The One Behind It All Chapter 22

However, at that time, the main market for Huawei's mobile phone sales was in rural areas, and they were all telecommunications bureaus below the township level. Each bureau had a small number of users. Everyone thinks that 2,000 switches are enough, and if you develop 10,000 switches, you won't be able to sell them at all. This situation has had an impact on the confidence of Wanmenji developers. In order to encourage the developers of Wanmen Machinery, Zheng Baoyong held a meeting with everyone and vowed, "If you develop it, I promise to help you sell 10 units." Everyone felt very encouraged after hearing this. Unexpectedly, instead of selling 10 units of the C&C08 Wanmen machine, it sold hundreds of thousands units, becoming the mainstream switch in the domestic public telephone communication network.

Subsequently, Zheng Baoyong organized Li Yinan and other personnel to consider the research and development plan of Wanmen Machine. Li Yinan is a student in the youth class of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. He went to college at the age of 15. Li Yinan started as an intern at Huawei. When he joined the Wanmen Machinery Solution Group in 1993, he had not yet graduated as a graduate student and was less than 22 years old. At that time, Li Yinan wore a pair of glasses and was as thin as a middle school student. When central leaders came to inspect Huawei, more than one leader told him to eat more.

At that time, the research and development of the C&C08 2000-door switch was in full swing, and the design of the 10,000-door switch was also discussed in full swing. We first analyzed the competitors' technical solutions. To expand from 2000-door machines to 10,000-door machines, a more popular approach is to use an internal high-speed bus to connect multiple 2000-door switch modules, such as Shanghai Bell's S1240 and Fujitsu switches. All have this structure. But after several months of discussion, everyone found that it was not feasible.

Li Yinan then thought that the fastest public bus standard was the Multibus II bus of Intel Corporation of the United States, so he decided to use Multibus to implement the Wanmen machine. Since the initial plan used bus products from Intel Corporation of the United States, Huawei's R&D Department ordered development boards and tools for nearly US$200,000 (equivalent to 2 million yuan at the time) for the first time. In order to rush for time, Huawei gave the R&D Department full authority to place orders. However, after several months of further consultation and further research by the R&D department, everyone decided that it was inappropriate to use this product: Huawei simply did not have the technical capabilities to implement such a fast bus. 200,000 US dollars of development boards and tools were ordered for free!

In mid-1993, Huawei's financial situation was very tight. Many urgently needed components could not be purchased immediately due to lack of funds. It was no longer enough to spend so much money on a batch of development boards and tools that had no much use. possible. When he went to work every day, young Li Yinan became nervous when he heard the phone ringing. The product had not yet been successful but had already put the company in debt, and he felt a heavy burden on his heart. Later, with Zheng Baoyong's efforts, he only compensated the supplier 200,000 yuan, which saved the company a lot of losses.