Yanjing Television Factory!
After leaving the auditorium, Li Yi led Zhang Ziqiang over to the factory administration building and returned to his office.
This office had been specially cleared out for him by Director Jiang when he first took over the Yanjing Television Factory.
However, Li Yi had only been there twice in total, so it was somewhat of a waste!
Back in his office, Li Yi had intended to first call Jiang Longyin to update him on the situation here and reassure him not to worry too much.
But after picking up the phone and placing his finger on the dial pad, Li Yi paused.
After more than half a minute, he set the phone down again and fell deep in thought.
He needed to carefully review the situation, figure out exactly how to handle it, and then make the call—there was no rush.
When he’d told those workers earlier that he’d resolve this within a month and lead them to witness a miracle, it wasn’t just empty talk or a stalling tactic—it was his truest, most sincere belief.
To be honest, the debt crisis at the Yanjing Television Factory had indeed been within Li Yi’s expectations.
In fact, the seeds of trouble had been sown long before he issued that production target of 80,000 units to the factory; it was only a matter of time before it erupted.
And the reason Li Yi insisted on keeping the factory running day and night under such circumstances was that he had his own calculations.
Li Yi had already conducted an in-depth investigation into the state of the Yanjing Television Factory.
To describe the factory’s previous state, one word fits perfectly: barely hanging on.
Originally a medium-sized television factory with an annual design capacity of 120,000 units, before he took over, it could produce at most two or three thousand units a month.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t increase production—in fact, boosting output would have been a simple matter for the factory—but the problem was that they couldn’t sell the units.
With a production volume of two or three thousand units, the factory could sell everything it produced, and the profits were just enough to pay the employees’ wages; on a good month, there might even be a small surplus.
However, if production capacity were expanded on a large scale, the inevitable result would be massive product backlogs and the company becoming heavily indebted.
There were two main reasons for this situation.
On the one hand, Yanjing TV Factory lacked the necessary capabilities, and its brand was uncompetitive.
On the other hand, Yanjing TV Factory’s competitors were simply too powerful; facing such rivals, they stood no chance!
Yanjing TV Factory had been in operation for only five years. At the time, its investment exceeded 8 million yuan, and it employed around 2,000 workers, making it a fairly large state-owned factory by domestic standards.
In its early years, the Yanjing Television Factory had enjoyed a period of glory. At its peak, the “Yanjing” brand televisions produced by the factory were bestsellers in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and the four provinces of Shandong, Hebei, Henan, and Anhui, and even held a significant market share across the entire Northeast region. It once achieved the remarkable feat of paying 30 million yuan in taxes and profits in a single year.
Unfortunately, the good times did not last long. Within just a few years, provinces and cities across the country began launching their own television industries, each competing more fiercely than the last.
In Beijing itself, the Yanjing TV Factory faced a three-pronged assault from the Beijing TV Factory’s “Mudan” brand, the Tianjin Radio Factory’s “Bei Jing” brand, and the Tianjin TV Factory No. 2’s “Great Wall” brand.
It was bad enough that the local market was tough to navigate, but the situation outside the capital was just as cutthroat, with fierce competition everywhere.
Outside Beijing, the largest market share was dominated by the Jinxing and Feiyue brands from the Shanghai TV Factory, while the remainder was completely carved up by multiple brands, including the Yellow River TV from Qin Province, the Swan brand from Saibei Province, and the Huanyu and Jinling Panda brands from Jibei Province.
Consequently, Yanjing TV Factory’s market share has been steadily eroded, shrinking year by year, and its profits have plummeted repeatedly.
More importantly, the leaders of other domestic factories were looking to the future and were all devising ways to produce color televisions.
In contrast, due to the stubborn and short-sighted leadership at Yanjing TV Factory, the company had become complacent at this critical juncture, clinging to outdated products from years past just to scrape by. It was only a matter of time before it was left behind.
According to Li Yi’s analysis, the only way forward for Yanshan TV Factory is to upgrade and modernize its products, strengthening itself while competing with other brands for market share.
But a television factory is not quite the same as a cotton mill or a candy factory; it’s not as if product upgrades can be achieved simply by coming up with a few novel ideas.
For a factory like this, product upgrades require not only new equipment but, more importantly, the development of new products.
The capital required isn’t a mere hundred thousand or so, but tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions.
For example, last year, the Shanghai TV Factory imported a color TV production line from the Jiaopenzhi factory, which had been doing quite well, at a cost of a full 90 million… US dollars.
The Yanjing TV Factory clearly lacks the financial strength for this. They can’t even come up with 900,000 dollars, let alone 90 million.
On one hand, they needed massive funds for product upgrades; on the other, they were barely able to pay their employees’ wages. Left with no other choice, Li Yi had to find a different approach.
Li Yi’s plan was to leverage his exceptional marketing skills to first generate some quick cash for Yanjiing TV Factory, and then use those funds to upgrade the entire factory’s product line.
Therefore, after thoroughly understanding the situation at the Yanjing TV Factory, Li Yi decided to launch a groundbreaking marketing campaign for the company.
However, Li Yi was also well aware that Yanjing TV Factory’s brand power was limited. Even if his marketing campaign was a resounding success, it would only generate a temporary surge in traffic—not a sustainable one.
So, the only thing Li Yi could do was to capitalize on this surge in attention, make a substantial profit, and lay the groundwork for the factory’s upcoming comprehensive reforms.
This is precisely why Li Yi demanded that all factory employees and managers focus solely on production and nothing else.
After all, when the surge of attention arrived, if there weren’t enough products to meet the demand, the end result might be that competitors would reap the benefits—and that was not a scenario Li Yi was willing to accept.
However, while his intentions were good, he was let down by a group of incompetent colleagues.
They actually embezzled the wages that should have gone to the workers, completely disrupting his plans and putting Li Yi on the defensive.
Li Yi was well aware that the Yanjing Television Factory was short on both funds and raw materials; they typically purchased raw materials on credit, settling their debts with suppliers only after the products were sold.
This wasn’t really a big deal—suppliers’ money could be owed for a while. In the business world of later times, wasn’t everyone in debt to those above them and dragging their feet with those below? Li Yi was used to it.
What Li Yi hadn’t anticipated, however, was that the factory’s leadership would be foolish enough to embezzle the employees’ wages, ultimately triggering this whole mess.
Of course, one couldn’t entirely blame the factory leaders for this; it was simply that their perspective differed from Li Yi’s.
In Li Yi’s view, the people a company must never alienate are its employees, because they are the ones who directly create value for the factory; without them, the factory would grind to a halt.
Next came the downstream customers—they were the ones who directly paid the factory and were the source of its livelihood, so they couldn’t be alienated.
And the ones you least need to worry about offending are the upstream suppliers—after all, they depend on you for their livelihood.
But those factory executives clearly got it backwards, thinking the workers were their own people and easy to manipulate.
So they took the wages that should have gone to the workers and gave them to the upstream companies—it was utterly idiotic, and they truly deserved the beating they got.
It’s like holding a pair of chopsticks without knowing which end goes up and which goes down.
Originally, according to Li Yi’s plan, he intended to wait until the Yanjing TV Factory’s inventory exceeded 80,000 units before launching his grand marketing campaign.
But as they say, life is full of surprises, and plans rarely go as expected.
Now that this mess has erupted, he has no choice but to grit his teeth and take action ahead of schedule.
With that in mind, he decisively picked up the phone and dialed the district government…
………
PS: After attending the event yesterday, I had a few drinks with the leaders. Lao Cang’s drinking tolerance is on par with Li Yi and Zhou Yang—he’s the type who goes down after just one glass.
Although the leaders were very considerate of Lao Cang and insisted it was just a token gesture, he ended up drinking half a glass, and then… that was it…