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Making it, better
制造，力求完美
Foxconn, a Taiwanese contract manufacturer which employs over 1m workers on the mainland, is sometimes represented as a low-tech sweatshop; in fact, it holds international patents in areas ranging from electrical machinery to computing to audio-video technology. It is expanding its Shenzhen facility to support rapid prototyping by Apple’s new R&D centre in the city. Its joint venture with Japan’s Sharp is investing $8.8bn in Guangzhou to make advanced liquid-crystal displays. It is also developing industrial robotics in Shenzhen.
台湾合同制造商富士康公司在内地雇工超过100万人，有时会被描绘成低技术血汗工厂的代表。富士康公司拥有许多国际专利，涵盖了从电子机械到计算再到音频视频技术。目前位于深圳的工厂正在扩建，用于支持苹果公司新的深圳研发中心进行快速成型。它与日本夏普的合资企业在广州投资8.8亿美元制造先进的液晶显示器。它还在深圳开发工业机器人。
BGI, formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute, moved to Shenzhen to get away from northern bureaucrats. Seven years ago it was declared a “DNA superpower” byNature, a science journal, after it bought so many genome-sequencing machines that it ended up owning more than half the world’stotal. It is due to go public shortly.
原名北京华大基因研究所的华大基因，为摆脱北方的官僚主义而搬迁到深圳。7年前，华大基因购买了大量的基因测序机器，最终拥有的机器数量占世界总数的一半以上，因而被科学期刊《自然》杂志称为“DNA超级力量”。华大基因将于近期上市。
Mindray, a devices firm with $1bn in global sales, is developing new technologies for ventilators, digital operating rooms and surgical robots. The firm’s experience of managing both American and Chinese researchers is revealing. Its researchers in Silicon Valley are not just tutoring their counterparts in Shenzhen, it turns out, but also learning from them. Cheng Minghe, the firm’s president, observes that Westerners produce high-quality research but take a long time over it, whereas the locals are better at speedy development of new kit.
全球销售额约10亿美金的医疗设备企业迈瑞正致力于研发呼吸机、数字化手术室和外科手术机器人。公司在管理美国和中国研究员方面的经验引人深思。身在硅谷的迈瑞的研究员不仅指导深圳的同行，事实证明，他们也在向深圳学习。公司总裁程明和发现，西方人的高质量研究耗时更长，而本地人则更善于迅速开发新的组件。
Huawei spends more on R&D than Apple does. The privately held Shenzhen firm made its name as a telecoms-equipment vendor, but is now a big force in smartphones and cloud computing too. Its revenues for 2016 are estimated at 520bn yuan, a 32% increase on a year earlier. It devotes an impressive 15% of its revenues and 82,000 of its 180,000 employees to R&D.
华为公司在研发领域的投入比苹果公司更多。这家深圳的私营企业过去作为电信设备供应商而闻名，如今在智能手机和云计算方面也实力雄厚。2016年的年收入约5200亿元，同比增长32%。它将年收入的15%用于研发，18万员工中有8.2万是研发人员，这一点令人印象深刻。
Huawei is innovating as it is globalising. Dieter Ernst of the East-West Centre, an American think-tank, praises the company for creating a “global innovation network” of the sort that only Western multinational companies used to have, with more than two dozen R&D centres the world over and a number of collaborative hubs run with leading multinationals and universities.
华为全球扩张的过程也是一个创新的过程，美国智库东西方中心的迪特·厄恩斯特盛赞华为是一家创造“全球创新网络”的公司，而全球创新网络过去只有西方扩过企业才拥有，目前华为在世界各地已有20多家研发中心并与顶尖的跨国企业和大学建立了合作枢纽。
This has paid dividends. Huawei is one of the world’s most prolific generators of high-quality international patents. Along with Sweden’s Ericsson it is at the forefront of 5G, which will replace the current 4G networks for mobile telephony. Its narrow-band internet-of-things protocol, a cheap and low-energy way to connect machines to the cloud, was recently approved as a global standard.
付出就有回报。华为是世界上拥有最多高质量国际专利的公司之一。与瑞典的爱立信公司一样，处于5G技术的前沿，5G将为取代目前移动电话的4G网络，其窄带物联网协议——一种廉价而低能耗地将机器联系到云端的方式，最近被批准为国际标准。
Another way Shenzhen is rewriting the rules is by embracing open innovation. In the West, corporate innovation has generally been a secretive, top-down affair. Many factories in the city started by making clever imitations of Western goods, which led foreigners to dismiss the locals as mere copycats. That was a mistake. David Li of Shenzhen’s Open Innovation Lab argues that the copycats have since morphed into a powerful ecosystem of collaborative, fast-learning suppliers and factories. “Anybody can come to Shenzhen with an idea and get it prototyped, tested, made and put on the market at a decent price,” he says. Silicon Valley is obsessed with rich-world problems, he thinks, but China’s open innovators work on affordable solutions for the masses on everything from health care to pollution to banking.
深圳改写规则的另一个方法是拥抱开放式创新。在西方，公司创新通常是遮遮掩掩、自上而下的事。而这座城市的许多工厂靠巧妙地模仿西方产品起家，西方人仅仅将这些本地企业视为山寨商。这是一个错误。深圳开放创新实验室的李大维辩解道山寨商已经演变为一个由善于合作、快速学习的供应商和工厂组成的强大的生态系统。他说，“任何人都可以带着想法来深圳，制作原型、进行测试、制造产品，并以合理的价格投放市场”。他认为，硅谷痴迷于解决富裕世界的问题，但是中国的开放创新者为普罗大众提供了一种负担得起的解决方案，涵盖了从医疗保健到污染治理再到银行业务的方方面面。
Mr Li says the already frenetic pace of Chinese innovation is speeding up further. Dealmaking used to involve long banquets and vast quantities ofbaijiu, a local firewater. Now introductions are made at the flick of a finger on WeChat, a remarkable messaging and payments app with more than 800m users. As soon as a WeChat group is formed, there is little need for phone calls or meetings. Tencent, the internet and online-gaming giant that invented WeChat, is also based in Shenzhen. Worth some $250bn, it is one of Asia’s most valuable firms. Its snazzy and green new headquarters in Nanshan towers over a modern neighbourhood of startups, incubators and funky coffee shops.
李先生说中国已然狂热的创新还在快马加鞭。谈生意在过去意味着一场接一场的宴请及一杯接一杯的白酒。现在只需要指尖轻点微信，就可以引荐某人。（微信是著名的实施联络和支付应用，约有8000万的用户）。一旦有了微信群，就不再需要电话和会议了。腾讯，互联网和在线游戏巨头、微信的发明者，同样也是一家在深圳起家的公司。市值约2500万亿美元的腾讯公司是亚洲最具价值的企业之一，它位于南山区的新总部新颖而又绿色，耸立于由初创企业、孵化器和时尚咖啡馆组成的现代社区之间。
One of Shenzhen’s most daring startups, Royole, is expanding its output of an extraordinary product: the world’s thinnest foldable full-colour touchscreen display. Liu Zihong, a mainlander, earned his doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford University, where he dreamt of radical new ways for machines and humans to interact. When he started Royole, he says, he knew it had to be based in Shenzhen. Getting from early-stage research to manufactured product would require a massive amount of what he calls integrated innovation: “Materials, process, device design, circuit design—all needed to be innovated…if you changed one material, you had to change the process.” His team had to develop entirely new materials and factory tools, including custom-built robots, to make his screens, accumulating over 600 patents along the way. He insists this could not have been done even in Silicon Valley, because California cannot match Shenzhen’s ecosystem of “makers”.
深圳最大胆的创业公司之一柔宇正扩大生产一款卓越的产品：世界上最薄的折叠式全彩触摸屏。刘自鸿是中国内地人，在斯坦福大学获得电气工程的博士学位，在那里他梦想着机器和人类互动的全新途径。当他成立了柔宇公司，他说柔宇必须而且只能立足于深圳。从早期研究到生产产品需要大量的他称之为综合创新的元素“材料、工艺、设备设计、电路设计，所有的一切都需要创新。如果你改变了一种材料，你就得改工艺。”为了生产屏幕，他的团队需要开发出一整套新的材料和包括定制机器人在内的工厂工具，并在生产过程中积累了600多项专利。他坚称这些在硅谷都难以实现，因为深圳“制造者”的生态系统是加州无可比拟的。
With $280m in venture-capital investment, Royole is valued at $3bn. It is investing $1.8bn to build a heavily automated factory and integrated R&D complex which should propel sales past $3bn. But Mr Liu has even grander ambitions. He thinks his screens could be deployed more widely, in places such as cups, clothes, desks, even walls. “Last year the display industry was worth $150bn,” he says, “but flexible displays will double that.”
柔宇获得了2.8亿美元的风险投资，估值约30亿美元。它将18亿美元用于建设高度自动化工厂和集成研发园区，预计将推动销售额超过30亿美元。但刘先生有更大的抱负。在他看来，他屏幕的应用范围可以更加广泛，如杯子、衣服、书桌甚至是墙面。他说，“去年，显示产业的产值约1500亿美元，柔性屏将使它翻一番。”