The damp sea breeze from Victoria Harbour, carrying a faint salty tang, brushed across the faces of Nakayama Takuya and his party.
The bustling urban landscape intertwined with the slightly old industrial districts, forming Hong Kong's unique character.
The first target of their trip was Hong Kong Huake Electronics Co., Ltd.
Anyone familiar with the development of China's electronics industry knew that Huake Electronics had been established in 1983, jointly set up in Hong Kong by China Resources Group and the former Fourth Ministry of Machine Building, Seventh Ministry of Machine Building, and Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. It was Hong Kong's largest integrated circuit manufacturing enterprise at the time, and had built China's first 4-inch wafer production line. Back then, even within China, this was technologically leading production capacity.
At their first contact, the senior representatives of Huake Electronics wore professional, polite smiles, but their eyes could hardly conceal their caution toward these "distinguished guests" from a major Japanese company and their demands.
When Mr. Ishida displayed the preliminary planned order quantities from Sega for the circuit boards and components of the "Pokémon" electronic pet, a faint but unmistakable chorus of sharp inhales sounded in Huake Electronics' conference room.
"This... this quantity..."
Huake's representative, a manager surnamed Li, pushed up his glasses and looked at the document in his hands with some disbelief.
They were more accustomed to producing calculators, electronic watches, radios, and other products with relatively low technical content and fairly stable order volumes.
Game consoles—especially from an industry giant like Sega of Japan—were still a relatively unfamiliar field to them.
Although Sega's order was only for circuit board printing and assembly, not finished products, the quantity of the order still made them realize that the gaming industry actually had such enormous scale. The quantity