Chapter 23 Fifty Thousand, A Token of Respect

Chapter 23 Fifty Thousand, A Token of Respect

In the following days, the two Langchao employees never showed up again. Only Jared, relying on his friendship with Xi Xiaoding, kept coming to Yuanxin every day—yes, he was one of the few friends Xi had made at Penn. The kind who used to drag Xi around to various bars, selflessly imparting all sorts of girl-chasing techniques.

"Xi, have you made up your mind?"

"No way."

"OK! Then let's drop the topic. By the way, the cherry blossoms at Penn are beautiful this year, and Thunder Bar has some new dancers."

...

The above conversation happened almost daily. Afterward, Jared would wait for Xi to finish work, then insist, as a friend, that Xi accompany him to a bar.

However, when Su Yuanshan arrived at the company today, he was surprised to find that Jared wasn't lounging in Xi's office as usual.

"Where's Jared? Don't tell me you two stayed out too late last night and he's too tired to come?"

"He's at Tian Yaoming's place," Xi Xiaoding said, winking with a hint of pride. "That guy is an expert in baseband soft decision algorithms and interleaving/de-interleaving algorithms, and he loves to teach. I arranged for him to sit in on Tian Yaoming's group meeting. Today they're discussing baseband algorithms."

Su Yuanshan froze for a moment, then burst into laughter.

Tian Yaoming, as a telecommunications specialist at UESTC focused on protocols, was certainly capable. But it depended on the field and who he was compared against... Jared, after all, was a bona fide wireless communications Ph.D. from Penn who later joined Motorola, one of the industry giants.

Letting Jared sit in on Tian Yaoming leading a group of master's and undergraduate students discussing baseband algorithms was like inviting Guan Yu to watch amateurs swinging broadswords in the streets.

At this point, Tian's group had only a few half-baked ideas, and none were real baseband experts.

Xi Xiaoding laughed and opened a folder, pulling out a list and handing it to Su Yuanshan. "See if these people are suitable? They all have backgrounds in integrated circuit design."

Su Yuanshan glanced at it. Xi had selected five candidates, with Li Mingliu from Tsinghua at the top.

Li Mingliu had once been the most arrogant new recruit, but after being disciplined jointly by Xi and Su Yuanshan, he had quickly become Xi's most reliable assistant.

"Li Mingliu's your top guy. You're willing to hand him over?" Su Yuanshan asked, knowing that Li Mingliu was a graduate student from Tsinghua's electronics engineering department. When the teams were first formed, he had been snatched up by Xi because of his strong programming skills and IC background.

"EDA development now only needs some minor tools and maintenance work. His talents are wasted here. Besides, his real passion is chip design—he's better suited for you."

"Alright. I'll have him lead the team."

Xi Xiaoding nodded. "It's a shame I can't help. By the way, MPEG1 isn't an international standard yet. Are you sure about betting on it?"

"It depends on who proposed it," Su Yuanshan said. "It was drafted by the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) and ISO (International Organization for Standardization)—the biggest standard-setting bodies. MPEG was born with a golden spoon. It's only a matter of time before it rises."

As they chatted, the door suddenly swung open, and Jared strode in, looking unusually serious.

"Xi, Su. Today we must settle this."

Xi Xiaoding still thought it was the usual daily pestering and just smiled, shaking his head.

But Su Yuanshan immediately sensed something different. Today was the day the first batch of pagers rolled off the line.

"We still firmly believe that character encoding is a form of information expression and should not be patentable. However, to show our respect for the company that organized the encoding first, MOTO is willing to offer fifty thousand US dollars in exchange for you making the encoding public," Jared said.

Xi Xiaoding froze and immediately looked at Su Yuanshan.

Su Yuanshan frowned slightly and asked quietly, "And if we refuse?"

"Then we will join forces with Pioneer to resist your monopolistic behavior by adopting an entirely new Chinese encoding system in future paging stations."

Su Yuanshan was silent for a few seconds, then suddenly smiled. "Fifty thousand dollars? Alright."

Jared was overjoyed. "Really?"

"Really. Draft a contract and we'll sign it immediately," Su Yuanshan said, his smile radiant.

**

After Xi Xiaoding saw Jared off, Su Yuanshan paged his uncle. Soon he received confirmation: at the pager factory, Wang Chaoxin had held a press conference announcing a nationwide distributor conference for early next month.

No wonder MOTO had been so eager to give Yuanxin only two options—either take the money or fight to the death over the paging market. And it wasn't just about the pager market—it was about the critical market for paging station signal transmitters, where Yuanxin had no real ability to compete yet.

"If Jared and the others switch encoding, it'll probably delay them by one to two months," Su Yuanshan thought, dialing Pan Xiaojun's mobile next. He told him to inform Uncle Zhang to seize the opportunity: rush to lock down as many distributors as possible across the country, and preferably collect franchise fees upfront—tie them to Yuanxin's chariot before anything changed.

"On our side, the EDA software is ready for final encryption. Ten days from now, I'll have my father take it to the capital. Can we make it?" Su Yuanshan asked.

Xi Xiaoding did a quick calculation and nodded. "No problem. So basically, the pager market monopoly only lasts two months?"

"Yes..." Su Yuanshan sighed. "Nothing we can do. MOTO is the industry leader. The fact we got a head start is already a miracle."

Then he suddenly grinned. "And now we have fifty thousand dollars in foreign currency. We don't need to worry about travel expenses for the October exhibition anymore."

At that time, foreign exchange reserves in China were extremely scarce, and it was nearly impossible for private companies to obtain foreign currency. This fifty thousand solved a big problem.

Later, Su Yuanshan pulled Li Mingliu and the other four into his office and officially announced Li Mingliu as team leader, fully in charge of MPEG decoder chip development.

This time, Su Yuanshan didn't intend to personally handle every detail like he had with the pager chips. The team needed to grow.

Moreover, he planned to develop this team into Yuanxin's dedicated IC design group—forming the company's fourth pillar.

EDA, wireless communications, IC chips, and microcontrollers—this was Yuanxin's embryonic structure.

Li Mingliu was ecstatic about the new project. When he learned that dozens more people would join in a month, he was so excited he almost claimed the server room as his personal office.

After assigning tasks, Su Yuanshan reopened the long-neglected C++ compiler.

He needed to create a small utility to allow Yuanxin EDA to directly read Protel project files.

Currently, Protel dominated PCB design. To quickly capture market share, Yuanxin EDA had to seamlessly import Protel files.

After all, Yuanxin was still poor. The pager project's revenue wouldn't be available immediately. For now, they could only rely on Yuanxin EDA.

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