Huaqiangbei Grand Lecture: Glory and Dreams

I, Old Song of Kinghelm (www.kinghelm.com.cn), came into the electronics business in Huaqiangbei halfway through my career — a change of trade, not a retreat into the religious life. Back then I thought Huaqiangbei was a place full of crowds, easy money, brisk business and endless opportunities, with good-looking women running the shops, and that it was nothing but deals and transactions, with no loyalty and no sense of right and wrong. What I never expected was that Huaqiangbei also has a truly influential platform: the Huaqiangbei Grand Lecture, chaired by "Fat Brother" Xu Huimin. Here there are stories that warm you, calls that urge you on, and clashes and exchanges of views; it is a feast of conversation and a hall of learning, and it is the lucky ground on which I became part of Huaqiangbei.

I, Old Song of Kinghelm, first heard of the Huaqiangbei Grand Lecture from two formidable characters in Huaqiangbei, Jason Fan and Brother Bo, who are the organisers and convenors of "Electronics Fun", the district's most formidable QQ group; by then, as speakers, they had already given two talks. I learned a great deal at the lecture, and I felt it could help me settle quickly into the electronics ecosystem of Huaqiangbei; I also made many friends there and had opportunities to learn, improve and grow, so I often went along to the events that Fat Brother organised. After all that coming and going, and a fair amount of glancing across the room, I was eventually lucky enough to become a speaker at the Huaqiangbei Grand Lecture myself. I gave three talks there, which trained me up and lifted me a level, and which also made Kinghelm's name in Huaqiangbei — a supplier agreed to give us seven days' credit.

The first was on the afternoon of 22 February 2014, when my subject was "The Opportunities and Challenges in the Development of BeiDou". At that point Kinghelm (www.kinghelm.com.cn) had only just become an agent for antennas and navigation modules in the BeiDou industry. I had done my homework very carefully in advance: I began with the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, moved on to the American GPS system, and then to China's own BeiDou BDS system and the BeiDou GPS antennas and modules we were preparing to develop and produce, before talking about the "two passenger, one hazardous" programme that Kinghelm was involved in at the time — the monitoring of tourist coaches, long-distance buses and vehicles carrying dangerous goods. I also set out Kinghelm's positioning and outlook in the GPS and BeiDou industry. The response from the audience that day was quite good, and once I came off stage I gained several older female admirers: they all wanted photographs with me, and my vanity and my self-importance were abundantly satisfied. There was one unusual male fan as well — Old Xie, who stands one metre eighty-eight point eight, weighs 250 jin, or about 125 kilograms, and has an IQ of 250, an EQ of 250 and a personality of 250 to match. Xie Jiapeng is a literary, greasy, middle-aged man of Huaqiangbei who has written a great many novels, poems and essays, and who takes me out for drinks and for Chaozhou beef at Damu whenever he has nothing better to do. He is my greatest gain from Huaqiangbei. (I should add here that Old Xie's novel Thirty Thousand Yuan from My Father is already being prepared for publication. Its main thread is the story of a beautiful, innocent young nurse who gradually turns into a greasy woman running a shop amid the economic tide of Huaqiangbei; the novel describes and celebrates the love and hate, the profit and the principle, the crime and the punishment, and the passion and the enmity of the men and women who run shops in Huaqiangbei, along with the fortunes made overnight and the falls taken in half a day, and the whole Huaqiangbei story of buying in and selling out, of trading and speculating, and of moving on from that to building a brand, doing research and running a company. It is a "Rashomon" of Huaqiangbei, and he says that once it is published he will give me fifty signed copies.)

My second visit to the Huaqiangbei Grand Lecture was in May 2015. At the time I was studying the business models and the direction of development of Huaqiangbei and had gained a little insight. My subject was "The Transformation Path of Huaqiangbei's Electronics Distributors", because people in the same trade in Huaqiangbei were running into bottlenecks and difficulties, and I wanted to do some research and analysis. Once I had tidied the content of my talk into an article, it was republished by Sina Tech and by a good many newspapers and magazines (see www.kinghelm.com.cn). At the time Cheng Yimu, chairman of the Shenzhen Electronics Chamber of Commerce, commented that Old Song was the first person to have systematically studied, sorted out and summarised the business models of Huaqiangbei, and that this had academic significance and practical guidance.

With Chairman Cheng's endorsement behind me, I finally made it into the upper circles of Huaqiangbei. No more erguotou at RMB 6.9 a bottle and no more braised pork trotters at RMB 8 a portion — I was upgraded to sipping coffee and appreciating red wine with the big names of Huaqiangbei, and at my most pretentious I even smoked two Cuban cigars with Brother Long of Toshiba.

The third was in 2016, when I was promoting my new product (www.slkormicro.com) — the silicon carbide MOS field-effect transistor project run in cooperation with Slkor — and my subject was "The Path to Huaqiangbei's Take-Off". I had researched how my fellow electronics people in Huaqiangbei should transform and develop, and I produced a fairly thorough analysis of it, which struck a chord and prompted a good deal of reflection among many of my peers. It also helped to promote my own personal brand, and let people know that Old Song of Kinghelm is a street-stall economist and a famous teller of jokes in Huaqiangbei — cultured, full of stratagems and armed with theory. The Sohu Tech channel even carried it as a live web broadcast, and the response was very good; I was well equipped to harvest the women who run the shops of Huaqiangbei like so much chives.

My three talks at the Huaqiangbei Grand Lecture were given with enormous support and help from Fat Brother Xu Huimin. Fat Brother is not only the host of the lecture but also a great hand at public-interest work: he funded the Huaqiangbei dance troupe out of his own pocket and often takes these half-old men and half-old women out to exercise, and their performances at the lecture bring energy and an audience with them. And of course there was the wholehearted support that Liu Yugui, general manager of Huaqiang Electronics Network, gave to Kinghelm as the leading figure on the organising side.

Through the Huaqiangbei Grand Lecture I have come to know a great many grand figures and elders of the electronics trade in Huaqiangbei — Dr Zhu Junshan of Zhongyifa, for one, the most highly educated and most learned man of letters in Huaqiangbei, who spoke at the Grand Lecture for nine years in a row and who often told me about The Plum in the Golden Vase in private, which taught me a little about human nature and human desire. Then there is Jason Fan, founder of the Electronics Fun group, whose company Ampda handles international sourcing with a purchasing network that reaches the whole world; anyone looking for scarce electronic components should go to him. I was lucky enough, too, to get to know Mr Wu Bo, the finest pen in Huaqiangbei; his writing is excellent, and the only way I can catch up with him is to work harder at my jokes. He is now a vice-president of LCSC (www.szlcsc.com). Then there is Chang Jiang, the young president of Liexin.com, and Chen Long of Longwei ERP software, this most daft of brothers, and Hu Shenghua, a gold-medal speaker who has taught for five years in a row, and Huang Rusen of Shilianxin, a master of sales, and Big Brother Chen, who is round-faced and big-eared, thoroughly Buddhist in temperament, much loved by the women who deal in second-hand goods, and able to shoulder anything. We all enjoy a bit of banter and a drink together, developing and growing side by side. This is the blessing that the Huaqiangbei Grand Lecture has brought us.

On the happy occasion of the hundredth session of the Huaqiangbei Grand Lecture, I, Old Song of Kinghelm (www.kinghelm.com.cn), wish the lecture ever greater and ever better success, and more help for the electronics people of Huaqiangbei. I hope Fat Brother succeeds in losing weight — losing fat without losing weight, and without losing any of his enthusiasm — and I look forward to the lecture's next 100 sessions, when Old Song will come again to exchange views with you all and report on Kinghelm and BeiDou. Thank you, everyone.

Introduction to Mr. Song Shiqiang

Mr Song Shiqiang is the general manager of both Slkor and Kinghelm. He is a member of the expert pool of the Chinese Institute of Electronics, a specialist researcher on the Huaqiangbei business district in Shenzhen, and a popular-science columnist. Mr Song began his career as a technician at the grassroots level and has served as the CEO of an internationally listed real estate company. He has deep experience in technical management and business operations, and combines macroeconomic theory with day-to-day management practice to drive his companies' rapid growth.

Mr Song Shiqiang has invested in Slkor and Kinghelm, both headquartered in Shenzhen, China, and both recognised as national high-tech enterprises. Their brands, Slkor (www.slkoric.com) and Kinghelm (www.kinghelm.net), enjoy international recognition and reputation, and their market share continues to expand. Slkor focuses on the research and development of new materials, new processes and new products; its technical team comes from Yonsei University in South Korea and Tsinghua University, and it was among the first to master silicon carbide MOSFET technology. Slkor has grown from a fabless design house into a comprehensive company covering design and development, manufacturing, total solutions and sales service.