"Determined hunter" and "track long-terminer" Whether it is from Zhu Xingming's various labels or Inovance's 20 years of steady development style, it seems that this "helmsman" of Inovance should present a standard image of an old and excellent middle-aged entrepreneur, but at the 20th anniversary ceremony of "Twenty Years Leap, Centennial Dream" 2023, which just ended on December 23, through Zhu Xingming's keynote speech, the author finally understood that he was actively breaking through, The depth of wisdom contained under the overall layout of continuous innovation: the only constant is change itself.
The first change, brave the high-end game.
After graduating with a master's degree in signal circuits and systems, he went to Shenzhen Huaneng to work as an ordinary technician and salesman in Shenzhen Huaneng, Zhu Xingming's story started really plainly, but the turning point occurred in 1997.
In 1997, when Hong Kong had just returned to the motherland, the three domestic Internet giants had just started, and at this time, Huawei's sales had reached 4.1 billion yuan, ranking among the top 10 Chinese IT companies, and the company had more than 5,600 employees. Founded in 1993, Huawei's subsidiary, Mobeke, gathered a group of top engineers and technicians in the industry to carry out research and development work through selection, external employment and other methods, and in 1997, Huawei's expansion of the inverter business gave Zhu Xingming an important opportunity.
By 2000, Huawei had achieved contracted sales of 220 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 80%, breaking through a record high. At that time, Zhu Xingming had also become a product line director at Huawei Electric, but in early 2001, Ren Zhengfei delivered the famous "Huawei Winter" speech, which heralded the arrival of the crisis. In 2001, Huawei gave its subsidiary Ansheng Electric to Emerson Electric Company of the United States for 6 billion yuan. Zhu Xingming was also packaged and "sold" together with many technicians.
The second change, China's industrial control "butterfly" waved its wings.
During his tenure as the director of Emerson's electrical product line, Zhu Xingming examined and understood the advantages and disadvantages of China's manufacturing development from the perspective of foreign companies. In 2003, Zhu Xingming started his business with 15 people from his original team, and then attracted three former IBM employees to join, so that 19 people officially founded Inovance.
It is worth noting that Qiu Wenyuan, who was in the same period as Zhu Xingming, also left to start a business not long after, and established Blue Ocean Huateng and listed on the A-share market in 2016, as well as Fairchild in the semiconductor industry and Anke in the medical device field. Huawei Electric, the Huangpu Military Academy in the field of industrial control, can really be regarded as "the world full of peach and plum".
Relying on the research experience accumulated in Huawei and Emerson in the early stage, Zhu Xingming and the entrepreneurial team quickly found a market gap. At that time, vector inverter was not mature in China, so Inovance resolutely chose to use vector inverter to win the world, "to make vector inverter civilian and popular!."This is the earliest development guide of Inovance's technology.
In May 2002, the land "bidding, auction and listing system" was officially introduced, land prices continued to rise, and the policy of China's real estate industry for more than 20 years was officially born, and China officially joined the WTO in the same year. Since 2005, the market has been in short supply, and a large amount of hot money has flowed in, boosting housing prices. High-rise buildings rose from the ground, but at that time, domestic elevator companies were doing simple work of assembling foreign spare parts.
The keen Zhu Xingming found the opportunity to show his talents, at this time the elevator is controlled by PLC, driven by the inverter, Inovance technology on this basis continuous optimization, the successful development of the sensational "NICE3000", so that the key lines have been greatly reduced, the commissioning work has been simplified, and the market demand has been grasped. By 2008, the share of Inovance's elevator integrated controller business has ranked first among domestic brands.
The third change, China's industrial control "tornado" swept overseas.
Zhu Xingming, who is still cool-headed and planning for the long term: "At different stages of enterprise development, there must be new products that are more suitable for customer needs, so as to maintain the effective operation of the "balanced system" of enterprise development. In the "Future Development Road of China's Automation", he proposed that only integrated automation products can develop in the Chinese market for a long timeServo is the core product of future automation. In the past year, Inovance Technology has successively set up PLC and servo technology teams, determined to march from a single product to a comprehensive solution. After at least five years of long-term investment, Inovance has successively developed H1U H2U series PLC products, IS series servo drives and ISM series motor products, and has gradually grown into one of the few domestic enterprises integrating control + drive + execution.
In 2012, Inovance started to explore internationalization, and successively established subsidiaries Inovance in Hong Kong and Inovance in India, mainly serving the Southeast Asian and Korean markets, and after 10 years of development, Inovance's overseas services have covered more than 20 countries. In order to cope with the company's internationalization process and continue to meet the increasingly strong localization** needs of international customers, Inovance officially established its first European production base in Hungary in 2022. In Southeast Asian markets such as Vietnam and Thailand, Inovance provides customers with high-stability and energy-saving solutions based on industry distribution, market capacity, and process needs.
Finally, in 2003, a small "butterfly" belonging to China's industrial control industry waved its wings caused by the vibration, through the dust of China's manufacturing development in the past 20 years, causing another "tornado" in the world industrial field.
Facing the difficulties, the fourth change of "gritting teeth and resisting".
In 2008, Inovance Technology began to enter the field of electronic control of new energy vehicles, and after 2016, it began to continue to increase investment, and in 2017 and 2018, when the company underwent an important test, Zhu Xingming resolutely decided to "transfuse" a large amount of profits to the new energy business, he said: "Even at the risk of poor financial indicators, we must do so." Even if the profit drops to zero, we have to make the car up. At times like these, we have to be bold. Later, with the outbreak of the new energy commercial vehicle market, Inovance gradually formed the powertrain system capability of "motor + electronic control + gearbox". The growth at this stage is not only because of the right direction, Zhu Xingming also led Inovance to come up with full action and determination. withstood the darkest torment before the dawn before seeing the new dawn of the enterprise.
With the foreshadowing in the field of new energy vehicles, Zhu Xingming began to lead Inovance to do things again. "At the end of 2013, we were keenly aware that mechatronics will become the mainstream of automation in the future, robots will become the core products of intelligent manufacturing in the future, and 2017 will become the first year of robot outbreak. "In 2014, Inovance Technology entered the field of robotics without hesitation and began the long journey of mechatronics. "As we expected, in 2016 Chinese robots reached 650,000 units, a new high in 2017, reaching 1360,000 units, definitely more than 200,000 units in 2018!In the live broadcast speech of "Learning from History, Asking the Present and the Future", Zhu Xingming shared that Huichuan's "bet" was full of excitement.
Once again, Embarking on the right and replicable path, Inovance has built a virtuous circle in which the more open thinking, the more accurate the timing, and the more significant the results. In 2017, Inovance discovered a new trend, which is intelligent manufacturing. In recent years, the development of the manufacturing industry has made the application of industrial robots more and more extensive, and the excellent performance of Inovance Technology in the past multiple tuyere periods has laid a solid foundation for the development of the field of industrial robots. First of all, it has a broad market and independent research and development capabilities, secondly, it has more than ten years of experience accumulation in the research and development of robot ontology, and finally it has strong automation control technology and software development capabilities. It perfectly matches the software and hardware strength of the development of intelligent manufacturing industry. Zhu Xingming is full of confidence: "China's industrial robot market space is huge, and the future will usher in a period of rapid development." In the face of this market opportunity, Inovance will also actively carry out the layout. ”
For the nth time, the change is profound in the genes of Inovance.
Relying on the accumulation of technology in the field of industrial control, Inovance has also launched PCS products for the energy storage industrial and commercial side market, and took the lead in proposing fully liquid-cooled energy storage terminals and industrial and commercial all-in-one solutions in the industry. Since 2023, Inovance has been making continuous efforts in energy storage, and has taken energy management (including energy storage systems and industrial power supplies) as one of its three strategic directions. For the emerging market of energy storage, Zhu Xingming's judgment is as accurate and sharp as ever. He believes that the current development of the domestic energy storage industry is still in the initial stage of exploration, and key issues such as safety and economy have yet to be solved. "The architecture of energy storage technology and products may need to undergo revolutionary changes in the future, and if the existing model is done step by step, it will not only be difficult for enterprises to make profits, but also may give rise to a series of cascading problems. For trial and error, Zhu Xingming has been mentally prepared. "Although there is no obvious performance at the market level, we have already made some moves in terms of technology development and solutions. ”
Inovance's innovative all-LiqCool liquid-cooled energy storage terminal products increase the cycle life of the system by 20% and save the start-up time by 1 hour in winterThree-phase four-wire direct access to the Internet, at the same time access to the isolation-free transformer, the system efficiency is greater than 91%;The battery supports pack-level gas + water firefighting, preventing re-ignition;EMS has a variety of built-in logic to meet the requirements of different scenarios. Every detail has been taken into account, and every detail is a big step ahead of similar products on the market. The design of Inovance's energy storage products contains the core wisdom of Zhu Xingming as a long-distance traveler on the track.
Written at the end: Mark. Benioff said that fast-growing companies must continue to innovate, and that companies are like sharks, and once they don't move, they are dead. In the past 20 years, Inovance Technology has seized the opportunity and searched up and down with the attitude of a charger, and has realized the perfect "bet" from inverters to industrial automation, elevators, rail transit, to robots, intelligent manufacturing and new energy, and every step of it reflects Zhu Xingming's mentality as an entrepreneur, just like what he shared in Skyworth Auto Entrepreneurship Class: "In this era, the only thing that is certain is uncertainty. No one is immune to the torrent of uncertainty, and the most important ability of an entrepreneur is to adapt to uncertainty. ”