"Teacher Gao, Teacher Gao, we've received many more submission invitations since last night! A lot of them are from world-renowned academic journals."
"You're famous now. At the very least, you've become hugely famous in the field of materials chemistry!"
Early in the morning, Xu Qingzhou's youngest student, Zhou Helin, eagerly ran up to Gao Yuan. His face was full of excitement as he repeatedly called him Teacher, leaving Gao Yuan feeling rather pleased.
Zhou Helin had been sent by Xu Qingzhou to serve as Gao Yuan's assistant, helping him handle miscellaneous tasks such as emails and lending a hand during experiments.
Zhou Helin was thrilled about it.
After all, Gao Yuan was now not only the boss, but also the unquestioned authority in the lab. Even Dr. Xu Qingzhou followed his lead. Working under such an exceptional figure, his future was bound to be bright.
"Invitations from where?" Gao Yuan asked.
Zhou Helin casually named several academic journals and listed their SCI impact factors.
In this age of entertainment above all else, Weibo and Baidu searches always revolved around celebrities and internet influencers. The vast majority of ordinary people had no concept at all of X Fiber's birth.
Yet in the specialized field of chemical materials, the situation was entirely different.
The names Kunlun Company and Gao Yuan were currently at the height of their fame, rapidly spreading through research institutions across the country.
As testing reports on X1 Fiber came out from major laboratories both at home and abroad, people in the field began to realize the unimaginable potential of this new fiber.
The super honeycomb structure pioneered by X1 Fiber was simply astonishing. Following this path and introducing further derivative models—X2, X3, X4, X5—could ultimately create a vast X series fiber family that would sweep through the entire chemical fiber industry and completely reshape the balance of power within it.
As a result, everyone began asking around for information and inviting Gao Yuan to submit papers.
Whichever journal published an academic paper on the epoch-making X1 Fiber would undoubtedly see its impact factor rise dramatically and its academic standing elevated.
"Do I have to write it in English?" Gao Yuan asked with a frown.
Zhou Helin looked rather troubled. "There's no helping it. Nearly all of academia's most influential journals are run by the West. It's not as if there's a rule allowing Chinese submissions, and their reviewers wouldn't understand them anyway."
So that was how it was...
Gao Yuan nodded slightly, but he still felt uncomfortable about it.
To be honest, Chinese researchers had indeed been forced to publish in English journals all along.
Rather than building China's own Chinese-language academic journal system, policymakers only looked at the number of SCI papers, cumulative impact factors, and citation counts when students graduated, teachers sought promotions, or researchers applied for grants.
When those at the top were so obsessed with the West, how could anyone expect scholars to voluntarily publish papers in Chinese?
Wasn't that fucking sick?
Gao Yuan came from the grassroots, from an unconventional background. He had not understood the domestic paper evaluation system before, but now that he did, the more he thought about it, the angrier he became. What the hell was this nonsense?
"Forget it." Gao Yuan sighed helplessly. "Don't reply to them yet. This isn't a minor matter. Let me think it over some more."
Zhou Helin nodded in agreement and left Gao Yuan's office somewhat dejectedly.
In his eyes, Teacher Gao was great in every way except that he was too stubborn.
It was only an English paper. He and all those senior brothers and sisters could help, so there would definitely be no problem.
Once Gao Yuan's paper made the cover of a top global journal, it would bring immeasurable benefits not only to Gao Yuan himself, but also give the lab's graduate students something to be proud of.
If it had been anyone else with such earth-shaking research results, they would probably have churned out countless papers already and wished they could broadcast them to the entire world.
But Gao Yuan had dragged things out until now without even deciding whether to write a paper at all.
"English journals, Chinese journals, other people's journals, our own journals... The academic world's nonsense really is troublesome."
Gao Yuan muttered to himself irritably.
Deep down, he was a nationalist and strongly disliked the current state of China's academic world, which blindly worshipped the West.
Fortunately, shortly afterward, Cao Feiyu came to his office as well, bringing truly good news that spared Gao Yuan from having to dwell on the matter.
"Look, this is last week's shipment volume." Cao Feiyu handed Gao Yuan a chart with a smile.
Gao Yuan looked closely, and his face immediately lit up. "It exceeded one thousand tons!"
The report clearly showed that last week's X1 Fiber shipments had reached 1,075 tons. Based on the current purchase price of 6,300 yuan and a selling price of 30,000 yuan, gross profit had reached an astonishing 25.4775 million yuan!
Earning over twenty million yuan every week meant more than a billion yuan a year!
Gao Yuan was excited that he was about to join the ranks of the super-rich, but at the same time, he understood perfectly well that gross profit was not actual profit. Taxes, losses, R&D, management, and a whole series of other costs still had to be deducted.
Still, no matter what, this was tremendous news. It meant that the company's operations had finally gotten on track, and demand for its products exceeded supply.
"Money is still very important in this world," Gao Yuan said excitedly to Cao Feiyu. "Once the company has sufficient cash flow, many things can be put on the agenda."
"Such as?" Cao Feiyu asked.
Gao Yuan listed several things he felt needed to be done right away, such as buying a business vehicle to take Xu Qingzhou and the graduate students to and from work, improving the factory cafeteria's food, setting up a small gym, and so on.
"At the end of the day, it's because this place is too remote." Gao Yuan sighed. "This was my father's old factory, located in an industrial park. There's no commercial district nearby, so nothing is convenient."
"It's fine to use this place as a factory, but we've outsourced our production operations now. What remains are administrative functions like R&D, finance, and management."
"It's manageable while we have few people, but eventually we'll need to hire more employees, especially highly educated research personnel. We can't keep everyone cooped up in an industrial park forever. It's too unfair to them. Besides, in a small city like Shaoxing, truly capable first-rate researchers might not be willing to come at all."
After hearing Gao Yuan out, Cao Feiyu agreed. However, the company was still in its early stages and had many matters to handle. They would have to take things one step at a time; they could not become fat in a single bite.
After dealing with these matters, Gao Yuan went to the laboratory in a good mood.
Besides being a business manager, he was also the leader of scientific research, so he spent more of his time conducting research in the lab.
After Xu Qingzhou took over the laboratory, he expanded it using unused factory buildings and purchased a great deal of scientific equipment and consumables.
It had now reached the hardware standards of a first-rate domestic laboratory. Unfortunately, there were still relatively few researchers, and they needed to find a way to recruit more people.
"I need to tell you something." Xu Qingzhou frowned as he spoke to Gao Yuan. "I heard from several senior brothers and sisters that DowDuPont, the world's largest chemical fiber supplier, is studying how to deal with us. BASF, Bayer, Toray, and other giants haven't been idle either. It seems that overnight, our little laboratory has become the common target of giants around the world."
"The situation is somewhat dangerous. The reason giants are giants is that their deep accumulation and foundations absolutely cannot be underestimated."
Gao Yuan shrugged. "If they want to come after us, what can we do? All we can do is try our best to do our own work well."
"I have some new ideas about the research on X2 Fiber. Let's have a meeting in ten minutes."
"Alright. I'll go notify everyone."
Gao Yuan reassured Xu Qingzhou, telling him not to worry so much about others. At this point, it was only normal for industry giants to target Kunlun Company. It would have been strange if they had not come after them.
Gao Yuan returned to his workstation and rapidly sketched on draft paper with a pencil, preparing the content for the research group's morning meeting.
Before long, Xu Qingzhou and the laboratory's researchers gathered around Gao Yuan in a small circle.
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