Hi, Everyone! I will continue to brag. I am the majority shareholder, boss, chairman and general manager of two companies, Slkor and Kinghelm. Slkor (www.slkoric.com) has been developing rapidly in recent years, investing heavily in product research and development, with high-end products such as IGBTs and power management chips selling well in the market, and the domestic market share of the slkor is rising. We have opened two directly shops in Huaqiangbei commercial area, Shenzhen, which we dubbed “abnormal development and savage growth”. We are also pushing our brand “Slkor” and its products to the international market. Only half a year, we have been receiving new orders from foreign customers every day. Considering that the semiconductor industry is one with high technical barriers, requiring significant investment and having long payback period, these are very good results for Slkor, which was founded just a few years ago.

                                                                                                          Opening Ceremony of Slkor Store II in Huaqiangbei

I will continue to share the second part of "The First Experience of The Internationalization of Slkor", i.e. Slkor’s approach to the internationalization, including ecologization, matrixing and hierarchicalization theories, together with the current layout of the product R&D, promotion and sales, and Slkor future development plan. I will analyze the underlying logic and basic theories that support these approaches, hoping to improve together with you!

It is my philosophy to do things by finding out the underlying logic and following the law, this is the way to yield twice the result with half the effort. It will not be helpful to rely on stirring up emotions, calling slogans or pumping fists. If this is the case, people like Yimiao Liu, Anzhi Chen and Hongshen Zhai, who preach success theories, will make more money than Zhengfei Ren, the founder of Huawei, Chuanzhi Liu, one of the founders of Lenovo, Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, or Qiangdong Liu, the founder of Jingdong. I know a female boss from Shenzhen Huaqiangbei. Her business is not good this year, so she participated in a marathon team. After running for a period of time, her business is still not good. Then she raised fund by crowdfunding in the Circle of Friends for her hiking in the Gobi Desert, saying that she will "transcend" herself and asking people to help her "rebirth". Two days ago, we met at the Electronica China, she said she participated in a philanthropic organization to help poverty relief in the mountains of northern Guangdong, with the belief that blessings come from merits and virtues, and her business will naturally be good as a result. I wish her to find the wealth code of Huaqiangbei!

一、Ecological, Matrixing and Hierarchical Strategies

I've studied theories about forest ecology, according to which a vibrant forest must have mosses, grasses, and other lower plants, then shrubs and trees will grow, and finally towering trees will emerge. The lower plants can also support the earthworms underground, conceal hares to support wolves and other higher animal in the ecological chain. This is called ecosystem, where the development follows the law from low to high and from small to large, animals and plants support and constrain each other to form a closed loop, so that it can develop and live forever. I am convinced by this theory, which is also the basic theory that is guiding Slkor (www.slkoric.com) and Kinghelm at their primary stage of development.

 Ecological, Matrixing, Hierarchical Methodology of Slkor

1. Ecological

1) Ecological Product Strategy (wide varieties)

The logic of Internet sales is to attract people first (Internet platform, APP, building an ecology around smart hardware, etc.), develop products based on people’s characteristics (user profiling) in a targeted manner, and then sell the products to them. Slkor ecological product strategy applies the underlying logic of Internet marketing to the product development. Slkor team focus on product supporting and ecological layout, and strive to maximize the possibility of meeting customer needs in respect of new product project formation, technical parameters design, production and sales strategy to expand sales and enhance customer stickiness. Based on the power devices such as MOS tube and IGBT tube launched at the earliest, Slkor develops other supporting products, such as Hall components, crystal oscillators, high-speed optocouplers, power management ICs, LDOs, and AC-DCs etc.

Thanks to this guiding principle, Slkor product lines are getting bigger. Kinghelm (www.kinghelm.net), another company of mine, develops and produces signal connectors, connectors, USB-type-c interfaces, board-to-board connectors, and a series of ancillary products based on its original products, such as BDS GPS antenna connectors and other products, RF microwave technology and its original equipment!

2) Slkor ecological brand strategy (strong penetration)

It is extremely difficult to build a brand, not to mention that our goal is to build “Slkor” and “Kinghelm” into international brands. Once, a boss from Huaqiangbei drunkenly told me that he wanted to build a famous semiconductor brand and make it well known in the world, and he gave me a box of Maotai, asking me to write an advertorial for him. After checking his stuff, I said that they are not a brand, just a registered trademark, just registered overseas. He told me that he live streamed on Douyin until midnight every day. I told him, “if you do not understand brand operation, it will be useless to live stream until 1:00 am without eating and drinking!”

Fuxing I vs. Slkor Warriors Basketball Match

Slkor brand ecological layout refers to the diversified and inclusive brand building and promotion, and penetration and influence through a variety of channels and ways. Friendly communication and good interaction should be maintained with Internet platforms of electronic information industry, electronic industry associations, and various salons. Slkor not only focuses on its own brand building, but also actively cooperates with other brands to jointly promote its products and services. Through diversified and multi-layered brand promotion, Slkor lets more people understand Slkor and improves the penetration and influence of the brand.

Slkor established ‘Slkor Warriors Basketball Team’, which is mainly responsible for competitions and publicity, and Kinghelm established ‘Kinghelm Badminton Team’ to build up the bodies of the colleagues and promotes internal communication. The two teams help realize internal and external paralleled exchange of information and affection. We hope ‘Slkor Warriors Basketball Team’ could attract the best basketball players in the electronics industry. Our goal is to make a name in the industry. At present, we need three-point shooters and powerful center forwards!

Slkor and Kinghelm Ecologically Support Each Other

       3) Industrial ecology

Slkor has always maintained an open and inclusive attitude, and build industrial ecology with this mentality. In addition to the “independent and controllable” core technologies and industry chain nodes, Slkor maintains friendly relationship with the silicon carbide substrate and epitaxial wafer manufacturers, wafer fabs, IP design companies, component sealing and testing factories, product solutions companies, PCBA factories, as well as competitors in the silicon carbide product segment. We always believe that the world is big enough, God will let all people have food to eat, business competition is not a life-or-death struggle, there is also the ecological prosperity of symbiosis. In the end, the final fight is the product and character, “Great virtue carries happiness with it”!  

Kinghelm (www.kinghelm.net), one of mine companies, belong to the electronic information industry, most of its products can be applied to the same electronic product. For example, using for bluetooth headsets, Kinghelm ceramic antenna kh3216, type-c information interfaces and Slkor MOS SL2301, SL2n7002, TVS SMAJ5.0A-13-F, SLESD03D6BU, they are often applied to the same model at the same time, achieving the ecological complementation.

2. Matrixing (e.g., publicity and promotion).

Slkor adopts ecological publicity strategy to conduct publicity and penetration on its official website and social media. Currently, social media include Sina Weibo, WeChat Official Accounts Platform, Douyin, Zhihu, Bilibili, Little Red Book, WeChat Video Channel.

1) Official website (Chinese & English)

The official website of Slkor (www.slkoric.com) displays products, promotes the  brand "Slkor", and also features technical exchanges in the electronics industry, collision of ideas, data query and information exhibition. We hope to make this website a platform for the synergistic development of the electronic components sector.

Slkor official website in Chinese and English are mirror images of each other, and the rich content of Chinese official website can be synchronized to English website, and the daily traffic of up to 100,000 visits can be instantly channeled to the English website. In addition to disseminating Slkor product information and semiconductor industry news, the website also carries articles by semiconductor experts such as Professor Zhou Zucheng of Tsinghua University, Mr Zhu Yi-Wei of Tsinghua University, and Professor Wang Zhihua of Tsinghua University, to share experts' views and show industry dynamics. Engineers are preparing for Slkor’s "Product Application Cases" column, which will have more application technology content to be published.

Column by Professor Zhou Zucheng of Tsinghua University on Slkor’s Official Website

2) Weibo, WeChat Official Account, Douyin, Zhihu

Information points are discretely distributed on the Internet, users make adverse selection at their terminals for end-to-end point-to-point interaction and communication, and the commercial transformation process presents a funnel-like filtering and screening, which is the basic model of Internet marketing. Based on the model, Slkor focuses on sending multi-information points on various platforms to achieve full coverage and saturated penetration as much as possible, and increases the exposure probability and frequency by using massive statistical samples, circumventing the chance and uncertainty of the Internet. Publicity is carried out not only on the official website (www.slkoric.com), but also on various media platforms, such as Weibo (Slkor, Silicon Carbide Expert), WeChat Official Account (Silicon Carbide Expert, Kinghelm, BDS Expert), Douyin, and Zhihu. These platforms can cover a wider range of audience groups, achieve 360 ° of advertising bombardment with no dead angle, and attract more potential customers for Slkor.

The marginal cost theory of macroeconomics is very good in the age of electronic information, and software and the Internet fall into this category. Information dissemination and content production has the characteristics of marginal cost close to zero, we pay special attention to the quality of publicity content. For example, I have published three articles of over ten million clicks this year. So, although I racked my brains to write articles, causing a lot of hair loss, Slkor’s costs of content production are very low, considering over ten million clicks. Massive modular content and product information on our website also appears, for example, the "daily product" column on the website is updated every day, content production becomes more cost-efficient.

Screenshot of Product Series Show on Slkor’s Official Website

It is Zhou Hongwei, the founder of 360 Antivirus Software, who used this theory most successfully. He used the free software model to eliminate many of his peers, and then using the "wool comes out of the dog, and let the pig pay the bill" charge model, earned a lot of money with rogue software and implanted advertisements.

3) Search engines (Bing, Baidu, Google)

Search engines are the information portals frequently used by us every day. In addition to the official website and media platforms, search engine is one of the most important publicity channels for Slkor. ‘Slkor’ and its associated words have a very large number of entries, ‘Slkor’ has more than 126 million entries on Microsoft's search engine Bing, which, and 30 million entries on Baidu. These data show that if users understand the semiconductor and related information through search engines, it is very likely for them to see Slkor Semiconductor, and thus know Slkor and buy our products, so we will make money.

Slkor Semiconductor has 1,200,000 Entries on Baidu

I would like to focus on the word "screen domination". With the support of the massive amount of information on the Internet, Slkor and related MOS, TVS diode, IGBT and other words will dominate the search results! Nowadays, society is fast-paced, we are surrounded by the information cocoon, we will generally choose vendors shown on the first three pages in the mobile phone and PC screen, so the information and keywords ranked in the first three pages are important! Of course, corroboration by other platforms or search engines is also necessary.

To achieve fruitful Internet marketing, it is necessary to analyze thoroughly the present mode of mainstream Internet communication. WeChat Circle of Friends is a closed circle of information, its maximum scale of audience is just a few thousand people, and its dispersion of available content is not as good as Weibo, whose users churn is a big problem. Baidu's keyword drop-down word and long-tail word marketing needs to pile up a huge volume of words, and the backlink and other tactics used on the official website is subject to the adverse selection of the users, which is a big inherent problem. Our Kinghelm (www.kinghelm.net) has piled up a lot of words such as BDS GPS antenna RF connectors, and Slkor (www.slkoric.com) has piled up words like diode, transistor, mos, and these words have reached the degree of screen domination!

Screenshot of Type-c Connector Series on Kinghelm’s Official Website

4) Platforms (szlcsc.com, ickey.cn, alibaba.com, hqew.com)

Slkor not only does a good job in domestic publicity, but also actively carries out publicity work in overseas markets. For this purpose, Slkor has used well-known platforms such as lcsc.com, ickey.cn, alibaba.com and hqew.com for overseas publicity. These are big platforms with high traffic, high conversion rate and rich industry resources, which is a great help for Slkor's brand promotion and the arrival rate of new product samples to customers.

3. Hierarchical Strategy

Based on the above theory of forest ecology, we learned a hard lesson in business management before. When just entering the semiconductor industry, Slkor was engaged in silicon carbide power devices such as SiC SBD and SiC MOSFET, which were the most cutting-edge at that time, they were developed with hard efforts, but sold poorly, even the costs of the current sheets were not recovered. Later, I sold several houses to tide over the difficulties. So, it doesn’t work out if you just have good things to brag and pretend to be something. It will work out if you sell the goods out and recover your costs. Our current approach is as follows:

1) R&D: low-end products to high-end products

Slkor hierarchical new product R&D focuses on gaining a foothold in a niche product first, and then engaging in product and technology upgrading to meet the needs of different customers and markets. In the past few years, Slkor developed TVS diodes, bridge stacks, Schottky diodes and other low-end products, and then developed high-end products. Now IGBT, Hall components, AC-DC products and other products are among best sellers. We are reserving technologies of 3^rd generation of Gallium Nitride semiconductors while upgrading the Silicon Carbide power device technologies.

2) Publicity: Company, Brand and Product

Slkor's hierarchical publicity refers to publicity of company image, "Slkor" brand publicity, and product publicity in the form of progressive publicity and penetration at user end. The newly launched product models such as BAT54S, IRF640N and UCC27523 were vigorously promoted. After all of the publicity strategies played out, Slkor's sales soared!

3) Customers: from small ones to big ones

Slkor’s hierarchical customer acquisition strategy is to gradually accumulate customers starting from small ones to big ones to achieve growth. The advantage of this strategy is that Slkor can establish a stable customer base, and eventually gradually expand its market share. Slkor is a source factory capable of R&D and production, its repeat order rate reaches 87%, and the repeat order rate of its OEM business also reaches 78%, which is the guarantee of our high-speed development!

4) Markets: Coastal markets, inland markets, then overseas markets

Slkor's hierarchical market expansion strategy is expansion from coastal markets to inland markets and then to overseas markets. Slkor is located in Shenzhen, a city with a developed IC industry, and started market expansion with the Pearl River Delta market by means of publicity and promotion, customer development, and cooperation with agents. After achieving a little success in the coastal market, Slkor gradually expanded into the inland markets, and finally developed overseas markets. This is a strategy of low risk and quick result.

二、Overseas Market Strategy

Slkor's overseas market strategy is divided into two major aspects: publicity and sales.

Slkor's publicity and promotion is very comprehensive. At the early stage, we released a huge number of advertorials covering several channels and platforms. According to my friends, Brother Wei and Brother Lei, my bragging in Huaqiangbei helped Slkor occupy the minds of customers all over the world! The influence of the advertorials is more lasting and touching, they can influence a customer's judgement. We have also opened online shops on alibaba.com, aliexpress.com, lcsc.com and other e-commerce platforms, and we also have many overseas agents. Slkor also cooperates with Kinghelm (www.kinghelm.net) for cross comprehensive publicity so that more people can know and understand Slkor, increasing brand exposure and user stickiness, and improving Slkor's awareness and reputation in overseas markets.

Slkor Overseas Market Strategy

1.Official website (English version)

The English official website (www.slkoric.com) is a window for end-users to know about Slkor, showing the company's image and strength so that overseas customers can understand the company's values, corporate culture and ethics, and providing online consulting services so that our overseas customer service specialists can communicate with customers online and exchange, answer questions and listen to suggestions, and overseas customers can know about Slkor’s products and services. Kinghelm (www.kinghelm.net) adopts the same strategy.

2. Alibaba.com, aliexpress.com, lcsc.com, joinf.com and overseas agent channel

These platforms are used to sell Slkor products. Slkor has established a wider sales network in the overseas markets through the e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba.com, aliexpress.com and lcsc.com, as well as the partners such as joinf.com and the overseas agents, not only expanding the sales channels, but also improving the sales efficiency and strengthening Slkor’s brand influence.

At present, Slkor has agents in India, Poland and Singapore, our domestic agents are also helping us to expand overseas markets, e.g., Shenzhen Mairuida Electronics helped Slkor to expand the Indonesian market!

3.Cooperation with Kinghelm

Slkor and Kinghelm are sister companies, belonging to the same owner, Shiqiang Song. The two companies work together to expand overseas markets, and through mutual support and collaboration, increase brand awareness and influence in overseas markets.

4.Comprehensive publicity supports brand promotion in overseas markets

What is important at this stage is to release advertorials. For example, the English version of the article “Shiqiang Song reveals the wealth code of Huaqiangbei, why are  there so many billionaires from Huaqiangbei?” written by Shiqiang Song was published by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily, American News Network, Financial Daily, BBC Daily News, Japan Newsweek and other international authoritative media, and the article “Shenzhen Huaqiangbei's Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” written by Shiqiang Song was published by Dow Jones. Good articles drive comprehensive publicity, which is one of the important means for Slkor to promote and publicize in overseas market at current stage.

About 100,000,000 Search Results Related to "Huaqiangbei" on Baidu 

Slkor and Kinghelm are companies growing in Huaqiangbei, which is characterized as a world-class distribution center for electronic components and a showcase for trendy electronic and digital products, as well as a place full of opportunities for gold-digging in Shenzhen. The word "Huaqiangbei" (Shenzhen Huaqiangbei) has an average of 30 million searches per day on Baidu and Google. When it comes to hot events, the daily traffic may be up to 100 million searches, Huaqiangbei SEG Plaza swaying two years ago is the case. Huaqiangbei and I have a destiny. My first job in Shenzhen was working in Huaqiangbei, I started my business in Huaqiangbei, and Slkor opened a point of sale in Huaqiangbei after it became a big company and moved away from Huaqiangbei. I wrote a lot of articles researching Huaqiangbei and contributing my ideas and suggestions to Huaqiangbei's development and transformation. It is sort of using hot spots and brings a lot of traffic for Slkor and Kinghelm.

"Slkor Huaqiangbei" has 113,000 entries on Baidu

After basically covering the English-speaking areas, Slkor's promotional campaign will penetrate the minority language areas to escort the marketing in English-speaking areas. At present, we have already started with South Korea, Japan, India, Vietnam and other neighboring countries and regions. Next year, we will begin to set up a professional team to make short videos and release them on TikTok and YouTube. The most popular short video platforms such as Douyin, bilibili.com, WeChat Video Channel, and Little Red Book may create correlation and geometric volume of dissemination like viral fission based on a variety of elements contained in the content you publish. I posted a video on Douyin when I went back to my hometown in Xichong County, Sichuan Province, and found a primary school classmate who had not been in contact for more than 60 years, and he told me that he had found his first love who he broken up with 50 years ago by releasing videos on Douyin. This is extremely efficient. Therefore, it is these platforms that Kinghelm and Slkor will use as our major publicity tool in the future.

This is all the strategies we are currently adopting, and I will share with you in the future if I have the chance.

Thank you!

About Mr. Shiqiang Song

About Mr. Shiqiang Song:

Mr. Shiqiang Song is a researcher of private economy at the Economic Development Center of the State Council, a member of the electronic information expert pool of the China Association for Science and Technology, and an expert in Huaqiangbei business research. Mr. Song was the CEO of a listed international real estate company, and now he invests and manages Shenzhen SlkorMicro Semicon Co., Ltd. and Shenzhen Kinghelm Electronics Co., Ltd. (www.kinghelm.net).

Both Slkor and Kinghelm are national high-tech enterprises, owning dozens of original invention patents and software copyrights. At present, Slkor is one of the Chinese semiconductor companies developing rapidly and steadily. The company's vision is “to become the leader in semiconductor industry”."With Kinghelm, BDS is connected”. Starting from the development of BDS GPS antenna, Kinghelm has developed and produced RF microwave antennas, RF jumper cables and electrical signal connectors to embrace the intelligent digital era of the Internet of Things. Mr. Song has a high reputation and influence in the semiconductor and BDS positioning and navigation industry. Mr. Song has been working in the electronics industry for many years and is constantly striving for a better business environment in Huaqiangbei, in the hope that Huaqiangbei will become a window of reform and opening up and a symbol of Shenzhen's economic development.