Chapter 172: Chapter 160: A Monthly Production Capacity of 3 Million Units, Orange Mobile Phone’s First Double Eleven

Upon hearing the news, Tang Qingshan took several senior administrators from Xuyuan and made a special trip to Zhuxianzhuang Science and Technology Park.

Under the pretext of a tour, he kept bringing up this year’s graduating seniors in his conversation.

Chen Yansen took the hint. He smiled and told Tang Qingshan that the technology and product departments could take on 200 interns. As long as they were competent, they would all have the opportunity to become full-time employees after graduation.

Tang Qingshan nodded in satisfaction, then said, "The spots for students from low-income families are tight this year. There are limited part-time positions available in the cafeteria, dorms, and library. As their senior..."

"Pinbei Technology is short on customer service staff. I’ll have a word with the HR department. We’ll hire 50 part-timers to start. Just have someone send me the list of names. Thank you, Teacher Tang, for helping me with this urgent need."

Chen Yansen agreed readily before Tang Qingshan could even finish.

Even though it was Tang Qingshan who had come to him with a request, the way Chen Yansen put it made it sound as if Tang Qingshan had helped him solve a manpower shortage.

This made Tang Qingshan exclaim inwardly, ’This kid knows how to play the game!’

University students were cheap and capable. Chen Yansen had no reason to refuse, and he could even earn a good reputation from it.

Besides, when Orange Technology was applying for its 3C certification, network access license, and radio transmission equipment type approval certificate, Tang Qingshan had used his connections extensively to help speed up the process.

Favors had to be returned; that was how relationships deepened.

Tang Qingshan was very pleased with Chen Yansen’s attitude. Before leaving, he invited him to give a speech at the freshman orientation gala.

Chen Yansen couldn’t be bothered with something that was all for show with no real benefit, so he found an excuse to decline.

Seeing that he wasn’t interested, Tang Qingshan didn’t insist.

Chen Yansen saw Tang Qingshan and the others off. Just as he returned to his office, he received a call from Cao Dahua.

"Remember Wang Hongde from You Pu Battery?" Cao Dahua’s voice was filled with unconcealed amusement.

"I remember. I heard they can only get orders from knockoff phone factories these days. Seeing you this happy, don’t tell me Wang Hongde got hit by a car?"

Chen Yansen sat in his chair and joked with a smile.

"Not quite, but close. You Pu’s batteries screwed over Transsion. This month, there were four phone explosion incidents in Abyssinia, and the investigation showed they were all caused by batteries supplied by You Pu."

Cao Dahua slowly explained, then added, "The news has spread throughout the circles in Shencheng City. No one dares to use You Pu’s products now, and a bunch of people are demanding refunds with contracts in hand. Then yesterday, the authorities shut down You Pu, seizing both their people and their goods."

"Did you and Old Zuo have a hand in this?" Chen Yansen asked suspiciously.

"Hey, I’m a good guy, a model citizen. How could I do something like that? You can only blame Wang Hongde for being too greedy. To make money, he desperately cut costs and exploited his employees. He was careless with quality control, and that’s how so many defective products got sold."

Cao Dahua quickly denied it and explained the cause of the matter.

"Got it. I was planning on dealing with him myself, but it looks like that won’t be necessary. By the way, didn’t Zhou Jinling go to Abyssinia? Does this affect our market expansion plans?"

Chen Yansen frowned and pressed with a serious tone.

"I’ve spoken with Xiaozhou. They opened an Orange Mobile Phone specialty store there. Before the incident, the Orange F1 was selling several dozen units a day. But in the last two days, sales have dropped to single digits."

Cao Dahua sighed, the smile gone from his face.

There are two sides to every coin. Wang Hongde had not only screwed over Transsion, but he had also dragged the Orange Mobile Phone down with him.

The locals now had a deep distrust of smartphones made in Hua Country. After all, who would want to buy a phone that might explode?

Internally at Orange Technology, the first-generation phone was named the Orange C1, while the one developed specifically for the African Market was the Orange F1.

The Shencheng Factory had only produced one batch of 50,000 units, priced at 99 US dollars.

It took 17 African market expansion teams nearly three months to sell 40,000 units. There were still 10,000 units left in the warehouse.

After this incident, future sales would probably be even more difficult.

"If they can’t handle it, pull them all back and send in a new team. Tell Zhou Jinling I’m giving him one last month."

Chen Yansen felt that Zhou Jinling lacked execution ability and instructed Cao Dahua.

’If you’re not capable, you get replaced!’

"Okay, I’ll tell Zhou Jinling. Also, the other production bases have started operating today. Tomorrow, Orange Mobile Phone’s shipment volume can reach 100,000 units."

Cao Dahua acknowledged, then shared a piece of good news.

The production factories in zones A1, A2, A4, and A5 had completed their preliminary preparations. Production materials, employees, and assembly line equipment were all in place.

Monthly production capacity was as high as 3 million units!

It was estimated that they could fulfill the remaining 3.7 million Orange Mobile Phone pre-orders before mid-December.

Previously, the Orange Phone Factory had already shipped 1.2 million units.

"Pinbei is also launching soon. Once the Jingdong flagship store is online, I estimate monthly sales can reach 1.8 million units."

Chen Yansen responded directly, understanding Cao Dahua’s unspoken meaning.

It was simply that the Orange Phone Factory’s production capacity had increased too quickly, and with Orange Technology having only a single product, sales couldn’t keep up with production.

"Alright, I’ll get back to work then." Seeing that Chen Yansen understood, Cao Dahua said no more and hung up with a smile.

Chen Yansen leaned back in his chair, lost in thought.

The next task he had assigned to Zhang Cong and Zhou Ze was to design a thousand-yuan phone and a flagship model priced around 4,000 yuan.

This was to seize a larger share of the mobile phone market.

Besides Apple, companies like Mountain Star, High Technology Corporation, and Nokia all relied on the total sales of multiple models to break into the top ten in shipment volume.

A monthly capacity of 3 million units? He didn’t think it was too much; in fact, he thought it was too little.

As for Wang Hongde of You Pu, the situation struck him as amusing.

He hadn’t even made a move yet, and Wang Hongde had already run into trouble.

According to Cao Dahua, Wang Hongde was looking at spending at least two years behind bars this time. Selling inferior batteries and causing a damaging international incident made him a classic target for the authorities’ current "double crackdown."

Chen Yansen couldn’t help but laugh out loud. After a moment’s thought, he called Zuo Hongyu and gave him Zhou Shouzhi’s contact information.

Next, Orange Technology needed to adjust its suppliers to avoid repeating Transsion’s mistake.

Zuo Hongyu would also have to be the one to take over DST’s supplier resources.

Once DST’s financing came through, Chen Yansen planned to have Gao Weilin approach several of Hua Country’s top screen and battery suppliers to negotiate investing in them while their valuations were still low.

This would accelerate the domestic production of the Orange Mobile Phone’s core components.

After the e-commerce department received the notice about the increase in factory capacity, they immediately reduced the customer order queue time from six months to one month, significantly cutting down the waiting period.

...

...

「Hu City.」

Inside a bright and clean office building.

Zhang Yanan, taking advantage of her supervisor not looking, secretly logged into the Orange Mall to check her order.

The original estimated shipping date was April 7, 2012, but now it had changed to November 28, 2011!

It was a full five months earlier!

’I can get my Orange Mobile Phone by the end of the month?’

’Could it be that Orange Mobile Phone’s production capacity has increased?’

Previously, she had frequently urged them to ship faster in the comment section of Chen Yansen’s Weibo account. She even threatened that all of Orange Technology’s employees should be sent to the assembly line to produce phones for long-suffering customers like her.

After all, everyone had supported the Orange Mobile Phone with their hard-earned money, yet they had to wait half a year to receive it. No one could stand that.

Zhang Yanan’s heart leaped with joy. Just as she was about to share the news on the Orange community forums, she discovered that many other buyers had also noticed their estimated shipping dates had been moved up.

Everyone was excitedly discussing it on the Orange community forums.

"Has Orange Mobile Phone grown a conscience? They’re actually not doing hunger marketing anymore?"

"My cousin works at the Shencheng Factory! He heard that Orange Mobile Phone built four new mid-sized production bases at once! After December, everything will be in stock!"

"Damn! Won’t the scalpers be screwed then?"

"Hey, person above me, you’re not a scalper, are you?"

"All scalpers should die! The phone’s official price is 1999 yuan, but they dare to sell it for 2500. They’re making more than Chen Yansen himself!"

Zhang Yanan stopped reading there. The thread had gone off-topic, with all the subsequent replies just cursing out scalpers.

Previously, Orange Mobile Phone’s monthly shipment was only 500,000 units. Compared to the annual smartphone market of two to three hundred million units, it was just a drop in the bucket.

Although anyone could buy an Orange Mobile Phone, the delivery times varied. Scalpers exploited this time difference, adding 300 to 500 yuan to the price of each phone they sold.

Even though Orange Technology’s e-commerce department required customers to provide their ID information and limited the number of orders per IP address, they still couldn’t stop the scalpers.

Many users who were eager to get an Orange Mobile Phone actually paid extra to buy from scalpers, causing the phone’s price on the secondary market to climb higher and higher.

「Elsewhere.」

Lei Yijun sat in his office, pointing at the manager in charge of battery procurement and yelling at him.

He never would have imagined that he would fall into the same pitfall that Orange Mobile Phone had.

Because Xiaomi Mobile Phone users were constantly complaining about overheating issues, Lei Yijun wanted to switch battery suppliers and optimize the design flaws in the charging power.

He also imitated Orange Technology by switching to a back cover material with better heat dissipation.

Who would have known that when the first batch of batteries arrived, they discovered the dimensions were off from the production requirements? The automated assembly equipment couldn’t be used, so they had to manually stuff the batteries into the slots.

"President Lei, this batch of 20,000 units... should we return them, or...?" Li Wanqiang asked in a low voice, looking at the procurement manager who was getting an earful.

"Have the factory find some people to install them manually."

Lei Yijun said wearily.

Mountain Star was throttling Xiaomi’s screen supply, the contract manufacturer was complaining that Xiaomi’s order volume was too small, and now the batteries were having problems. The shipping date kept getting pushed back.

Users were cursing him out every day for playing games with them!

Lei Yijun decided that getting the product supplied was the most important thing for now.

At this moment, he finally understood why Chen Yansen had been willing to spend a fortune to build his own factories.

At least when it came to production capacity, he was finding it incredibly difficult to coordinate everything right now.

He had known for a while that DST had switched its investment to Orange Technology, giving it a 9 billion US dollar valuation.

The market was large, but every bite Orange Technology took was one less bite for Xiaomi.

Only then did Lei Yijun realize that he had still underestimated this rival.

「Three days later, Double 11 arrived.」

In Taobao’s digital appliances section, it took the Orange Mobile Phone only three hours for its sales revenue to surpass the Apple 4.

After all, the official Hua Country version of the Apple 4S hadn’t been released yet. The Apple 4’s specs were falling behind the times, and since the Apple 4S was already available overseas, not many people were willing to buy last year’s old model.

At 11:58 PM that day, the total sales for the Orange Mobile Phone reached a staggering 490,000 units!

Just 3,000 units short of breaking the 500,000 mark!

Zhang Yong decisively hinted to the product director of the digital category to have his people pad Orange’s numbers with 3,000 fake orders, pushing the sales data to an even 500,000.

Early the next morning, Ali made a public announcement.

Taobao Mall’s third annual Double 11 sales event had achieved a cumulative sales revenue of 6.13 billion yuan!

Compared to 2010, this was an increase of more than tenfold.

Meanwhile, Jingdong’s sales revenue was only 1.06 billion yuan!

Liu Qiangdong had originally intended to use Double 11 to challenge Taobao, but he ended up eating dust.

He hadn’t even managed to achieve one-fifth of Taobao’s sales!

However, after learning that the Orange Mobile Phone had contributed 1 billion yuan in sales to Taobao, Liu Qiangdong immediately called Chen Yansen to propose an exclusive partnership agreement with Orange Technology.

For the upcoming Double 12 sales event, Jingdong was willing to give the Orange Mobile Phone ad space on the boot screen, in pop-ups, and the prime "ocean view" slots on the event’s homepage.

But Chen Yansen was unmoved. He was willing to open a flagship store on Jingdong, but as for signing an exclusive deal, he’d rather not.

They might be on friendly terms, but when it came to making money, boundaries had to be drawn.

Liu Qiangdong had no other choice. After hanging up, he began to personally oversee and accelerate the integration process with Orange Technology.

He even wanted Jingdong’s design department to handle the UI design for the Orange Mobile Phone’s online store.

Chen Yansen knew in his heart that this was the final honeymoon period between him, Taobao, and Jingdong.

Once Pinbei went live, they would most likely end up in a bloodbath.

"The more the merrier!"

Chen Yansen stood in his office, looking out at the darkening sky, and chuckled softly.

「At the same time.」

The navel oranges that Zhang Yifeng had sent from Xiyue finally arrived at the first floor of the Science and Technology Park.

More than 20 boxes of various sizes were piled high. They were intended for the category team to review the product quality, and also to check if the current packaging methods had any flaws.