On June 7th, SUU MBA Midday Talks continued, and the theme of this session was “Breakthrough Strategy in the New Manufacturing Era”. The Outreach Department of SU MBA Federation invited Mr. Chen Guoping, Managing Partner and Executive Director of Haoji Capital, to be our guest. Mr. Chen has served as a senior executive of many enterprises, and has been deeply engaged in the fields of intelligent driving, intelligent network, industrial Internet and energy storage, specializing in cross-border resource integration, and has rich experience in corporate venture capital, and has promoted the development of intelligent networked automobile industry cluster in Suzhou High-speed Railway New Town, and has landed the headline enterprises, such as Momenta, Jiuzhi Intelligence, and Teng Sheng Technology, to form the closed loop of the industrial chain. Mr. Chen shared his thoughts on the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry from the challenges and opportunities of the manufacturing industry at this stage, typical cases of breakthrough practices, suggestions and exploration paths, which brought more thoughts on the transformation of the manufacturing industry to the MBA students.

Mr. Chen first asked the question “Is it really hopeless for the US manufacturing industry to come back?”. This question is for the students, let us with the question, listen to the sharing, and then give their own answers.

The first part of the current stage of manufacturing challenges, Mr. Chen combined with the Suzhou manufacturing industry in the past 30 years of rapid development, cited the original capital accumulation from the service of foreign-funded enterprise customers Dongshan Precision, elaborated on the past of our township and village enterprises in the accession to the WTO, seized a wave of foreign-funded enterprise supply chain services to undertake the opportunity to seize the two sets of China's capital market, the GEM and the KCB this huge dividend period! , which are rapidly getting bigger and stronger. Nowadays, high tariff barriers, shrinking foreign supply chain, and imbalance between supply and demand bring great challenges to the manufacturing industry. However, Mr. Chen also analyzed the change of growth rate of industrial sector in 13 cities in Jiangsu Province in the same period from 2022 to 2024, and pointed out that Suzhou's industrial manufacturing industry is complete, resilient, and has many growth points. In addition, Mr. Chen analyzed the difference between the characteristics of entrepreneurs 30 years ago and the characteristics of entrepreneurs who start their own business nowadays, pointing out that the market has higher requirements for entrepreneurs nowadays, who must be hexagonal warriors in order to cope with the competition and challenges of the market nowadays.

In the second part, Mr. Chen cited examples of actual cases in which his company invested, such as New Nuyuan, which makes power modules for charging piles (with assembly factories in the U.S. and India), Research and Selection Workshop, which is a large model of BOM (non-standard) for the automation equipment industry, Jie Sheet Metal, which is an industrial Internet platform company specializing in sheet-metal processing, and Teng Sheng, which is a globalized energy storage company, etc., and analyzed the differences between the companies he invested in and most of the current manufacturing companies. This will help us analyze the differences between our portfolio companies and most of the current manufacturing companies.

At the same time, it also naturally led to the third part of the suggestions and exploration paths. Mr. Chen pointed out that the transformation of the traditional manufacturing industry should seize the paths of branding, globalization, intelligence, capitalization and platformization in order to succeed in the transformation and breakthrough.

Mr. Chen pointed out that only by breaking the cage of thinking can we see the real blue ocean and the ability to build Noah's Ark. Finally, Mr. Chen returned to the opening question, “Is there any play for the return of the U.S. manufacturing industry?” The students expressed their own views. And Mr. Chen's opinion is, don't be too optimistic that the return of the U.S. manufacturing industry will be hopeless, and think that China will continue to maintain the advantages of the manufacturing industry. Because AI is redefining the manufacturing industry, the manufacturing supply chain will be modular optimization, shorten the length of the supply chain, and there is a large number of robots will be skill leveling, will have a disruptive impact on the traditional reliance on high-skilled engineers culture of China's manufacturing industry.

Summary: Through Mr. Chen's sharing, we have gained an in-depth understanding of the challenges faced by the traditional manufacturing industry, and through the analysis of actual cases invested by Mr. Chen's company, Haoji Capital, we have been able to explore the transformation of the manufacturing industry, which has provided us with realistic references and ideas.