Despite its plans to become the “Silicon Valley of the East”, Shenzhen is still stuck with its Huaqiangbei identity — fast, cheap and replicable.

An obvious example is the fake Apple Watch. The appearance, strap and even the software interface inside are all similar to the original Apple Watch. If you look at it from 5 meters away, you can hardly tell the difference between the fake and the genuine one.

But that is not what Shenzhen, which hopes to become another Silicon Valley, needs most right now. Startups like DJI and, most recently, Royroya, with their own research and development capabilities that can make breakthroughs in key areas, will give Shenzhen a stronger “city name”.

According to a previous report by Cyril Ebersweiler, founder of HAX, xiaomi is the only Chinese company among the 11 most valuable hardware startups in the world. In the article, he argued that there would be a very short window for Chinese companies to start hardware startups. The point is that not many hardware startups know how to make products, market them, and sell them. If foreign hardware entrepreneurs overcome language and communication barriers to prototype and mass produce in China, the advantage for Chinese startups will be less pronounced.

What Cyril doesn’t mention is that prototyping in Shenzhen is also a dangerous business. Due to the lack of protection from the patent system, many manufacturers in Huaqiangbei directly focus on Kickstarter and use their powerful manufacturing capabilities to copy the products mentioned above and sell them.

This is the usual practice in Shenzhen. The first person who thinks of a good idea is not necessarily the first person who can eat crab, but the person who has strong marketing ability, channel ability and rapid replication of the product can scoop the delicious soup from the cauldron of the market. As a result, Shenzhen companies, which have always focused on technology research and development, have few breakthrough technologies in their products, and there are no technological barriers – and how can Shenzhen compete with Silicon Valley without technological breakthroughs and innovations?

In fact, for hardware products, simple and repetitive competition, such as low prices, is now a capital game only big companies can afford to play. The more complex business becomes, the more it needs to rely on “hard power” to speak for itself.

When used to the “I copy you, you copy me” competition, and products. Even modest technological breakthroughs can endear themselves to the Chinese public. Previously, OPPO spent several years working on the fast charging technology, not only received the welcome and respect of consumers, but also gained a good reputation in the industry. In addition to local innovation, Shenzhen also needs companies that can make breakthroughs in key technology areas. These companies are shenzhen’s “city calling card” and the fundamental reason why Shenzhen is able to stand on equal footing with Silicon Valley.

Dji is one of the few hardware startups that can give Shenzhen a “global calling card effect,” but it’s hard to name any shenzhen companies that have developed attractive brands overseas. But Royole, which recently raised 1.1 billion yuan at a valuation of $1 billion, could be shenzhen’s next internationally influential startup.

Royole Technology was founded in 2012, focusing on the research and development of flexible display technology, to put it bluntly, is the research and development and production of flexible screen.

The technology industry is taking this technology very seriously. On the one hand, if flexible display technology is mature enough, it can make the screen any fold, roll up production, hardware products will have more abundant appearance, and because of the characteristics of flexible screen itself, it still has more functions and possibilities.

Apple once submitted with the flexible screen related patents in 2012, it predicts the flexible screen for the new changes brought by the consumer electronics products, such as using the flexible screen of the appearance of electronic products can adapt to different devices, and such as the flexible vibration screen can sense and transmit voice, so I can put the microphone and speakers at the bottom of the screen, You can also integrate a keyboard underneath the screen to give touch to the touch screen.

Plastic Logic, a world-renowned manufacturer of Plastic electronics, showed off its PaperTab concept at CES in 2013 with a flexible e-paper screen. It’s a special tablet with an Intel Sandy Bridge Core I5 processor. It features features that mimic the vision of traditional paper, but also offers different interactions by taking advantage of flexible screens, such as pinching a corner of the screen and bending it to turn a page. In addition, multiple Papertabs can also cooperate. As long as two devices touch, the data of one device will be synchronized to another device.

At present, the most mature manufacturer of flexible screens should be Samsung. Starting with the Youm, a flexible phone screen developed by Samsung at CES in 2012, Samsung has been showing off its flexible screen development results at various exhibitions for several years. Eventually, these findings were applied to Samsung’s mobile phones, as well as wearables and TVS, such as the Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy S6 Edge and Galaxy Gear.

Now, royole technology research and development of flexible display, specifications and performance in the world’s forefront. Last August, they announced that they had successfully developed a flexible color screen with a thickness of just 0.01mm and a curling radius of just 1mm, which holds the world record and has been successfully integrated into mainstream smartphones. By comparison, Samsung’s flexible screen is 0.3-0.5 mm thick, 30 to 50 times thicker than Royole’s. In royole’s sample video, someone fanned the screen with their hands and the screen swung up and down, making it feel lighter than normal paper. The video also shows that the flexible screen can be rolled up.

 

In other words, if royole’s flexible screen is adopted, then the products developed by manufacturers can at least ensure that the industrial design of products is more flexible. Moreover, liu Zihong, founder, chairman and CEO of Royol technology, said flexible displays have an even more competitive advantage than traditional displays in terms of cost of basic materials and processing technology.

In July 2015, Royole technology announced the start of the first flexible screen production line in China, with a designed capacity of 1 million pieces/month. From the successful development of the flexible screen to the actual production, the time is exactly one year, and from the establishment of the company to the actual production, the time is exactly three years, the speed is astonishing.

Three years is a very short time to make a major breakthrough in a key technology area. This reflects royole technology’s ability to tackle key technical problems — in the past three years, Royole Technology has applied for more than 200 core technology patents, most of which are international invention patents. Royole applied for a patent every five days.

Behind the strong technical ability, also reflects royole technology strong technical research and development team. It is understood that Royole technology currently has more than 200 employees, half of which are R&D engineers. And the company has set up a research and development center in Silicon Valley, which is filled with at least a dozen Stanford-educated PHDS with experience at IBM, Intel and other big companies.

Founder Liu Zihong before the creation of soft technology, has been in theory and experiment research on the basis of flexible electronic spent six years, his research results published in the journal of applied physics famous in the cover story, and in 2012, has been named by the American physical society for applied physics letters the 50th anniversary of the publication celebrates one of 50 selected papers. Because of his achievements in flexible electronics, he was invited to be a guest lecturer in the Electronic Engineering Department of Stanford University.

Apart from products, Royole is the first “unicorn” among Chinese hardware startups besides Xiaomi to reach a valuation of 1 billion yuan within three years. The recognition from the investment market also indicates the investment community’s view on the future of science and technology industry. Whether it is business model innovation or marketing innovation, science and technology is difficult to bypass the word “technology”.

For a city in need of a “city name card” to prove itself, royole can never be too numerous.

Off-topic: In addition to flexible display products, according to reliable information, Royole technology will also release a new intelligent display terminal products of its own brand in September, which is worth paying attention to.

Photo from AsianTowers

The illustrations are from CityCloud