Background
Wu was born in Beijing in 1959.
鹰 吴
Wu was born in Beijing in 1959.
Wu Ying attended Beijing Industry University. Soon after his graduation in 1985, he went to the United States to pursue further studies at the New Jersey Institute of Technology with only $27 in his pocket, and earned a graduate degree in electrical engineering.
After working at Bell Labs for four years, in 1991 Wu founded a technological consultating company Starcom with another overseas Chinese student in New Jersey. Four years later, the company merged with Unitech to form UT Starcom. In the three years from its initial public offering of stock in March 2000 to 2003, the company’s revenues increased ten times. Its worldwide sales revenue reached over $2.9 billion in 2005, with $2 billion from outside China. UT Starcom is considered one of the best Chinese technological stocks on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
The company’s success is based on innovation. The first huge success were the PAS (personal access system) handsets, widely known to Chinese as ‘Xiao Ling Tong’ (‘Little Smart’). Wu fine-tuned the ‘personal handy-phone’ technology that is popular in Japan and launched Little Smart in China in 1998. In a regulatory environment where only licensed companies were allowed to provide mobile services, Wu managed to convince telecom officials that cell phones were just a wireless extension of fixed-line phones. He sold the system to China’s two giant fixed-line companies, China Telecom and China Netcom, who were eager to share the huge mobile market but could not because of strict government regulations.
Serving as a bargain alternative to mobile phones, the Little Smart handsets allow ordinary Chinese citizens to receive cell-phone-like service at rates as low as 25 percent of those of regular carriers. As Wu sees it, this is a huge potential market of 650 million people who would like to use regular cell phones but cannot afford them. With its citywide mobility and low price, Little Smart is very popular among ordinary Chinese and gained around 90 million users by the end of March 2006.
Under Wu’s leadership, the company initiated a digital TV solution called IPTV (internet protocol TV) as its new line of innovation. IPTV delivers digital TV service to subscribers via internet protocol over a broadband connection. Thus, IPTV does not have the traditional program constraints of fixed times and fixed channels. Besides selecting programs from a menu display, IPTV customers have the choice to pause, rewind and fast-forward the program that they are watching. They can also watch programs that were broadcast during the past two days or even earlier, at any time of their choice. Wu has predicted that IPTV will dominate the market in the post-digital age. Through its efforts in cooperating with two telecom giants, China Telecom and China Netcom, and radio and television stations, UT Starcom has served not only as an equipment supplier, but also as a promoter of IPTV’s development in China. This safe and inexpensive digital TV technology has also gained the Chinese government’s support. It had hundreds of thousands of customers in China by 2006. Since watching TV is a favorite pastime for most Chinese, Wu believed that IPTV’s development in China, with its huge potential market, would surpass that in Japan and the USA.
In 2006, Wu shared his insights on innovation with Beijing Review. Encouraged by the Chinese government’s advocacy of innovation, he believes the usual inadequate implementation by the responsible departments or local governments needs to be improved; the social environment needs to be more supportive to innovative, small and start-up companies; the legal and financial environment also needs to be improved for start-ups; and preferential financing and tax policies should be used as a means to encourage independent innovation in companies, and to transform China from the world’s manufacturing center into an R&D center, China should start establishing a national R&D group in the IT sector which brings together innovative overseas returnees with local talents.