Li Ye led Jin Peng and Li Dayong into the house and asked in surprise, "Brother Peng, when I asked you in the first half of the year, you said everything was going smoothly. Why has it suddenly stopped going smoothly now?
What hardship is there between brothers that you can't talk about? Did it really have to worry you until your hair turned white?"
Jin Peng's metal smelting plant had broken ground and begun construction three years ago. By rights, it should have been bearing fruit by now. How had things suddenly gone wrong?
Jin Peng smiled awkwardly and said, "My hair didn't actually turn white from worry. Your sister-in-law has been so anxious she can't sleep at night, and that's kept me from sleeping well too."
"Then something really has happened. Tell me exactly where the problem lies. Electricity? Or technology?"
Li Ye immediately turned serious.
Jin Peng's electrolytic aluminum industrial project had been personally facilitated by Li Ye back when he was in Soviet Russia. If this project went down the drain, Li Ye would have to bear the consequences.
Heavy industry had always been characterized by massive investment, high risk, and steep technological barriers. During the wild development of the eighties and nineties, it was hardly uncommon for projects to swallow huge sums only to leave their investors with nothing.
Based on Li Ye's objective experience from two lifetimes, the biggest problems behind unfinished projects in the nineties were mainly concentrated in two areas. One was an extremely tight power supply, and the other was excessively backward technology.
Of those, electricity was the easiest chokehold point, because the power shortage in those decades had simply been too severe.
That was why Li Ye had considered all sorts of difficulties for Jin Peng in advance. On one