The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide.

Chapter 334 Precursor of Tsunami

Lithography machines involve many industrial chains, so Zhou Xin has always thought about the principle of gradual replacement.

For advanced processes, mature products from mature European, American and Japanese suppliers are used, and suppliers are gradually replaced on lithography machines that are one to two generations behind.

For example, when Xinxin lithography machine achieved a breakthrough in the 40nm process, the 130nm lithography machine technology originally purchased from Nikon gradually tried to be replaced by domestic suppliers.

This is a step-by-step process.

Zhou Xin has no system and cannot directly solve all real-world problems. He hopes to not only ensure the competitiveness of Xinxin lithography machines in the commercial field, but also gradually promote the improvement of the domestic industrial chain.

Zeiss's rejection gave them a blow. They had always believed that Zeiss would continue to cooperate with Xinxin in the EUV field because of its success in immersion lithography machines.

The RMB 50 billion lithography machine R&D fund is also based on this consideration, because if Xinxin has to rely on itself to complete the objective lens system, RMB 50 billion is far from enough.

Moreover, Zeiss's rejection is purely a commercial act, and there are good reasons. Zeiss has joined EUV LLC for nearly ten years, and there is no reason to suddenly switch to Xinxin.

Not to mention that Xinxin and even China behind it have zero technology accumulation in the EUV field.

"It is possible for Nikon to sell it. As long as our immersion lithography machine sells well enough and takes up all of Nikon's market share, it is possible to sell it if their precision instrument department cannot make ends meet." Zhou Xin said.

As long as the price is right, there is nothing that cannot be sold.

Given the impending financial crisis, their chances of selling are even greater.

What Xinxin has to do is to squeeze out a large amount of the market that originally belonged to Nikon before the financial crisis came.

Guan Jianying reminded: "It is unlikely. Even if Nikon is willing to sell, regulatory authorities in various countries, especially Neon and European regulatory authorities, will not agree.

EUVA has invested a lot of money in EUV for so many years, and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will not allow Nikon to sell its precision instrument department to us at this time. "

Zhou Xin silently nodded in agreement.

He forgot that there was still a regulatory issue. The previous failure of Xinxin’s acquisition of Cymer was due to regulatory rejection.

“It was so smooth before that we ignored that EUV LLC was still waiting for us.

This time has taught us a lesson, things are not always smooth sailing.

Especially in the field of lithography machines, we have only achieved a temporary lead. "Hu Zhengming concluded.

Hu Zhengming knew that Zeiss's refusal to continue cooperation with Xinxin in the EUV field was very important to them, which meant that they were inherently five years behind ASML in EUV research and development.

Five years is still an optimistic estimate.

ASML is the only complete lithography machine manufacturer of EUV LLC.

But Hu Zhengming was not too frustrated, because when he founded Silue Semiconductor, the gap between them and Cadence was equally large.

They expected it would take five years to catch up, but it actually took them about three years to achieve 90.00% of Cadence's effectiveness.

Difficulties will always exist, but they manifest themselves in different forms. Whether it is entrepreneurial experience or scientific research experience, Hu Zhengming has been profoundly told this.

After Zhou Xin calmed down, he also felt that it was no big deal.

Because the immersion lithography machine is enough to advance the process to 7nm, by 2020, China has not even solved the problem of national production of 28nm.

It is already impressive enough that he can help China solve the localization of the entire 7nm chip process. As for more advanced processes, he can only say that he will try his best.

From a commercialization perspective, the commercial value of EUV is not that exaggerated.

The first-generation EUV was successfully developed in 2010 and officially launched into commercial mass production in 2013. Because the equipment was too complex, the production capacity was extremely limited, and the initial annual output did not exceed 20 units.

Based on commercialization in 13, Xinxin is optimistically estimated to be three years behind, and conservatively estimated to be five years behind. This gap is nothing.

"We are going to poach people from Nikon and make our own lenses." Lin Benjian said: "I know some experts in Nikon's optical field, and I will try to see if I can poach people from Nikon.

We recently raised a large amount of money from the listing, and we are fully prepared financially. "

Zhou Xin said: "The 200 billion yuan just raised is the initial ammunition. If you need financial support in the future, let me know and we can transfer money from other sectors."

If we say that when the Asian financial crisis occurred in 1998, China had not yet joined the WTO, and strict monetary control policies fundamentally blocked the liquidity of international capital entering the Chinese market.

In addition to people working in the financial industry, people working in Guangdong Province must also be working in Guangdong Province. The vast majority of Chinese people have very little impression of the 98 financial crisis.

The financial crisis in 2000 mainly affected the Internet industry, and the impact on China was still relatively small.

Therefore, the financial crisis that swept the world in 2008 gave Chinese people an intuitive concept of financial crises and a new understanding of the cyclical financial crises of capitalism.

The four trillion plan will have mixed reviews in the future.

The Chinese people’s impression of this financial crisis is that of 08. That’s because a large number of landmark events occurred in 08, including stock market crashes in major markets in various countries, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being taken over by the federal government, and Lehman Brothers Bank. Bankruptcy and more.

But in fact, this crisis began in 2007. Excessive borrowing under too loose credit standards led to the birth of this crisis.

In 2006, Warren Johnson flew to Zhangjiang almost every half month.

"Shrink, we need to shrink comprehensively and strategically. This is an era when cash is king. We need to liquidate most of our stock assets. Winter is coming."

“It’s time to get into gold.”

"When the crisis hit, I thought emerging investments could start buying a bank."

Zhou Xin has been shrinking across the board since 06.

Because of the combination of Madoff and the mobile Internet, the already loose credit standards were abused even more.

A large number of middle-class people have obtained credit lines from banks. For assets with a paper value of US$50, they can get a loan of US$75 from the bank, with a mortgage rate of more than 100%.

The middle class then used the money to buy Madoff's financial products.

Madoff Financial Management's high returns and on-time payments for five consecutive years have made the snowball grow bigger and bigger. By the end of last year, when Baidu Pay was conducting its year-end summary, it even claimed that they had helped customers manage as much as US$5000 billion in wealth.

At least more than 5000% of the US$80.00 billion are Madoff financial products.

This is just one channel of Baidu Pay. There are also channels such as X.com and eBaypay that also sell Madoff financial products.

Just because Baidu Pay is a major traffic player, they sell the most.

This kind of bubble frightened Zhou Xin, and he used Internet finance to inflate Madoff's bubble ten times.

This also means that when the bubble explodes, the impact will be far more than 10 times greater.This would be a bigger disaster than the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

NewPay and WeChat Pay, the only two companies that do not sell Madoff's financial products, will become a rare cleanup.

In early 2006, house prices began to fall.

In early 2007, subprime lenders began filing for bankruptcy.

In April 2007, two large hedge funds collapsed due to drag from their subprime loan investments.The hedge fund collapsed two months earlier. When Zhou Xin saw the news, he realized that winter had come.

After the collapse of large hedge funds, a large number of investors became suspicious of hedge funds, triggering a crisis of trust in the hedge fund industry.

The largest fund in the hedge fund industry was Madoff.

This is like later generations using Alipay to create Yu'e Bao's Tianhong Fund. With the support of Yu'e Bao, it transformed from a fund company ranked 50th in scale to the number one fund company in one year.

This is the power of the Internet, not to mention Madoff who can give 10 points of profit.

Users began to run on Madoff's financial products.

"Sorry, the financial product you purchased has not yet reached the redemption period. Please wait patiently for the redemption period on February 2008, 2."

Investors found that they could no longer exchange Madoff funds from Baidu Pay, which further triggered investor panic.

Although the Madoff Financial Management Fund is closed for one year, it has always been available for redemption at any time and is guaranteed by the platform for users.

In other words, Madoff has a one-year closed period. If the user wants to withdraw, Baidu will pay for it to help Madoff pay.

Unfortunately, there were too many people cashing in, and Baidu couldn't handle it anymore. Baidu only prepared $10 billion in cash and put it in the bank, ready to cash it out to users.

They never imagined that one billion dollars would be wiped out.

The news that the payment period had not yet arrived only appeared for one day, quickly triggering panic among investors.

The previous request size was US$30 billion. After this news was quickly spread on Weibo, the size of the application for payment exceeded US$100 billion in just one day, and the situation is still further fermenting.

"What did Bernard say?" Robin asked.

In its cooperation with Madoff, Baidu Pay quickly rose to prominence through this shareholder trend. Although it is still inferior to NewPay and WeChat Pay in terms of payment frequency and payment amount, it has successfully surpassed WeChat Pay in terms of total personal account balance.

It even surpassed NewPay in terms of total account balance.

Because of the success of Baidu Pay, Baidu's stock price has soared. At this time, the valuation of Baidu Pay alone is close to 1000 billion US dollars.

So much so that there have been constant voices within NewPay about cooperating with Madoff.

"We are in contact, and Madoff said that they have prepared 200 billion in redemption funds and will soon arrive, and it is expected to take three days." George Reyes said.

Jorge Reyes had known Bernard Madoff for a long time, dating back to more than a decade ago when he worked at Sun Microcomputer.

The cooperation with Madoff was promoted by him, and it was precisely because of this credit that he moved further from financial director to chief financial officer.

"It won't work in three days, tomorrow at the latest. Now the redemption applications in our backend have exceeded 100 billion U.S. dollars. In three days, this number will be far more than 100 billion U.S. dollars.

By then, US$200 billion will no longer be enough. Robin's face turned red and he paced back and forth in the room.

He was vaguely worried that Madoff would go bankrupt.

If Madoff goes bankrupt, Baidu will also go bankrupt. The US$10 billion on Baidu's books has already been cashed out.

The 4000 billion hole is absolutely impossible to fill.

Although the product is provided by Madoff, Baidu is just a channel. The problem is that the hole is too big, and supervision will not let Baidu go.

"I will continue to communicate with Bernard." George Reyes was also panicked.

The same is because the holes are too big. If there were only a few billion holes, it wouldn't be a big problem.

But this is a scale of hundreds of billions, and the transactions under his desk with Madoff will definitely be dug out.

He's gotta go to federal prison and sit through jail time.

Madoff mobilized US$100 billion for payment the next day, but this amount was far from enough.

After one day of fermentation, the amount of redemption has exceeded 300 billion US dollars.

Because the snowball was getting bigger and bigger, Madoff did not keep it in the bank like in the original time and space, but made various investments.

But he is still very stable and chooses investments based on U.S. debt, supplemented by stocks, leaving only a small amount of cash.

In addition to the cash paid out over the years, the cash on his books is only 200 billion.

What's even more terrible is that the domestic bonds he purchased ranged from one-year to five-year maturities. It takes time to convert one-year treasury bonds into U.S. dollars, and at the same time so many treasury bonds are being sold on the market, there must be someone to take over.

Madoff was under great pressure to pay.

“Robin, we can’t keep paying like this.

There is a lot of turmoil in the market now, and the value of assets being sold has been seriously underestimated.

The contract signed by Madoff and the user is a one-year closed-end financial management. We cannot think that it is wrong to redeem it at the expiration date just because we used the method of redemption at any time. "After Madoff cashed out US$100 billion, he refused to cash it out.

He flew to Silicon Valley to try to get on the same page with Robin.

Robin opened the window and saw a circle of people outside Baidu's campus, all shouting to pay back the money.

There were even people holding signs.

"If we persist, the angry crowd will set this place on fire," Robin said.

Robin paused for a moment and said: "Bernard, I know you are also under a lot of pressure.

But this is not a reason to refuse payment. The current payment amount is only US$500 billion.

This number is currently not growing any further.

Now that we have paid out the 500 billion, there will be another 3500 billion in users who will trust us in the future.

If we keep failing to pay, the amount will get bigger and bigger. "

Madoff said: “It’s not that I don’t pay, but the bottom layer of our fund is various products, and these products cannot be turned into cash instantly.

I can not do it.

The reason why it previously supported redemption at any time was because Baidu adopted a strategy to benchmark NewPay currency funds in order to promote Madoff.

This is a strategy that Baidu insists on pursuing. Madoff Fund Company has never supported Baidu in doing so from the beginning.

The reason why I transferred 100 billion US dollars yesterday was to relieve this pressure and because of our previous good cooperative relationship.

But I will never be able to get $500 billion in cash.

To withdraw so much cash, Madoff would have to face a loss of at least US$25 billion, or even more. "

(End of this chapter)