Reborn multinational giant

Former British Prime Minister Churchill once said: "There are no eternal friends, nor enemies, only eternal interests!"

Less than ten minutes before the official start of the conference, when Fang Zhe walked into the venue, he accidentally saw the three big men of BAT, two horses and one Li sitting in the audience, talking and laughing together, and they had a very happy conversation!

Such a scene is really rare. Fang Zhe was curiously planning to join in the fun. Who would think that before he came to the front, Tencent Ma, who was the first to see him among the three, winked quietly at the other two.

Immediately, Fang Zhe was puzzled to see that the three people who had talked so happily suddenly became unsmiling, one by one sitting in distress, or turning their heads to say hello to Fang Zhe.

Officials of the conference deliberately arranged four seats close together, from right to left are Tencent Ma, Ali Ma, Baidu Li, and Fang Zhe.

Fang Zhe greeted the three of them politely and sat on the seat, and at the same time he began to think about the reaction of the three of them just now.

As Fang Zhe thought, he leaned forward and inadvertently glanced at the three people's current expressions. The three people's energy-raising skills were really good, at least Fang Zhe couldn't see what they were thinking at the moment.

Fang Zhe always felt that something was wrong, but he couldn't figure out the key point for a while.

While he was thinking about it, the conference officially began!

The theme of this year’s conference is: Strategies in Transformation. Just listening to the name of this theme, Fang Zhe feels little interest. When it comes to transformation, I am afraid that this topic should be discussed. It is the manufacturing industry with serious overcapacity in the past two years. In contrast, the transformation of the Internet industry is nothing more than the transformation from the traditional Internet to the mobile Internet that has been commonplace in recent years.

Of course, this conference is called the IT Leaders Summit. IT involves not only the Internet industry, but also related communications, electronics, computers, and many other industries.

Therefore, the keynote speakers invited by the conference this year also include the big names in these industries.

The opening ceremony of the conference was still the usual relevant government leaders and special guests speeches. What made Fang Zhe's eyes narrowed was that the special guest who gave the opening speech this year was a former deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China. Economist!

This has never been done in previous IT summits. This also reflects the official hope to pass this conference to the outside world.

Fang Zhe closed his eyes and recalled, remembering that in the past few years, because of the global economic crisis in 2008 and the huge investment of 4 trillion yuan invested by the domestic government to stimulate the economy, many domestic manufacturing companies are facing a crisis of overcapacity, such as production capacity. In the severely surplus steel industry, the price of one ton of low-end steel is not as good as one ton of cabbage. The transformation and upgrading of low-end industries to mid-to-high-end industries is imminent.

After the new leadership takes office next year, policies including the Belt and Road Initiative and supply-side reforms will be able to see the shadow of solving these problems.

After the opening ceremony, Fang Zhe and the other three giants of BAT were sitting in the audience and continued to be the audience. Gein was the main guest speaker this morning. None of the four of them had a conversation. It was scheduled for this afternoon, and now the people invited to the stage are Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo Group, Shi Lirong, president of ZTE, and Zhang Yaqin, vice president of Microsoft.

These three are also well-known big names in the domestic IT industry, but their industry is more inclined to IT services at the bottom of the Internet.

In his previous life, Fang Zhe did not pay attention to the content of the three of them participating in the IT summit, let alone what they said. Therefore, Fang Zhe is considered fresh in this life and listened to their conversation casually.

As soon as it came up, the host mentioned a question that is quite related to the theme of "transformation". How do you view Kodak's bankruptcy?

Kodak mentioned by the host is the world's largest imaging product company. It was founded in 1880. Its main products include film cameras, film rolls, photographic and video equipment and other imaging products.

This company has a history of more than 130 years since its establishment. At its peak, it occupied 23rd of the global market in the industry. However, such a century-old top multinational company filed an application for bankruptcy protection two months ago.

The bankruptcy of Kodak caused a great shock worldwide. The last time such a century-old multinational company went bankrupt was the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008. That incident directly triggered a global economic crisis.

For this reason, many people say that Kodak’s bankruptcy is likely to be the beginning of another global economic crisis. Coupled with the current domestic crisis of overcapacity, various alarmist remarks are popular. The host throws this hot topic out. , There are also quite some arguments for the meaning of true knowledge.

The three people on the stage were very interested in the topics raised by the host. In fact, since the news of Kodak's bankruptcy two months ago, many people around the world have been paying attention, debating and analyzing the reasons for Kodak's bankruptcy.

The three of you said something to me and each expressed their own views. Even Fang Zhe, who is a reborn person, agreed with many of the views put forward by the three of them.

Kodak's bankruptcy can be said to be deeply related to today's theme "transformation". Kodak's bankruptcy can be regarded as a typical case of failure in transformation.

Specifically, the main business film business, which has contributed a lot of profits to Kodak in the past few decades, is a shrinking industry. The times are constantly advancing and the industry is constantly changing. The rise of digital cameras and mobile phones and other electronic devices Continuously optimized camera functions have caused the global film industry to shrink.

Kodak invented the world's first digital camera. However, because of concerns that digital cameras would affect the profits of the existing film business, Kodak has been reluctant to develop the digital camera business until now that the global film industry has shrunk completely and Kodak ended in bankruptcy.

This kind of corporate development history is a bit stupid and incredible in the eyes of any normal person, but it did happen to Kodak and many companies and industries around the world.

For example, when the automobile was first invented a few centuries ago, in order to protect the interests of horse-drawn carriages and horsemen, the British government once stipulated that the speed of cars should not exceed that of horse-drawn carriages. Nokia has always been the dominant player in the global feature phone industry, but when smartphones first came out, In order to protect the interests of existing feature phones, Nokia’s smartphone business has been developing slowly. After the emergence of the e-commerce industry, Didi, Uber and other emerging economies, many offline stores and taxi drivers have resisted and protested.

Transformation does not mean the simple upgrading and transformation of low-end industries to mid-to-high-end industries. It also means the loss of existing interests and the redistribution of vested interests. This is the case for a company, an industry, and a country. This is especially true of the changes and adjustments in the global supply chain of each country.

The emergence of WeChat has seized the track and opportunity of Tencent's transformation to the mobile terminal. The e-commerce enterprises and companies invested by Huizhong have also made the competitive environment and profit distribution of the e-commerce industry more complicated. As for sitting next to Fang Zhe Baidu's general manager Li, who seemed to have a kind face, Fang Zhe suddenly remembered the wolf-like culture advocated by both Baidu and Huawei.

Fang Zhe suddenly understood what was wrong that he had noticed before. According to the situation in his previous life, at this moment, the three big bosses of BAT should dislike each other. The three companies are very competitive in business. Intense is.

But just now I saw the three of them talking and laughing, and there was something a little bit different, and they also avoided themselves. Is it possible that the three of them have been embarrassed and plan to unite to deal with...

"Who else can be dealt with, of course it is dealing with me!"

Fang Zhe was shocked with a cold sweat on his back.