Decade-Long Effort to Build an IoT Highway
It has been ten years since G7’s establishment.
When G7's first product was launched at the end of 2010, its namesake G7 Expressway hadn't broken ground yet. But today, this 2,500 km expressway extending from Beijing to the beautiful Xinjiang in the northwest is already through, while G7's "highway" of the Internet of Things (IoT) seems to see just a beginning.
Good news is that every inch of our IoT "highway" that we have paved in the past decade is vital. This "highway" enables that: An express company can dispatch all its vehicles across the nation within one system; The storage temperature of yogurt can be monitored in real time throughout its delivery process from a dairy factory to the end user, to ensure the temperature remains 4 ℃; The safety data of a chemical plant's truck fleet can be available all year round to ensure "zero accidents"; The driving behavior of several hundred drivers in a logistics company can be improved after analyzing the engine data to reduce fuel oil consumption by 10%; A long-haul trucker can use QR code payment to top up the vehicle tank with quality fuel instead of cash, even at a remote and unattended filling station near the border. ... Most of these abovementioned functions were first realized and pioneered by G7 in China, and share one principle: utilizing the IoT technology to improve the efficiency and safety of logistics. It requires the integration of hardware, software, algorithms, data, services and operations to break existing limitations. In the past decade, we grew our customer base to around 70,000 by performing such integration 70,000 times.
When we look back, the setbacks and failures that G7 once experienced far outnumber the successes and glories, and all the lessons we learnt exposed the same disadvantage in ourselves, in that we tend to become impatient when seeing upcoming opportunities, lacking the patience for accumulating our strength for technology-to-value conversion and the reverence for the unknown. The ultimate outcomes have repeatedly convinced us that to good products, there is no shortcut but a trail of never-ending improvements and an insatiable desire for the better. This is the only correct path to build up productivity with IoT technologies. Just as the saying goes, prayers and provender hinder no journey.
We should feel lucky that we didn't spend the past decade in anything other than striving to improve the efficiency and safety of logistics with IoT technologies. This has made G7 an industrial IoT-powered platform with the highest number of connected trucks and the most extensive coverage of logistic components in the world.
G7 IoT Platform at 21:15:30 on August 2, 2020
A Result-Delivering Technology, a Soul-Having Team, and a Vision-Broadening Circle
G7 took off in 2017, with its platform turnover skyrocketing from several hundred million to tens of billions. This is partially because of our continuous investment in IoT technologies and scale effects from our business growth. But what's more important is that G7's system has started to form a more powerful virtuous circle.
First, G7 has always adhered to the idea of "IoT creates productivity". In order to conquer the unique challenges in the IoT sector including the long supply chain and the slow effectiveness of iterations, we have thoroughly upgraded our service model from "prepaid" to "on-demand". Within two to three years, we successfully launched three core businesses, namely G7 Safety, G7 Freight and G7 Equipment. This closed-loop service idea with development of technologies and value as a result has significantly improved the iteration pace of G7's solutions, data and algorithms, and has also boosted G7's customer value.
Such a major, DNA-restructuring-like upgrade is a natural result of continuous transfusion of new blood in the entrepreneurial team. The new-generation entrepreneurial team consists of patient and kind people who have jointly created an atmosphere that values candor, says no to mediocrity or haggling over every ounce, dares to be the first, encourages each other to think out of the box, and has the future landscape of the industry in mind. This atmosphere further attracts aspiring leaders and persevering experts in different fields to G7 to achieve goals with long-term value.
Known for consistent actions and words, we treat our customers with a serious attitude, like they are our decade-long friends instead of counterparts in only one or two transactions. This has won over outstanding shareholders who continue investing in G7 for many years, world-leading strategic partners who design and create the future together with us, as well as more than 70,000 long-term customers who trust G7 and explore new values of the IoT with us.
What G7 aspires to achieve is not easy, but with a result-delivering technology, a soul-having team, and a vision-broadening circle, G7 is forging ahead against these obstacles.
Theme of Industrial Upgrading in the Next Five Years: Deep Integration of Transactions & Deliveries Into the IoT
The mobile internet has changed consumer habits and logistics efficiency dramatically in the past decade. Customers have now become accustomed to placing an order on an e-commerce platform in the morning with expected delivery in the very afternoon. However, this change is far from pervading most basic industries, considering that many industries still have quite primitive operations. It may take at least 40 days for one ton of scrap iron from a waste recycling station to arrive at a steel plant. Although many mines have been automated to their "teeth", coal mine bosses still need to pick up a telescope to check the truck queue length at the entrance of a pit, to decide whether to limit production or increase prices on the next day. Despite the tightening safety supervision of the government, trucks passing high-traffic national highways remain the biggest safety threat for local elderly and children, and heavy truck drivers are still regarded as one of the most dangerous professions in China.
G7 has experienced the incubation process of the IoT serving the industry in the past ten years. Today, the service capabilities of the IoT have grown to a point where they are beginning to speed up the changes.
In the next five years, the IoT will be deeply integrated into the supply chain. The entire complex process between industrial partners including transaction confirmation, cargo delivery, and payment settlement can be digitized in real time. Capital turnover of the supply chain will change from being counted in months to being counted in hours, and the logistics delivery will change from relying on massive amount of manual and repeated work to relying on AI-driven elements to improve efficiency. In the next five years, the IoT will pervade the logistics industry. Trucks, containers, pallets and other items will all gradually become intelligent to support internet connection, computing, and learning, and be connected to companies' operation management systems. This will enable Plug and Play (PnP) intelligent asset services based on platforms to boost asset efficiency. In the next five years, with the accumulation of IoT data and algorithms, the decisive factor for transportation safety will shift from drivers to AI. The tens of thousands of casualties each year will drop by an order of magnitude. In the next five years, the theme of industrial upgrading will be the deep integration of transactions & deliveries into the IoT. But technological revolution never happens automatically, and G7 should always be the one who breaks the limit and takes the first step against all the obstacles.
Zhai Xuehun
August 2, 2020, at midnight
