There are actually many types of plastics with various uses. They are an indispensable material type in modern industry. People deal with various plastic products almost all the time.
So this is a material category with a very wide range of uses. His subsidiary Huaxia International Petrochemical Company is one of the giants in plastic materials, and it still occupies a very large share in the global plastic materials field.
As for Cornerstone Materials, they don’t have materials in the plastics field. For them, they don’t bother to make such products with low technical content and low profit margins.
If he really interrupts and launches a series of materials with similar properties to plastics to replace plastic materials, then China International Petrochemical Company's business will shrink further.
Originally, their petroleum fuel business was cut, and now their plastics business is about to be cut again. It can be said that this company is the most ill-fated company under his ownership.
Moreover, these disasters did not come from other competitors, but were caused to such an extent by his own boss's novel ideas. It is really a tearful thing to say.
From the perspective of maintaining the stability of his business, Zhao Yi is just messing around like this. It is estimated that many bosses will not do this, but he feels that it is very necessary for individual interests to obey the overall interests.
Plastic products certainly have their own excellent properties and play an important role in industry and daily life. It is impossible to clean them up, but the environmental problems caused by plastics cannot be ignored.
And although plastic products are currently an important business of Huaxia International Petrochemical Company, they do not dominate the world, and their share of the global plastics market is not particularly high.
Because most of them are things without high technical content, unless they are special plastic products. Although the technology is high and the profit margin is high, the market size is actually not large.
If Fluolight Environmental Management Company were to produce various environmentally friendly materials that could replace almost all plastics, it would be equivalent to eating up almost all the market that originally belonged to plastics.
As a boss, the benefits of doing this are far greater than maintaining the original plastic market, so no matter from any perspective, this is something worth doing.
As for Huaxia International Petrochemical Company, they can only aggrieve themselves, but before that, they can sell their plastic business so that they will not lose money. As for how to make up for the shrinking business, they need to find a way on their own.
Maybe they can burst out their endless innovation capabilities under the huge performance pressure, and it is not impossible to find new businesses in the oil industry.
As for himself, he has never thought about coming up with new technologies, because he himself does not know what business is suitable for Huaxia International Petrochemical Company. Even their fertilizer business was figured out by themselves and achieved results.
Although Zhao Yi has absolutely no problems with technology, he is not omnipotent when it comes to finding the market. This requires the company to have keen insight and be able to detect new business directions.
Even if he can't find a new business direction, there will be no loss for him, and it can further reduce our country's dependence on oil, which is very important.
Oil imports are different from other mineral imports. Other minerals are actually well recovered and can be recycled. Now it seems that the import volume is large, but at a certain stage, internal recycling can be achieved based on the overall stock.
Most petroleum derivatives are disposable and difficult to recycle. This is why petroleum-related products cause greater damage to the environment.
I have never heard that steel scrap can pollute the environment, because this metal material is easily recycled, smelted from the scrap, and re-entered into the industrial field, which is incomparable to petroleum derivatives.
After thinking about this clearly, he said to Wei Donglai: "Since your environmentally friendly materials have achieved such outstanding results, we can continue to work in this field, and there may be more surprises.
After you go back, you can list all the material areas that may need to be replaced by environmentally friendly materials, and show me the list. I will develop relevant environmentally friendly materials when I have time. "
When Wei Donglai heard what he said, a smile suddenly appeared on his face. The boss wanted to find more financial resources for himself, which was very important for Yaoguang Environmental Management Company, which had been suffering losses for a long time.
As for whether the boss has the ability to complete the research and development of these materials, Wei Donglai has never doubted it. After all, the boss's mythical miracle has not been broken so far, and his reputation is naturally very strong.
Later, Zhao Yi listened in detail to them about the Tarim Basin, Lop Nur, the Loess Plateau, the Yellow River management project that had just started, and the seawater desalination project that had been started for some time.
All projects are progressing according to plan, and all work is currently going very smoothly. However, they purchased a batch of mechanical equipment from Tianshu Machinery Company at a cost of 100 billion yuan.
According to the official requirements for the Yellow River Management Project, they don't need to be so anxious, but according to their own internal time nodes, they need to do a lot of work in advance.
In addition, the Loess Plateau project is also accelerating. Together, the demand for machinery and equipment has suddenly increased a lot, and the number of employees has also increased a lot compared to before.
Fortunately, Xuantian Technology Company made a lot of money last year, and the cost of the Tarim Basin has been reduced a lot. Zhao Yi does not need to tear down the east wall to make up for the west wall. He can just pay a fee directly from Xuantian Technology Company.
As for borrowing from banks, Yaoguang Environmental Management Company does not dare to do so, mainly because their business losses are too large. If they use bank loans, the losses will be even greater.
The bank is not worried that they will not be able to repay the money, although as an independent enterprise, Yaoguang Environmental Management Company cannot afford the huge repayment capacity, and the asset output cannot currently obtain too many loans.
However, Yaoguang Environmental Management Company is not an independent legal person, but a sole proprietorship. In essence, it is not much different from a roadside restaurant. As the owner of the company, he has unlimited joint and several liability.
In other words, even if Yaoguang Environmental Management Company cannot pay the money, it will not be able to go bankrupt. The money owed to the bank still needs to be paid by Zhao Yi as the boss. It is impossible to go bankrupt and evade responsibility.
As for why he did this, as I said before, it was a huge risk for others, but for him, this was the best arrangement. As long as the risk was controllable, there wouldn't be a big problem.
The most important thing is that with his huge asset scale, even if a certain company has problems, it is not a big deal and it will not collapse all at once.
Because his industries are spread across almost all walks of life across the country, as long as our country's economic scale remains, the scale of his assets will not decrease. This is one of the important reasons why he dares to do this.
Just like the plastic material substitution issue just mentioned, although Huaxia International Petrochemical Company will suffer huge losses, Yaoguang Environmental Management Company can gain more benefits than their losses. Overall, the benefits outweigh the losses.
As a sole proprietorship, it is much easier to tear down the east wall and repair the west wall, because essentially it belongs to your own personal industry and does not belong to the company's industry, so fund allocation is much more convenient.
During the meeting with the Building Block Software Company, Zhao Yi was more concerned about the progress of their smart city brain project. This is their core business. If it is not satisfactory, the efforts of the Building Block Software Company for so many years will be a bit outweighed by the gain.
In order to enable the smart city brain to be applied as soon as possible, the current operation plan is for China Housing Company to undertake the operation of the smart city brain. As for the charging method, it is also very complicated.
When it comes to public services, service fees are collected from government departments by China Housing Corporation. When it comes to commercial services, fees are collected from commercial enterprises. Payment services in the residential field are also collected directly from residents.
Because the charging channels are very complicated and the work involved is very large, it is difficult for a building block software company to do this, because they are at best a software company with only such a large number of employees.
Therefore, this matter still has to be done by China Housing Company, because they themselves need to maintain a large property operation team, and it is much easier to charge commercial enterprises and residents.
As for the government charging items, it is even simpler. The China Housing Company can negotiate directly with the local government. As for whether there will be disputes, this is definitely possible. Everyone wants to get other people's services for free.
However, among the tenants of China Housing Corporation, one of the fees is the social public service fee paid to the local government, and this fee is also collected by China Housing Corporation and then transferred to the government finance department.
This is equivalent to a large amount of money that needs to pass through the hands of the China Housing Company. If you want to default on the bill or argue, this money will also be lost.
Building Block Software Company charges smart city brain project fees and follow-up service fees. The rest has nothing to do with them. Although they make less money, they have much less worry.
Of course, it must be profitable for China Housing Corporation to be willing to handle such a complicated matter. If they were asked to do it, they would not be willing to do it. These all come with costs.
In addition to the difficulty in charging, the construction of the entire smart city cannot be separated from the in-depth participation of China Housing Corporation. The purchaser of many smart hardware is China Housing Corporation.
It can be said that if they want to truly realize smart cities, there is a hurdle that Chinese housing companies cannot get around. The current strategy of Building Block Software Company is the most beneficial to them, otherwise it will be difficult for them to play well.
At present, their smart city brain is in the large-scale testing stage, involving more than 50 million people in the city. If the test results are perfect, the next step will be to enter the formal operation stage.
The building block software company will not receive any money during the testing phase, because the service recipients will not be charged during the testing phase. Naturally, the Chinese housing company, as an intermediary, is not willing to pay the fees themselves.
Only after the official operation and the fees can be collected, China Housing Company will pay off the previous construction costs, and at the same time, it will continue to pay the service fees of the Building Block Software Company.
If this is the case, the financial pressure on the building block software company is very high, because the hardware cost of the smart city brain is very high, after all, it needs to meet all aspects of the operation of the entire city.
This requires a lot of computing power, and for the security of city information, it is not possible to use the cloud computing platform of Xinghan Technology Company, and needs to be separated from the general commercial platform.
In order to ensure the stable operation of the smart city brain around the clock, Building Blocks Software Company has developed a new computing architecture, which is very different from the super-intelligent computer of Polaris Company.
Calculated based on their current cost of computing power, it basically reaches the level of 1,000 yuan per person, which means that serving a population of 50 million requires hardware computing power of up to 50 billion yuan.
This is not a big problem for other companies under his umbrella, but for the building block software company, this expense is very huge, and their operating income is basically drained.
They have invested huge R&D expenses in the research and development of smart city brains, but they don't actually make much money. Now that they are all invested in this, it is very stressful for them.
Regarding the cost of their computing power, Zhao Yi feels that it is still too high. Although it can be earned slowly over many years, the cost is still too high for the operation of the city.
You must know that a smart city is not just a smart city brain, but also includes various extended systems and hardware facilities that cost more. Not many cities can afford such a large cost.
The participating cities this time are all relatively large cities in the country and generally have relatively high spending power. However, for other cities, this cost is undoubtedly relatively high.
He believes that it is more appropriate to reduce the cost of computing power per capita to 50 yuan. With such a high cost, the building block software company will basically have no profit, and residents will also feel that the charges are too high.
However, with the current technical capabilities, it will definitely be very difficult to solve this problem. Otherwise, the building block software company would have done it long ago. There is no need to choose this expensive solution instead of choosing a cheap solution.
Such a high cost mainly comes from two aspects. The first aspect is the hardware cost. Breaking through this cannot be achieved by the Building Block Software Company alone. It requires the efforts of the entire industry chain.
The second aspect is the loss of power costs. Judging from the current energy consumption of silicon-based chips, it cannot be reduced just by wanting to reduce it.
In addition, there are many safeguard measures. In order to achieve stable and long-lasting operation, the requirements for safeguard measures must be very high. All these together make the cost reach such a level.
He thought for a while and said to Zuo Daqian: "Don't expand the scope of testing for the time being and maintain the current scale of testing. The current cost is too high and must be reduced."
Zuo Daqian also knew that the cost was very high, but he could not lower it just because he wanted to. When he heard Zhao Yi say this, he could only look at him eagerly, hoping that he could give him a solution.
"Xuantian Technology Company will launch photonic chips this year. The computing power is unmatched by current silicon-based chips. It also consumes less energy and has excellent parallel computing capabilities. It is very suitable as a carrier for smart city brains." Zhao Yi said .
When Zuo Daqian heard what Zhao Yi said, he had a shocked look on his face. As an industry insider, he certainly knew the benefits of photonic chips, but no company has yet made a breakthrough in this technology.
Therefore, the super optical brain is still in the world of science fiction. In the real world, no one has thought that such a product can appear. However, the boss told him that it will be available this year. How could this not shock him
As for Zhao Yi, he originally did not plan to come up with photonic chips so soon, because currently silicon-based chips are enough to meet most scenarios, and the demand for photonic chips is not that urgent yet.
Even the robots he plans to produce use traditional silicon-based chips, but use optical signal transmission technology in the signal transmission system because of its fast speed, low heat generation, and low energy consumption.
If you want to reduce costs, you can only use more advanced technologies. In addition to photonic chips, carbon-based chips are also an option, but carbon-based chips require large-scale production to reduce costs.
In contrast, the industry maturity of photonic chips is higher, because he has assembled photonic supercomputers on a large scale himself, and even for such small-scale production, the cost is not sky-high.
In fact, the production process of photonic chips is not very complex, much lower than that of silicon-based and carbon-based chips, but it requires a high level of manufacturing technology. Before, he only produced small batches in the laboratory.
However, even if he plans to come up with photonic chips and supporting computer technology, he does not plan to promote them on a large scale, because this will have a huge impact on the existing chip industry.
In the current chip industry, his companies occupy an absolute market share, and technological breakthroughs cannot bring him more benefits. There is no need to kill the existing industry at once.
The computing power of photonic chips is definitely unmatched by silicon-based chips, starting at least 10,000 times. However, the single-chip price of photonic chips is definitely much more expensive than silicon-based chips.
Even if the cost of computing power in a city is reduced by 20 times, the price of photonic chips is more than 2,000 times higher than that of silicon-based chips, which is definitely out of reach for ordinary users.
As for the actual cost, it is definitely not that high. The photonic chips he produces on a small scale in the laboratory, not counting computing power, are only about 10 times that of silicon-based chips for the same area.
If mass production is carried out, the cost will be further reduced, and it is possible that the cost will be almost the same as the current silicon chip, because during mass production, it will further optimize the production process and technology to reduce the cost to the lowest.
In this way, it can not only help the building block software company to effectively reduce the per capita computing power cost of the smart city brain, but also bring a lot of benefits to Xuantian Technology Company.
More importantly, the cost of high-end robots produced by Xuantian Technology Company will drop significantly. Currently, low-end robots cost 10,000, mid-range robots cost 50,000, and high-end robots cost 100,000. .
In addition to having more sensors and more precious materials, higher-end robots also require higher computing power. There are two reasons for this.
The first one is that the more sensors there are, the more computing power is required. This principle is easy to understand, because the sensors themselves also require computing power, and the more information points there are, the more information is processed, and the computing power is naturally consumed. Also bigger.
The second is that the higher-end robots have more comprehensive capabilities. Especially robots oriented to the service industry, they not only need more knowledge reserves, but also need to control body expressions and have sharper insights into the external environment.
It may not be cost-effective to replace low-end robots with photonic chips. Not only do they have relatively single functions, but the computing power of silicon-based chips is enough to support their work capabilities.
However, mid-range robots and high-end robots can replace the original silicon-based chips with photonic chips. Not only can the computing power be greatly improved, the control capabilities can be greatly improved, and various performance performances can also be greatly improved.
And the cost will be further reduced. Although in the market, the cost will not change much, and although the market price of photonic chips is certainly not low, for Xuantian Technology Company, the real cost they bear is significantly reduced.
This creates more favorable conditions for Xuantian Technology Company to promote high-end models of robots, because all robots are operated on a rental basis, and the cost needs to be borne by Xuantian Technology Company, but terminal costs will not increase significantly.
For example, window service robots require high-end model robots because this is an image display and it is impossible to use mid- to low-end model robots. However, the rental fee is based on the salary of ordinary window personnel.
Moreover, as a service robot, it cannot operate 24 hours a day. After all, everyone is asleep in the middle of the night, so there is no need for service. The value created is actually not as high as that of low-end model robots.
This is why he decided to promote high-end robots last, because the cost is high and the benefits are low. Even Xuantian Technology Co., Ltd. cannot afford the cost in the early stages of promotion.
If photonic chips are used, due to the sudden increase in computing power, robots will not simply be divided into low, middle and high-end models. There will be more models divided for use in different fields.
For example, window-type service robots only need to meet the minimum computing power, because their service capabilities do not need to be very high and they do not need too much computing power, so the cost is naturally lower.
For example, teacher robots used in schools need to have sufficient computing power to be able to complete various teaching tasks independently, and to be able to calmly face various problems of students.
After such changes, the average cost of mid-range robots will be reduced to about 25,000 yuan, and the average price of high-end robots will be reduced to about 50,000 yuan, with some sub-models even lower.
Although the cost is still not low, it is much better than before. He has long felt that the number of teachers in the school is too few, but the cost of high-end robots is too high, making it very difficult to implement.
Now even if 10 million high-end robots are deployed to compulsory schools across the country to serve as teachers, it will only cost 500 billion yuan. Although it is still not low, it is affordable.
At present, the number of teachers in the country is less than 10 million, and on average one teacher has to supervise more than 40 students. If artificial intelligence teachers did not bear most of the pressure, the quality of teaching would definitely be worrying.
However, smart teachers have no body and can only teach theoretical knowledge, which is powerless for students' practical ability development and practical activities. Interest classes in compulsory education schools across the country are seriously lacking teachers.
If a group of high-end robots act as teachers, this problem will be solved instantly, and the salary of teachers is higher than that of ordinary workers and higher than that of waiters.
This will also help Xuantian Technology Company recover its capital faster. According to the optimized cost, it can be profitable within two years, which is still very cost-effective.
If the Building Block Software Company had not faced this problem, he would not have made up his mind whether to take out the photonic chip. After all, this is still strictly confidential. (End of chapter)