Material Empire

From the moment the so-called virus in knives spread to Kusela, Takehiko Takamura knew that this was Qin Hai's foreshadowing, and Kusela had fallen into Qin Hai's trap.

Takehiko Takamura always felt that Wang Peichao's process of obtaining the gel formula from Qu Tao was too smooth, so smooth that it made people feel uneasy. Based on his own experience in dealing with Qin Hai, Takehiko Takamura did not believe that the other party would be so careless, and did not have any special precautions against such an important formula. He repeatedly asked Wang Peichao how he obtained the recipe, but Wang Peichao just told him that it was because Huang Yanling, who was in charge of Qutao's internal management, trusted Tang Honghui so much that Tang Honghui could easily access all the recipes.

This explanation did not satisfy Takehiko Takamura at all. Even if Huang Yanling was a pig who didn't understand the relationship between Tang Honghui and Wang Peichao, at least Qin Hai would not be so confused. The management of a modern enterprise will not be based on trust in a certain person, but will ensure the safety of the enterprise through a series of systems. No matter whether Tang Honghui's character is trustworthy or not, Qu Tao has no reason to let her get in touch with all the technical links by herself. Instead, she should break down the technical links and strengthen all kinds of supervision at the same time, so as to be safe.

Daqin Group is already a large enterprise with assets exceeding tens of billions, how could it not even have such a preventive mechanism. What's more, with the incident of Wang Peichao before, Qu Tao has no reason not to strengthen technical secrecy.

As an established company in the field of materials, Kusela is certainly not so naive as to push a foreign formula to the market without any inspection. After receiving the formula sent by Wang Peichao, Takehiko Takamura led the engineers of the technical department to conduct various tests, and the results showed that there was no obvious difference between the ceramic knives produced with this gel and Qu Tao's products. Chairman Kiyonobu Nishikawa and most of the senior executives were delighted with this result. Only Takehiko Takamura was suspicious, but he couldn't come up with a solid reason to stop the application of this technology.

According to Takehiko Takamura's idea, Kusela should first figure out the mechanism of action of this gel and verify its reliability theoretically before mass production. The previous technology research and development of Kucera Company was all completed in accordance with such rules. However, this time, Nishikawa Qingxuan couldn't wait any longer, because Qu Tao's products were crazily eroding the traditional market of Kucera, and Kucera had no time to wait.

In this way, a large number of ceramic knives are produced from the production line of Kussela and sold all over the world. Takehiko Takamura is waiting for feedback from users every day with trepidation. He believes that these knives will definitely have problems.

As early as two months ago, sporadic news came back that when a certain German company or an American company used Kussela's knives for machining, the cutter head was damaged, and it was also destroyed. Two machine tools. Kusela sent technicians to these enterprises to identify the cause of the accident, hoping to find out whether it was a defect in the tool itself or the result of improper use by the user.

From the user's point of view, because they have used this kind of knives before, and other companies have also used this kind of knives, and there have been no problems, so they tend to think that this is an accidental incident, and they did not attribute the responsibility to Kusela on the head. Only Takehiko Takamura understood in his heart that the crux of the problem was indeed on the knife, but he couldn't be sure what the real reason was for a while.

After that, news about broken knives became more and more frequent. At the beginning, users were only limited to seeking confirmation from Kusela after a problem occurred. Later, everyone communicated with each other and found that the situation encountered by their own company had also occurred in other companies, which attracted widespread attention. Some good people simply started to make statistics on knives problems. This statistic is amazing. Dozens of companies around the world have had the problem of sudden breakage of knives, and all the broken knives come from Kusela, the knives of Qutao, China. Not a single instance of the same problem occurred.

At this point, the user would be too slow to think that there is a problem with Kusela's knives. Anyone can make mistakes in operation, but this kind of broken or broken cutter head only appears on the products of the same manufacturer, which cannot be explained by my own mistakes. All of a sudden, related inquiry calls flooded the sales department of Kusela, making sales director Tatsuo Tanaka exhausted.

"Takamura-kun, can you tell me what's going on!" Tatsuo Tanaka was furious at Takehiko Takamura.

Takehiko Takamura could only reply with a mournful face: "I'm very sorry, this is indeed a problem with our knives. I have already said that there may be a problem with the gel formula obtained from the Chinese. Now it seems that my feeling is Exactly right."

"Why is there a problem? Didn't you say that the knives produced by this formula are exactly the same as Qu Tao's knives? And there has never been such a situation in the past few months. Could it be because of the weather?" Tanaka Danan asked.

Takehiko Takamura shook his head, and said: "This is not because of the weather, but because of the aging. The aging... means that there are very slow changes inside the material. After a long period of time, the properties of the material will completely change. We It has been analyzed, and all the knives with problems were produced 6 to 8 months ago, that is to say, the time for the internal aging of the knives to take effect is 6 to 8 months. If you give us more information from the technical department Time, we should be able to discover the existence of this timeliness, but unfortunately..."

Tatsuo Tanaka asked: "Then why doesn't Qutao's knives have such a problem? Their knives were sold earlier than ours, and the earliest ones have been used for a year, but there have been no problems."

Takehiko Takamura said: "This is the trap the Chinese set for us. The gel they used must not be the same as the one we got. They deliberately leaked a defective gel to us and guessed that we would not spend more. Enough time to test. By the time we know there is a problem with this gel, it will be irreversible."

"Yeah, it's irreparable..." Tanaka Tatsuo showed a smile uglier than crying, and he was about to collapse.

In six months, Cussela sold hundreds of thousands of knives of all kinds to thousands of businesses around the world, with prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to a few dollars. If there is a problem with the gel, these hundreds of thousands of knives will go wrong sooner or later, and the damage caused is enough to bankrupt Kucera. To avoid a worse situation, Kusela must recall these knives before they go wrong, not to mention the huge cost of paying the user and the cost of the recall, just the reputation brought by the recall. Losses were something Kusela couldn't afford.

There was a problem with Kusela's knives, and all of them were recalled, but there was no problem with the recall of Chinese Qutao's knives. This is equivalent to Kusela using his own face to make a big advertisement for Qutao. Qutao's reputation might not have been as strong had Kusela not been in the ceramic knife market from the start. Now that Kusela is raising his voice first and then lowering it, it actually sets off Qu Tao. How much advertising and public relations investment Kusela will need to spend in the future to restore such an influence.

"Mr. Takamura, the most urgent thing is to find out the cause of the knives' problems. If these defective knives can be replaced with qualified knives, then the reputation of Cussela can be guaranteed. Otherwise, I can only let customers buy Chinese knives are coming to replace our knives," said Tatsuo Tanaka.

"I'm very sorry..." Takehiko Takamura said these words very frequently now, "I don't think our technical department will be able to figure out the reason within three months. Even if we can find some signs, we need to have enough Time to test it out, or risk repeating the same mistakes.”

"Baga..." Tatsuo Tanaka's teeth were about to be gritted, and the feeling of being surrounded by clients all over the world asking for an explanation was really terrifying. It turned out that he was still able to play Tai Chi, and he reasoned that the cause of the accident was not found, and it was not necessarily a problem with the Kucera Company. But now there have been hundreds of problems, and if he explained it this way, he would be playing the customer as a fool.

Even though Kusela Company is the number one large enterprise in the international ceramics industry, in the eyes of some customers, it is nothing at all. Those companies that have purchased Kusela knives include American General Motors, Germany's Siemens and other giant companies. Anyone who stretches out a finger can press Kusela to death. How can Tatsuo Tanaka dare to play sloppy eyes with these customers?

"Takamura-kun, you said that the gel thing was a trap deliberately set by the Chinese. Do you have any solid evidence?" Tatsuo Tanaka asked while looking at Takehiko Takamura.

"No." Takehiko Takamura shook his head, "But this matter is very clear, we use the Chinese gel formula, but their products have no problems, and our products have problems, isn't that enough? "

"Is it possible to spread this news?" Tanaka Tatsuo said in a low voice.

Takehiko Takamura was startled: "Spread out, why!"

Tatsuo Tanaka grinned and said: "We can't let the Chinese become winners in this matter, we must drag them into the water together. Think about it, if this trap was set by the Chinese long ago, it means that the Chinese are Those who know that the knives are defective. In order to compete with us, they will not hesitate to provide us with a fake formula, at the cost of thousands of customers' equipment and the personal safety of workers. If this news spreads, what will everyone think of the Chinese people?"

"However, our formula was obtained through illegal channels, how can we explain this to others?" Takehiko Takamura asked hesitantly.