How To Break The Toilet Lid Dilemma?

Tencent Finance News (Yang Yang) The "toilet lid" incident has been lively for nearly two months. During the two sessions, even the president of the state and many deputies to the National People's Congress expressed their views on this.

The cause was an article by financial writer Wu Xiaobo titled "Going to Japan to Buy a Toilet Cover" at the end of January. He described in the article that Chinese tourists went to Japan to buy back hair dryers, ceramic kitchen knives, stainless steel vacuum flasks, electric toothbrushes and even toilet lids.

Such products are not available in China, but they are still unable to support domestic purchases from abroad. Wu Xiaobo concluded that the reason is that the technological and conceptual innovation of domestic manufacturing lags behind foreign countries. He proposed in the article: If you make an electric rice cooker, can you make the cooked rice grains shine in a non-stick pan; and if you make a toilet lid, can you make all buttocks clean like jade, like spring breeze?

The question I am curious about is, will the new generation of entrepreneurs in China also encounter the toilet seat dilemma at some point in the future? China's manufacturing industry once relied on cost advantages to be quite competitive, but when this relative advantage is gradually lost, what is the core of maintaining industrial competitiveness? How to shape and maintain this core?

How to crack the toilet lid dilemma? Wu Xiaobo's prescription for the manufacturing industry is: instead of seeking help from outside and trying luck on an unfamiliar battlefield, it is better to seek breakthroughs and strive for technological sharpness innovation. The next question is, how can we achieve technological innovation?

"Innovation" is not a proposition unique to China's manufacturing industry, or a unique question. Even in the TMT industry, which is relatively close to the world level, it is not too far away for Chinese entrepreneurs to be accused of plagiarizing and cloning Western technology, design and even business models. When explaining their business models, China’s first-generation Internet companies often use similar Western companies as an explanation. Just a year and a half ago, some VC investors pointed out that 95% of the early projects they looked at were so-called copycat (copy, plagiarism), "Because the cost of copying is too low, they often disregard the market demand for foreign markets. The hot projects follow the trend and replicate them to China."

In the early years, swapping the market for technology was the path for China to gain innovation. In recent years, the topic of "independent technological innovation" has been very hot, but does this mean not asking others and working behind closed doors? Obviously not. During the two sessions, Premier Li Keqiang made two statements about the "toilet cover incident": the first is to have an open mind and oppose trade barriers because consumers have the right to have more choices; the second is to upgrade.

"Of course companies can accumulate slowly." After an M&A case happened, I once asked the investor of one of the parties involved, and he asked: What if the best market opportunity is missed? It is not possible that some people seriously think that taking the road of independent research and development is the truth, but there are also people who dismiss this idea. "Any kind of technology, the more people and frequency it uses, the higher the possibility of innovation." Therefore, under the existing conditions, the technological gap between China and the West can only grow wider. Not only the western technology has a relatively high starting point, but also because its interaction with consumption can stimulate innovation.

Therefore, we see more, or the route of introduction, digestion, and absorption. One of the purposes of overseas mergers and acquisitions by Chinese companies in recent years is to acquire technology. Take Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's PC business as an example. In addition to the PC business and the market, more importantly, it has registered more than 4,000 technologies in the United States and around the world. If you want to merge, you have to go out and "go to a strange market."

Even if the technology is catching up, I am afraid that we have to take the initiative to "go to a strange market." A senior Internet person once said to me that he does not think that Chinese Internet companies will have "original technologies and business models", because in the PC Internet era, China does not have an international company. "For these companies, it is very happy to start a business in China because the market here is large enough." However, due to well-known reasons, global companies have not fully participated in the Chinese market. The innovative models of PC Internet are indeed from the West.

In the era of mobile Internet, although China and the world are technically on a unified starting line this time, Chinese entrepreneurial companies "are facing the world from the beginning, not just targeting the Chinese market." Just yesterday, I was having dinner with a person from a VC fund. She said that among the startups that the fund invests in, there are many startups that "get overseas users first and then transfer back to China."

Another senior investor in VC funds believes that in the era of mobile Internet, China will have world-leading technology and entrepreneurial models. In fact, in mobile communication software such as WeChat, as well as the combination of software and hardware, wearable devices and IOT, China has advanced innovations that are ahead of the world.