producing.
Shunde's home appliance industry will focus on smart home appliances. simply put, it is necessary to use robots to produce home appliances and home appliance robots.
Shunde's robot production line Source: " Finance "
By 2025, the global smart home market size is expected to grow to US$135.3 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 11.6% during the forecast period. China will become the largest market.
Behind the huge market driving force, the "dual intelligence" strategy of Shunde's home appliance industry also depends on two important reasons: First, China's chip technology has made great breakthroughs in cost control and performance advantages. Secondly, the success of Shunde Xiaoxiong and Delma has made the home appliance industry pay more attention to customer experience in the development of product .
Let’s talk about the first point first: the home appliance industry belongs to the traditional manufacturing industry and has a low digital maturity. Enterprises' digital transformation of requires ride-sharing from other high-tech industries to achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvement. For China's home appliances, the growth of the chip industry is an opportunity to assign technological value.
Smart home appliances are commonly used to use the open source chip RISC-V. One of the features of RISC-V is that it allows anyone to design and manufacture it, and can add usage scenarios and equipment by themselves. This is a low-cost, customizable chip development architecture with great potential in the future.
In 2019, the Shunde government, Hengji Investment, and Galanz Group, government and enterprises jointly built an open source chip production and research city in Shunde. Chip companies such as Yuefang Technology and Saifang Technology have settled in one after another. At present, an open source + wireless connection chip BF2 is mass-produced in the first microwave oven product; the other end chip NB2 is about to be mass-produced and has signed contracts with many home appliance companies.
BF2 chip Source: Pacific Computer Network
Since microwave oven products have a large amount of radiation, they have high requirements for the reliability of the chip. The ability to apply RISC-V chips in such harsh scenarios shows that the IP design of domestic smart chips has made considerable breakthroughs.
At the same time, Chinese people can master the chip IP by themselves, and they can also create products for "adapt to the home appliance usage habits of Chinese-style " . This is very different from the model in the past by "Chinese consumers adapt to foreign home appliance products".
According to , the chip market in China's home appliance industry is about 50 billion yuan, with a local supporting rate of only 5%. With the widespread use of variable frequency and intelligent products, the home appliance chip market is expected to continue to grow, which is a shortcoming that is urgently needed in China.
Let’s talk about the second point: Home appliance companies are gradually transforming from traditional manufacturing plants to consumer goods companies. One of the essences of Industry 4.0 is that manufacturers need to make changes to face consumers with increasingly improved product perception capabilities - they need customized production from B2C to C2B. This also coincides with the personalized and scenario-based characteristics of smart home appliances.
It can be said that this need has been more deeply recognized due to the rapid growth of Internet-genetic companies such as Bear and Delma in recent years. With the help of online channels and Internet marketing, the product design of Xiaoxiong and Delma is more in line with the current trend and has better user interaction experience. This is why they can become the dark horses of Shunde home appliance cluster.
Customized home appliances require more flexible, flexible and agile production lines.
Traditional repetitive production is turning to flexible production—now, after a worker assembles a washing machine with module A, the next order may be a washing machine with module B. In this case, a digital system can help workers select parts and check whether the assembly is correct or not.
For example, in the Midea Nansha Industrial Internet Demonstration Base, 2156 warning rules and 20 sections have been established, seamlessly connecting various manufacturing equipment, and equipped with a synchronization system covering suppliers, goods, and orders to adapt to the needs of high-speed changing users.
Midea Nansha Smart Workshop Source: Daily Economic News
Shunde Home Appliances’ intelligent road. In general, can leverage China’s intelligent technology advantages to complete product value reconstruction when transforming the industrial infrastructure of “machine generation”.
In the "14th Five-Year Plan" released in May this year, Shunde proposed to promote the high-endization of leading industries, consolidate and improve the two major advantageous leading industries of smart home appliances and high-end equipment manufacturing, and build a world-class industrial cluster. By 2025, Shunde will build a smart home appliance industry cluster of over 600 billion yuan.
Singapore Vice President Yang Jianwei once suggested: Shunde must eliminate home appliance manufacturing, because judging from the journey Singapore has taken, Chinese home appliance brands are unlikely to escape the fate of low added value.
smart home appliances add new options to this question: large traditional enterprises introduce chip technology, and small new enterprises provide product development ideas in the Internet era. The cooperation of Shunde home appliance industry cluster is gradually moving from capital-intensive to technology-intensive.
05 Epilogue
It is said that people who have been to Shunde and visited local village households have all had this experience:
In Shunde and in the shadows of shacks that were once family workshops, the old man you meet may not be able to speak his name in Mandarin , but he can definitely point out the direction of all countries in the world on the map, and he can also tell the difference between the nuts of the American standard and the European standard.
html At the beginning of the first century, Toshiba executive Hiroyuki Ishida compared competitors from China to those who sell fruits. "Chinese companies will package whatever fruits they need in the market. They are not the ones who grow fruits, nor are they the ones who grow high-quality fruits."The ordinary home appliance industry workers we meet in Shunde are just a group of people selling fruits. This group of fruit sellers has raised a new generation of fruit growing.
The people who sell fruits and the people who grow fruits, like the three generations of Galanz, step into the same river after all.
