It turned out that the company’s executives were all brilliant talents, as all their predictions came true.
After Jiangnan Group announced that it would fully open up various technologies and licenses for terminals, in just one day, not only were the companies already producing terminals going crazy, but even companies unrelated to terminals were also in a frenzy.
Many domestic and foreign enterprises, whose businesses appeared to have nothing to do with terminals, such as an air conditioning company in China and a tractor manufacturing company abroad, approached Jiangnan Group, expressing their desire to obtain technology licenses from Jiangnan Group and produce terminals.
According to data later released by Jiangnan Group, in the span of one week, over 3,200 companies expressed their hope to obtain relevant technology licenses.
Among them, 98% of companies already producing terminals submitted applications, totaling around 1,800. The remaining 1,400 companies, which had never manufactured terminals before, also rushed over.
In fact, this was a result of Jiangnan Group setting restrictions. Due to the overwhelming number of applicants and insufficient production capacity, Jiangnan Group had to announce that only companies with a production scale of over one million RMB would be eligible for licenses and parts supply in the first instance. Other companies or individuals would have to wait three months before reapplying.
The situation became even more spectacular three months later. Many one-person companies, or individuals without even a company, flocked to apply for technology licenses, stating their intention to build terminals.
The identities of these individuals were diverse, including English tutors from extracurricular classes, auto workers, and even cartoonists, all expressing their desire to build terminals, creating a mixed bag of people.
However, by this time, Jiangnan Group had established a complete system and regulations. Therefore, regardless of who applied, as long as they did not violate a few basic principles, they could almost always obtain full technology licenses within three days.
Throughout 2010, over 50,000 companies or individuals ultimately applied for and received authorization for Tianzhou terminals from Jiangnan Group. As for the investigation launched by the European Union, although it had not concluded, no information had surfaced, and not even an investigation team had been formed. After all, with 50,000 entities already authorized, what was there to investigate?
The reason for so many companies and individuals entering the terminal industry was that, while a portion were simply joining the bandwagon or trying to create a stir to boost stock prices without intending to actually produce terminals, the vast majority of companies or individuals genuinely wished to enter the terminal industry, launch their own terminal brands, and reap immense profits.
Historically, around 2012 was the most fervent period for global smartphone development. In that year alone, over 3,000 smartphone brands emerged in China.
Popular brands in later years like Xiaomi, Smartisan, and Nut were almost all established during that period. This era was known as the wild growth period of smartphones and also the most rapid development period for the entire mobile phone industry, considered the golden age of the industry.
So, why did this golden age emerge around 2012?
The answer lay in China. Initially, after Apple launched smartphones, as everyone was new to this product, apart from Apple, other manufacturers couldn't produce satisfactory smartphones.
Even with the subsequent release of the Android system, calling it garbage would have been an understatement back then. At that time, only manufacturers with significant accumulation in mobile phone technology, such as HTC and Samsung, could optimize the Android system while simultaneously launching their own smartphones.
By around 2012, the Android system had undergone four years of development and entered a relatively mature phase, with the system being stable enough.
More importantly, by that time, China possessed almost the entire industrial chain for smartphones. This was because, whether it was Apple, Samsung, or HTC, they could only design phones, while the actual production had to rely on contract manufacturers worldwide.
And at that time, the most formidable electronics contract manufacturer globally was Foxconn, and almost all of Foxconn's processing plants were located in mainland China.
However, Foxconn could not possibly encompass all the steps of the mobile phone production process by itself; they also needed to import semi-finished products from other companies for processing.
Thus, a large chain of electronic product processing emerged around Foxconn. But whether it was Foxconn or Apple, due to their absolute control over orders, they could drive down unit prices extremely low, making it painful for processing companies to earn profits.
When people are pushed to the brink, they start to think, since they have already mastered the production technology for these parts, why not produce a batch of parts under their own brand name and sell them externally?
Eventually, almost all contract manufacturing factories began selling the parts they could produce externally. By 2012, all the parts required for a smartphone could be purchased domestically.
Companies only needed to order mobile phone chips from MediaTek, Qualcomm, or other chip manufacturers, then purchase mobile phone parts domestically, and design a phone exterior similar to Apple's. Thus, a smartphone brand of their own was born.
You could call it a Hammer phone, or a Mop phone; as long as you were happy with the name.
In that era, with just one million RMB, you could establish the entire industrial chain, create your own mobile phone brand, and sell it online. The rest was a matter of marketing skill.
Simultaneously, due to Apple's high prices and the generally poor user experience of the Android ecosystem, the entire smartphone market was essentially a blue ocean. As long as you were skilled at marketing, you could carve out your own niche. This explained the crazy growth period of smartphones around 2012.
In this world, the situation of 2012 would have been difficult to replicate, as Tianzhou terminals absolutely dominated the entire market. In terms of both price and technology, they were irresistible. Other terminal manufacturers had almost no room to survive; even giants like Apple and Google could only resort to underhanded tactics to sway the market.
But who could have imagined that Jiangnan Group would suddenly open up the entire market, ceding the mid-range and low-end terminal markets, and also opening up the entire industrial chain to the market, thus single-handedly creating the prosperous era of 2012?
Similarly, in 2009, due to the explosive growth of the terminal market and a market exceeding 300 billion US dollars in a single year, all businessmen recognized the infinite potential of this market in the future.
Whoever could rise during this period of Jiangnan Group's perceived foolishness would become the next trillion-dollar super enterprise. Therefore, everyone, whether they had the means or not, jumped into the fray, even more so than in the previous generation.
Of course, there was another extremely important reason: Jiangnan Group had reduced the difficulty of manufacturing terminals to an unbelievable extent.
In 2012 in another world, for example, if an English teacher wanted to build a phone, they would first have to hire someone knowledgeable as a vice president to lead the entire phone manufacturing process.
After all, the English teacher themselves would certainly not know how to build a phone and would need professional guidance.
Then they would need to contact numerous mobile phone parts dealers, or directly contact manufacturers, place orders with them, and purchase all the necessary parts.
However, this would only secure most of the parts. Some of the most crucial components, such as chips and memory, would require communication with large manufacturers, negotiating production schedules, and vying like dogs for a small share of the chip market.
After painstakingly securing the hardware, you would also need a system development team to rebrand the generic Android system and add some extra features, thereby creating their own proprietary system.
Someone might ask, why would I bother modifying the generic Android system? Can't I just use it directly?
Of course, you can. Many phone manufacturers in history did just that. However, the generic Android system was developed on a universal device. But the parts sourced by their own phones came from various suppliers and had different performance characteristics. The generic Android system certainly could not fully utilize this performance, and sometimes it could even lead to the entire phone crashing.
Therefore, professional system engineers would be needed to fine-tune the system little by little, modifying it to adapt to the corresponding parts. Otherwise, what you would deliver to the users would be a glowing brick that could potentially become a brick at any moment.
In conclusion, building a phone during the golden age was still a difficult and troublesome undertaking. Even Xiaomi, back in the day, spent about a year negotiating with manufacturers before launching its first Xiaomi phone.
However, Jiangnan Group reduced this difficulty by an immeasurable amount, or rather, directly lowered Mount Everest to the level of a small hill.
Because in June 2010, Jiangnan Group, in conjunction with the China Electronics Industry Alliance, launched the first customized terminal procurement network.
This platform directly incorporated the data of all terminal-related manufacturers within the China Electronics Industry Development Alliance and the relevant parts they could supply into its own database.
Any company that obtained terminal authorization from Jiangnan Group could log in to this website and view all product data.
If this were all, it would certainly not be enough. The key was that this website also provided a virtual assembly function.
This function guided the entire manufacturing and assembly process of a terminal. Even if the user was a complete novice with no knowledge of terminals, by following this virtual assembly function, step-by-step selecting the various parts needed for their terminal, they could ultimately assemble a complete virtual terminal.
During this process, the program would automatically conduct compatibility checks for parts, automatically exclude parts that could not be connected, and recommend the best product combinations based on the performance of these assembled parts.
In short, all it took was having hands.
Finally, because all parts were manufactured according to Jiangnan Group's technical standards, and Jiangnan Group's system development department would continuously make micro-adjustments for new parts and release different system versions,
Jiangnan Group could then automatically match a usable system after all parts were assembled. If a match was not successful, for a certain fee, Tianzhou's software engineers would proactively modify the system to allow it to be installed in the terminal assembled by the user.
The only thing the user might need to design themselves in the entire process was the exterior of the terminal.