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Slkor Kinghelm Song Shiqiang: Why Are There So Many Billionaires in Shenzhen Huaqiangbei? (Part 3)
2026-10-29
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Huaqiangbei is located in Futian District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. It is the general name for Huaqiangbei Subdistrict and, together with "Zhongguancun in Beijing," is one of the two major centers of China's electronic information industry. It is a calling card showcasing the achievements of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone's reform and opening up. What deeply impresses people and makes them flock to Shenzhen Huaqiangbei (shenzhenhuaqiangbei) is the question of why there are so many billionaires in Huaqiangbei. Mr. Song Shiqiang, founder of Kinghelm and Slkor (www.slkoric.com), will explain this for everyone. Today he analyzes Huaqiangbei's unique business model and the characteristics of its small companies, because most billionaires come from among them!
Kinghelm and Slkor Song Shiqiang, "The Past, Present, and Future of Shenzhen Huaqiangbei"
[Text in Image]: Song Shiqiang; Huaqiangbei Commercial Research Expert; Private Economy Researcher; Member of the Electronic Information Expert Database of the China Association for Science and Technology; General Manager of Shenzhen Slkor Micro Semiconductor Co., Ltd.; General Manager of Shenzhen Kinghelm Electronics Co., Ltd. The Past, Present, and Future of Huaqiangbei.
As mentioned earlier, Huaqiangbei's regular working population is about 500,000. Small enterprises, small booths, and the endless stream of backpackers total about 100,000, and they are all independent economic entities! Because the base is simply too large, the number of people who seize accidental opportunities and become tycoons is also large!
These enterprises are small and their business models are simple. Some people dare to set up their own companies just three months after entering the industry, so most companies in Huaqiangbei have fewer than five people, many are based on kinship ties, and many companies even have only one person—the boss does all the work alone. For a component trading company in Huaqiangbei, 50 people is the upper limit. Corporate governance matters such as business models, brand building, corporate publicity, organizational development, supply chain management, customer management, legal risk control, knowledge engineering, process management, standardization, talent training, competitive barriers, corporate culture, and ethics are out of the question, let alone today's digitalization. They can only find alternative ways to compete!
Shenzhen Huaqiangbei's (hauqiangbei songshiqiang) main business is electronic components, with a huge variety and number of models. According to statistics from Huaqiang Electronic Network, there are more than 10 million electronic component models in Huaqiangbei. Add channel information, electrical parameters, packaging, original goods, refurbished goods, and other attributes for each product, and the amount of information is enormous. Huaqiangbei has a large workforce and wide channels, and external demand information comes from all over the world, so information in Huaqiangbei is explosive. Experts will find opportunities to make money in the middle! The essence of the business model of small BOM-matching companies in Huaqiangbei is to organize and desensitize (screen and reprocess) various product information and then resell it, earning a price spread after adding supporting services such as delivery, payment terms, rebates, and entertainment. Therefore, the bosses and boss ladies value information greatly. They care about relationships with original manufacturers and agents, procurement channels, application industries, development trends, substitutability, inventory levels, order cycles, Huaqiangbei market price fluctuations, and new product iterations!
People's Daily republished Slkor Song Shiqiang's "The Past, Present, and Future of Shenzhen Huaqiangbei."
From the above, it can be seen that Huaqiangbei's business model is not conducive to long-term accumulation and scaling, nor does it have the compounding effect of management and knowledge accumulation and iteration. Therefore, [entrepreneurs] can only seek fleeting opportunities by analyzing and judging complex information. Fires and floods at original component factories, discontinuation of old models, trade war blockades, explosive growth of new consumer products, economic crises, wars and epidemics, structural shortages, raw material shortages—these create price-increase opportunities caused by supply-demand imbalances. Huaqiangbei's bosses and boss ladies will cherish these opportunities and take a big gamble when possible. Speculation, plus leveraged speculation, is one of the simple and crude modes of getting rich quick. The planned production cuts by wafer fabs during the 2008 financial crisis, the 2011 Thailand floods, and the 2018 capacitor and resistor shortages made many people moderately wealthy. In 2019, under-display fingerprint chips rose suddenly, squeezing wafer fabs' normally unprofitable 8-inch wafer capacity and causing shortages of power devices such as MOSFETs. Because of well-developed supply chain management and ample inventory, Slkor ensured sufficient supply without raising prices and became famous in Huaqiangbei in one battle; Slkor became synonymous with "domestic substitution." In 2020, the successive shortages of STMicroelectronics' MCUs and Texas Instruments' products made Huaqiangbei's brothers and sisters a lot of money, created a group of billionaires in Huaqiangbei, and increased the number of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. If they bet right, they get rich overnight; Huaqiangbei gains several new upstarts who sit in private rooms on the second floor of Damu Beef Restaurant, drink "Martell XO," smoke "Hetianxia" cigarettes, and discuss the world—of course, they also invite me to tag along for free food and drinks! One Huaqiangbei boss lady listened to my explanation of the "Kondratieff cycle" theory and made a lot of money through speculation, so she gave me a 1:1 scale model of a Bentley luxury car as a thank-you! Huaqiangbei is just that bold and clear about whom it loves and hates!!! (To be continued)
Slkor (SLKORIC/SLKORMICRO) LED screen advertisement in Huaqiangbei.
Mr. Song Shiqiang, General Manager of Kinghelm (www.kinghelm.net) and Slkor (slkoric/slkomicro), is a member of the Electronic Information Expert Database of the China Association for Science and Technology, a columnist and popular science writer, and an expert in Huaqiangbei commercial research. Song Shiqiang invests in and operates Shenzhen Slkor Semiconductor Co., Ltd. and Shenzhen Kinghelm Electronics Co., Ltd., building...
The Dow Jones Index reprinted Slkor Song Shiqiang's "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow of Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen (Part 2)"
The English version of "Part 2," The Past, Present, Future of Shenzhen Huang Qiang Bei (Volume 2)---Slkor, Song Shiqiang, was republished by Dow Jones' MarketWatch column. The article takes the overall development of Shenzhen Huaqiangbei as its starting point and systematically discusses the start, growth, and maturity of Huaqiangbei after reform and opening up. The argumentation is rigorous and the reasoning is thorough; it is a highly informative and in-depth good article. Slkor Song Shiqiang's The Past, Present, and Future of Shenzhen Huaqiangbei was also republished by People's Daily's "Quality News." People's Daily's republication is also an affirmation of Mr. Song Shiqiang's long-term constructive research on Huaqiangbei!
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