【英语科技】“山寨手机之父”蔡明介

When Tsai Ming-kai walks into the conference room, it is hard not to feel a slight sense of disappointment. The kindly 60-year-old hardly looks like the ominous-sounding “King of the Bandit Phones” – an epithet that Taiwan’s easily excitable press has given the chairman and chief executive of Mediatek, the biggest supplier of mobile phone chips to China.

The exaggerated descriptions the press assigns Mr Tsai (which also include “King of Stocks” and “Godfather of Taiwan chip design”) stem partly from the fact that Mr Tsai is rarely seen in public. His appearances are limited to a handful of speeches every year and even the company’s quarterly results conference calls are handled by Yu Mingto, the chief financial officer.

Indeed, this is Mr Tsai’s first face-to-face interview with the press in three years – it was nearly derailed by a small crisis the night before when his public relations manager was unable to inform him in advance that a photographer would be present.

Workers at Mediatek, however, know a more personable Mr Tsai. One who, despite being a US dollar billionaire according to estimates by Forbes magazine, chats to his staff while lining up for a meal at the company canteen. Yu Mingto describes Mr Tsai as “a very fact-driven person”, but points out how, at critical junctures for the company such as during last year’s industry downturn, Mr Tsai had shown his softer side by sending encouraging letters to employees.

That aspect of Mr Tsai’s personality begins to shine through shortly after the interview begins. As he launches into his favourite topic – management theory and strategy – a beaming smile breaks out across his face.

“I never properly went to business school,” he declares. “I took one week off to attend a course on innovation and strategy at Stanford Business School.”

It was there that Mr Tsai came into contact with the teachings of Harvard’s Clayton Christensen, Peter Drucker and other management gurus. “That was 10 years ago.”

At the time, Mediatek was three years old and was just entering the mobile phone industry. Most of its customers were small family-owned factories in southern China, many of which where making cheap knock-off phones – thus earning Mr Tsai his “King of the Bandit Phones” nickname.

Mr Tsai, who was educated in electrical engineering first in Taiwan and later in the US, joined United Micro-electronics, one of Taiwan’s earliest and biggest chip companies, in 1983. He climbed through the ranks, and by 1994 was in charge of United Micro-electronics’ consumer and multimedia product businesses, which made chips for products such as televisions and disc players.

The unit was eventually spun off by United Microelectronics, becoming Mediatek and listing on the Taiwan stock exchange in 1997 – with Mr Tsai remaining at the helm and becoming both chairman and chief executive.

Despite his short course at Stanford, Mr Tsai became deeply impressed with Prof Christensen’s teachings, particularly those that concerned how newcomers can use disruptive technology to unseat existing market leaders.

Mediatek’s subsequent development and rise to become one of the world’s biggest chip design companies could essentially be viewed as Mr Tsai putting Prof Christensen’s theories into practice.

His enthusiasm for management theory was such that, even though Mr Tsai has nearly always rejected invitations for public appearances, for three years he wrote a monthly column in Business Today, one of Taiwan’s more popular business magazines, about technology trends and business management.

One of Prof Christensen’s theories declared that, although industries tend to be vertically integrated in their early days, they disintegrate into specialised segments once technology becomes more mature, with the process creating opportunities for newcomers to compete against incumbents.

In the technology sector, this meant that a small, new company such as Mediatek could survive and thrive just by focusing on doing one thing well, and doing it as cheaply as possible. Mediatek started with CD drives for computers, and quickly moved on to chips for DVD players. By 2000, it had become one of the biggest suppliers of chips for both those markets and Mr Tsai began looking to mobile phones.

Brands including Motorola had only started outsourcing their manufacturing to Taiwanese companies a few years earlier, but based on his then newly acquired management theories, Mr Tsai believed that process would only accelerate.

While much of the outsourcing of technology manufacturing went to Taiwan in the 1980s, Mr Tsai saw that China was quickly growing into the world’s factory for even high-tech good such as mobile phones. “Taiwan was able to grab that opportunity in the 1980s, but by the consumer electronics era [in the 1990s]?.?.?.?all the manufacturing had already gone to Shenzhen [in southern China],” he says.

So while the biggest players in the wireless chip industry – Qualcomm and Texas Instruments of the US – were focused on pioneering the third- generation phone chips that power advanced smartphones, Mr Tsai worked on improving the regular, or second-generation (2G) mobile phone chips to service the “newcomers” in China that he foresaw would one day unseat the industry leaders. “Actually there was still room for technological improvement [in 2G phone chips],” Mr Tsai explains.

CK Cheng, an analyst with CLSA in Taipei, says Mr Tsai’s breakthrough was in offering not just a chip, but a so-called “turnkey solution” that included reference designs that made it possible for new phone makers to get into the business. “The innovation was not so much the technology but the business model. It brought down the barrier of entry significantly,” Mr Cheng says. “Mr Tsai was the first to do that and it was a turning point for the Chinese mobile phone industry.”

Sure enough, while Taiwanese and western phone makers shunned Mediatek’s chips, Mr Tsai found a horde of eager customers in China’s budding phone makers. Using Mediatek’s technology, thousands of Chinese phone makers have combined to take about 20 per cent of the world’s biggest mobile phone market, to the chagrin of established brands such as Nokia and Samsung.

It was a shame, Mr Tsai says, that the phones made by his Chinese clients came to be known as shanzai, or bandit, phones. “They were foolish to call themselves shanzai. They should have just stuck with ‘whitebox’, because then people used their name to criticise them,” he says.

Instead, he says, cheap Chinese phone makers, and by extension Mediatek, embodies the process by which technology is brought from rich developed markets to the rest of the world living on much lower incomes.

“When technology is developed it inevitably serves those who can afford it, so the value created by leading technology is to serve those whose annual consumption power of is, say $5,000 or $10,000,” Mr Tsai says. By relentlessly improving existing technology to reduce costs, “this serves a population that is a much bigger proportion of the world”.

蔡明介(Tsai Ming-kai)走进会议室时，不免让人有些许失望，他年近六旬，相貌谦和，与“山寨机之父”的江湖称号很不相符。联发科技(Mediatek)是中国大陆手机芯片的最大供应商，作为联发科董事长兼CEO，蔡明介被倾向于煽情的台湾媒体赋予了这样一个称号。

蔡明介之所以受到媒体如此夸张的描述（他还有“股王”和“台湾IC设计教父”的称号），一部分原因是他极少公开露面，有限的公开露面仅为每年若干次讲话，甚至连公司季度业绩电话会议也由CFO喻铭铎(Yu Mingto)主持。

的确，这是蔡明介三年来首次面对面地接受媒体采访，而就连这次采访也因为他的公关经理未能提前通知他会有摄影师在场，而差一点在前一天被取消。

联发科的员工了解的蔡明介有着更亲和的一面。虽然《福布斯》(Forbes)杂志估计蔡明介身家超过十亿美元，但是在公司食堂排队打饭时他也会与员工闲谈。喻铭铎形容蔡明介是“一个十分注重事实的人”，但他又指出，在公司发展的关键节点，如去年的行业衰退之中，蔡明介曾向员工发电邮鼓舞士气，又显露了他柔和的一面。

蔡明介性格中的这一面在采访开始不久后就展现了出来，谈及最热衷的话题——管理理论和战略——脸上洋溢着微笑。

蔡明介说：“我从来没有正式读过商学院，只是曾请假一周，参加过斯坦福商学院(Stanford Business School)的创新和战略课程。”

蔡明介在那里接触到了哈佛(Harvard)教授克莱顿?克里斯坦森(Clayton Christensen)、彼得?德鲁克(Peter Drucker)以及其他管理学权威的理论，“那是10年前了。”

当时联发科才刚刚三岁，进入移动电话行业不久，客户多数是中国南方的家庭小厂，其中的许多都在制造廉价的仿制手机，蔡明介“山寨机之父”的绰号就是由此而来。

蔡明介先是在台湾学习电气工程，后又赴美深造，1983年加入了台湾最早也是最大的芯片企业联华电子(United Microelectronics)。在联电他逐步晋升，1994年开始负责联电消费电子和多媒体产品业务，该部门为电视机和影碟机等产品制造芯片。

该部门最终从联电分离，1997年成立联发科技并在台湾股市上市。蔡明介继续掌舵，身兼董事长和CEO职务。

蔡明介在斯坦福的学习时间虽然短暂，但他对克里斯坦森教授所传授的管理知识留下深刻印象，尤其是新入行者可借助颠覆性技术把原有市场领导者拉下马的理论。

联发科随后发展壮大，成为世界最大的芯片设计企业，基本上可理解为蔡明介将克里斯坦森的理论应用于实践。

蔡明介对管理理论充满热情，虽然会回绝几乎所有公开露面的邀请，但是他为台湾较为流行的商业杂志《今周刊》(Business Today)每月撰写一篇专栏文章已有三年，主题涵盖科技趋势和商业管理。

克里斯坦森教授的理论宣称，虽然在行业发展早期倾向于垂直整合，但随着技术更加成熟，就会分散为专业化的区隔，在此过程中新入行者有机会与既有业者开展竞争。

这在技术领域意味着，像联发科一样的小型新公司只要专注做好一件事，并且尽可能地降低成本，就能生存下来并蓬勃发展。联发科以电脑的CD驱动器起家，随后迅速转而生产用于DVD播放器的芯片。2000年，联发科成为这两个市场上最大的供应商之一后，蔡明介便将视线投向了移动电话。

摩托罗拉(Motorola)等品牌几年前才刚刚将制造业务外包给台湾厂商，但基于当时刚了解的管理理论，蔡明介相信这个过程只会加快。

虽然20世纪80年代科技产品制造的外包业务大多流向台湾，但蔡明介当时观察到，中国大陆正在快速成长为手机等高科技产品的世界工厂。他说：“台湾能够在20世纪80年代抓住机遇，但在（90年代的）消费电子时代……所有的制造业务都已经移至深圳。”

因此，正当无线芯片产业的大企业——美国高通(Qualcomm)和德州仪器(TI)——专注于研发用于驱动高端智能手机的第三代手机芯片时，蔡明介仍在继续改进常规的二代(2G)手机芯片，从而满足中国“新入行者”的需求。他预见到，中国的新入行者有一天能够把业界巨人拉下马。蔡明介解释说：“事实上（2G手机芯片）还有技术改进的余地。”

台北里昂证券(CLSA)分析师郑兆刚(CK Cheng)表示，蔡明介的突破之处在于，并不仅仅提供芯片，而是提供“交钥匙解决方案”，其中包含了参考设计，可为新手机制造商入行提供便利。“这与其说是技术创新，不如说是商业模式创新。这个创新显著降低了进入门槛，”郑兆刚说道。“这是蔡明介首创的，也是中国移动电话产业的转折点。”

的确如此，虽然台湾和西方手机制造商对联发科生产的芯片敬而远之，但蔡明介却在中国新涌现出的手机制造商中找到了许多热切的客户。利用联发科的技术，数千家中国手机制造商在这块全球最大的移动电话市场上总计占据了大约20%的份额，这让诺基亚(Nokia)和三星(Samsung)等成熟品牌懊恼。

蔡明介说，该公司中国客户生产的手机被称作“山寨手机”或“黑手机”，这让他感到惋惜。他说：“他们自称山寨并不明智，本来应该坚持使用‘白牌’这个词。因为别人可能会用这个名号攻击他们。”

他表示，其实，廉价的中国手机制造商，以及联发科，象征着将技术从富有的发达市场带进收入和生活水准较低的世界其他地区的过程。

“技术刚研发出来时，只能为买得起的人服务，这是不可避免的。因此，尖端技术所服务的人群可能要有5000至1万美元的年消费力，”蔡明介解释说，而坚持不懈地改进现有技术，降低成本，“它就能服务于世界上更大部分的人口。”

他说：“如果说金融危机明确了一件事，那就是新兴国家几乎没有受到影响。它们的经济将会继续发展，机会也会更大。”

除了热衷于支撑联发科快速增长的管理理论之外，蔡明介的另一个爱好是阅读历史。联发科目前正努力通过降低价格，在更高端的3G智能手机上重复2G时代的成功历史。

但是蔡明介已经将注意力投向一个新的管理理念：反向创新(reverse innovation)，在这个过程中，可以把根据新兴市场需求而开发的廉价型号，作为低端产品重新推向西方消费者。

这个想法很合理，蔡明介说。“因为新兴经济体市场巨大，有着几十亿消费者，而他们需要的是成本低、能买得起的解决方案。这就迫使你去创新。”

译者/王柯伦