"MLGBZ, they want it cheap and bright—how the hell am I supposed to do that? Why don't I just give it to them for free? Do they think labor and prices are still dirt cheap these days? MD, this job is getting harder and harder. They want a low cost ratio, and they want us to get into Zhongzheng Mobile's supply chain. How the hell am I supposed to pull that off?"
"The project hasn't even started, and we've already reviewed the price five times. Every day, it's cost reviews. Fuck, this isn't work for humans."
"The market is terrible, and my performance is tied to this—and tied to profits at that. NND, aren't they just using my money to make this project? This is so damn frustrating..."
Inside the luxurious office building of Hua Long Technology Company in Qianhai, Peng City, project manager Wang Wei had just finished an online cost meeting with suppliers. He leaned heavily back in his chair and immediately launched into a string of complaints, laced with curses.
Wang Wei was from Su Province. Only thirty this year, he had graduated from a top university with a master's degree. In just five years, he had risen to become a project manager at Hua Long Technology Company, earning an annual salary of four hundred thousand after tax. He could be considered one of the young elite.
Hua Long Technology was the top-ranked mobile phone ODM manufacturer in the country. Its annual phone shipments were measured in the hundreds of millions, supplying famous domestic mobile brands such as Zhongzheng, Oupai, Weiyi, and Xiaomi. Hua Long Technology had more than ten thousand employees and a market value exceeding fifty billion. Compared with the second-ranked Zhongwei Technology Company, it was nearly forty billion higher!
That was why, even in a place like Qianhai in Peng City, where every inch of land was worth its weight in gold and a single square meter cost three to four hundred thousand, Hua Long Technology had built its own office park and luxurious office building.
The office building had every welfare facility imaginable.
Gyms, rest areas, and places to eat were the bare minimum. Game rooms and nursing rooms were all permanent fixtures.
At Hua Long Technology, every project manager had to be an elite capable of standing on his own, especially those assigned to well-known mobile brands such as Zhongzheng, Oupai, Weiyi, and Xiaomi. Among them, the Zhongzheng Mobile account was the most important.
A project manager not only had to serve the client well, but also create value for both the company and the client. In practical terms, every phone project had to leave everyone happy, with both the company and the client earning substantial profits. Material costs were the biggest part of that.
After earning his master's degree, Wang Wei had entered Hua Long Technology through campus recruitment. After five years of hard work, he had become a project manager. His annual salary alone was four hundred thousand after tax, not to mention the project bonuses, company profit bonuses, and so on that came with each completed project.
That was because Wang Wei was fairly upright and unwilling to engage in shady dealings.
Otherwise, with his position as a project manager at Hua Long Technology, hundreds of suppliers below him depended on him to eat and drink. He could easily have lined his pockets.
Of course, with more money and greater authority came greater responsibility.
After finally winning the bid for a new mobile phone project, Wang Wei had been appointed by the project lead as the person in charge of screen development. He had immediately entered round after round of cost reviews. Including today's discussion at the online meeting, Wang Wei had counted clearly: this was already the fifth round.
Staring up at the snow-white ceiling, Wang Wei let his mind go blank. All he felt was a deep wave of exhaustion washing over him.
What 996? That really was a blessing, because he was on 007. As long as the phone he was developing had not been discontinued, he had to stay online at all times to respond to the client.
The project Wang Wei was handling was currently stuck on the materials.
A mobile phone might look small, but it actually contained a frightening number of components. That was why every phone brand had thousands upon thousands of suppliers serving it.
Among them, the screen was one of a phone's most important components. Due to technological limitations, it was even the second-largest core technology after chips that had yet to be mastered.
Everyone knew that chip development had lagged behind, but screen development was difficult as well.
A phone screen was not simply a piece of glass. It integrated all kinds of components, and those components themselves required many different materials.
OLED screens, widely promoted and therefore familiar to the public, were extremely difficult to produce. Fortunately, several domestic glass manufacturers could make OLED screens, and by now, they could at least be called decent.
LCD Screens, which were gradually becoming lower-end and marginalized, used highly mature glass technology. But for the glass to display images, it needed a chip capable of driving it.
Unfortunately, those chips were the same kind as mobile phone CPU chips. They were all cut from wafers, and the high-quality ones were basically foreign-made.
Besides glass and chips, LCD Screens could not emit light on their own, so they needed a component to provide a light source. That involved optical materials.
The better the optical material, the more light it could provide. Visually, that meant a brighter screen.
The core parts of domestic optical materials were imported from abroad, especially from the Little Country, and were relatively low-end. As for high-quality, high-end optical materials, sorry, those were foreign-made too.
The project Wang Wei was handling was stuck right there. Cheap optical materials did not utilize light efficiently enough, leaving the screen unable to reach sufficient brightness. High-quality optical materials could meet Zhongzheng Mobile's brightness requirements, but they were expensive and foreign-made, so the materials could not be used.
There were ways to use cheap optical materials by making adjustments elsewhere, which involved the choice of glass. But that was even more impossible, because glass resources were even scarcer. Zhongzheng Mobile had personally stepped in to secure the glass for this project. Otherwise, that glass manufacturer would not even have supplied Hua Long.
"Darkness gave me dark eyes,"
"Yet I use them to search for light,"
"Sweat condensed into a capsule of time..."
At some point, his phone suddenly rang, startling Wang Wei out of his blank reverie.
"Huh, Zhou Feiyu?"
Wang Wei picked up his phone and saw that it was his high school classmate. His brows immediately furrowed.
Zhou Feiyu worked at a materials company in inland Nanjiang Province, doing research and development on low-end materials. After learning that Wang Wei worked at Hua Long Technology, he would occasionally chat with him and jokingly ask Wang Wei to give him a leg up.
Wang Wei hated trouble, so he was not particularly willing to chat with Zhou Feiyu.
Still, they had been classmates for three years, so it would not be right to ignore the call. He decided that as long as Zhou Feiyu asked him for help, he would refuse, then answered the phone.
"What wind blew an old classmate into personally calling me?"
Wang Wei teased.
A hearty laugh answered him. "Of course it's the spring breeze. I'm riding high on it, so I came to bring an old classmate some good news."
Wang Wei was taken aback and asked with a smile, "What good news?"
Zhou Feiyu's voice quickly came through from the other end. "Didn't you complain to me a while ago about how lousy domestic optical film materials were? You said domestic basic materials had serious shortcomings and were still twenty or thirty years behind foreign countries? I can responsibly tell you that era is gone for good, because I've developed a material even more badass than foreign King Optical Film—and I've brought the price down too!"
"What?"
Wang Wei wondered if there was something wrong with his ears and instinctively asked, "Zhou Feiyu, do you even know what you're saying?"
Zhou Feiyu said, "A scholar apart for three days should be viewed with new eyes! Wang Wei, I'll arrive in Peng City tonight. Once you see the material, you'll know."
Before Wang Wei could say anything else, the phone was already filled with the disconnected beeping tone.
"Holy shit, he's serious?"
Wang Wei's face was full of disbelief.
Meanwhile, far away in inland Nanjiang Province, Zhou Feiyu had just boarded the High-speed Rail bound for Peng City.
With less than five hundred yuan to his name and an utterly ordinary appearance, Zhou Feiyu was completely inconspicuous in the crowd. Carrying a backpack, he looked like nothing more than an office worker on a business trip.
"Thirty years... finally, it's my turn to take the stage!"
After finding his seat, Zhou Feiyu sat down with his backpack in his arms.
Looking out the window, a faint smile appeared on his face, while blazing fire burned in his eyes.
No one knew that this journey of his would bring earth-shaking changes to the entire world!
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