Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

After Old Gao finished speaking with Qu Fang, he placed a set of keys on the table before leaving.

Chen Yansen looked up but didn’t say a word. He knew they were the keys to the villa near Delta Park.

This was probably the seventh house he had bought in his life.

As for apartment 0418, he had no plans to give up the lease. The rent was a mere 400 a month. Besides, going back once in a while would let him and Meng Jie or Song Yuncheng relive some old memories.

The five villas in Luzhou were all under renovation. He’d move in after the Orange Technology headquarters was finished.

The original plan was to buy three, but after a moment’s thought, Chen Yansen had Gao Weilin buy two more.

’Three villas would never be enough!’

After dealing with the Xiaohongshu matter, Chen Yansen opened Cadence Spectre and continued with his unfinished work.

Wu Shengyu and Mike Keller were leading their team, working around the clock to develop the Celestial Craft T100 Chip.

Of course, he wouldn’t be idle either.

Otherwise, with just the handful of people in the chip department, it would take them at least half a year to get the Celestial Craft T100 ready for launch.

Time ticked by. Soon, night fell, its reflection dappled with specks of light on the glass.

After wrapping up the new product launch, Wang Teng immediately rushed to the United Kingdom with staff from the intellectual property, legal, and finance departments. They were there to negotiate an architectural license for the ARM instruction set patent with ARM Company.

But ARM Company’s asking price was extremely high. In addition to a one-time licensing fee of 200 million US Dollars, they also required a 3% royalty based on chip shipments.

Before the trip, Wang Teng had researched ARM’s previous licensing fee standards. They typically charged an upfront fee of 30 to 80 million US Dollars, plus a 1% royalty.

For major clients like Apple, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MediaTek, they would even proactively lower the royalty to 0.5%.

It was clear that ARM Company had no qualms about treating Orange Technology like a fat Asian lamb, ready for the slaughter.

After a full day of discussions, ARM Company was only willing to lower the royalty to 2%. The quote for the one-time licensing fee remained at 200 million US Dollars.

BUZZZZZZ—!

Just then, the phone on his desk started vibrating.

Chen Yansen picked it up, and without much thought, pressed the answer button.

"Boss, we have a problem. ARM Company is holding firm at 200 million US Dollars, plus they’re demanding a 2% royalty."

Wang Teng stood in a hallway at ARM Headquarters, his expression grim. He was seething. ’These bastards are treating me like a total sucker, ready to be fleeced.’

However, in the eyes of ARM’s senior executives, Orange Technology was valued at over 20 billion US Dollars. As the Sect Leader of Senlian Capital, Chen Yansen’s personal net worth was over 50 billion. Was a 200 million US Dollar price tag really so outrageous?

Since Orange Technology wanted to go down the path of developing its own chips, was it really a problem to pay some tuition?

These Brits fleeced even Apple, Qualcomm, and Broadcom without hesitation, so why would they spare Orange Technology?

A dozen or so years later, Huawei would spend 1 billion US Dollars just to obtain a perpetual license for the ARM V9 architecture.

Therefore, considering Orange Technology’s market scale, 100 million US Dollars plus a 1% royalty was reasonable, but 200 million US Dollars plus a 2% royalty was just plain greedy.

"They won’t come down?" Chen Yansen asked, his tone calm.

"They won’t budge an inch on the one-time fee. We might be able to get the royalty down another half a percent," Wang Teng reported.

In the chip industry, ARM is like a property developer that provides Apple, Qualcomm, and Huawei with bare-bones apartments. The instruction set architecture is like the renovation tools; only after obtaining the technology license can one develop a processor.

For example, Huawei’s Hisilicon K3V2 processor was heavily modified from the ARM Cortex A9 architecture.

Apple and Qualcomm were no exception; for every single chip, they had to pay a ’toll’ to ARM.

This was because ARM’s reduced instruction set patents offered higher compilation efficiency, giving processors power-saving and low-energy-consumption features.

The technological moat that ARM had spent over twenty years and thousands of engineers building with massive amounts of code and patents was not so easily breached.

This was also the main reason ARM dared to make such an outrageous demand!

"Alright, I understand. Come back for now."

Chen Yansen’s eyes narrowed slightly as he spoke in a cold voice.

"Boss, so we’re not buying the architectural license?" Wang Teng asked, startled.

He knew just how important ARM’s reduced instruction set architecture patents were to the Celestial Craft T100 and the future of Orange Technology.

Being fleeced by ARM was taking one hit. Being fleeced by Qualcomm and MediaTek would be taking two.

After all, Qualcomm and MediaTek both had to pay royalties to ARM, and this cost was naturally passed on to their customers.

"We’re not buying."

Chen Yansen said grimly.

In 2012, ARM might have held a vast portfolio of 2,700 patents on instruction sets and microarchitectures. However, as long as they sidestepped technologies like the Thumb instruction set, multi-core scheduling, and conditional execution, Orange Technology could still forge its own path and independently develop a completely new CPU architecture.

As far as he knew, ARM would eventually shift its royalty model from charging per chip to charging per end device.

The price of a single chip ranged from 5 to 40 US Dollars, while a smartphone sold for over 150 US Dollars.

In other words, ARM would be increasing its royalties several-fold, even tenfold, in one fell swoop.

Because of this, Apple had no choice but to launch its Apple Silicon architecture. China accelerated the development of the free and open-source RISC-V architecture, and countries in Europe and America even launched "chip acts," raising billions of US Dollars at once, all to independently develop their own instruction set patents.

It couldn’t be helped. When it came to squeezing its clients, ARM was famously ruthless.

"Then what about the Celestial Craft T100 Chip?" Wang Teng assumed his boss was just speaking out of anger.

"I’ll take care of it," Chen Yansen said, his voice firm and resolute.

’If I can’t even handle a simple CPU architecture, then what was the point of my rebirth? What’s the use of having this cheat?’