"SVOL hit another all-time high at Friday's close! Boss, you really should see the carnage on Wall Street right now. Those fund managers who panic-sold in March are now lining up, weeping as they rebuild their positions at a thirty percent premium! I told them back when the Q1 report came out that Silicon Valley Online would bounce back, but they just wouldn't listen!"
"This was expected. There is no need to get overly excited over Wall Street's folly," Takuya Nakayama's voice remained steady, his deep eyes gleaming with reason, completely unaffected by Frank's emotional outburst. "The underlying logic of the Internet has not changed. The United States' telecommunications infrastructure is still expanding rapidly, and the number of internet users continues to grow. As long as these two factors remain constant, our fundamental position is unshakeable. Short-term capital market turbulence, which flushes out speculators with weak resolve, is actually beneficial to the company's long-term shareholding structure."
"You sound terrifyingly calm over there, like a machine without emotions," Frank muttered on the other end of the line, before chuckling. "Tom was just pulling a few technical directors into a dance in the hallway. You won't believe it—the physical copies of Dungeons & Dragons Online have completely sold out at Walmart and Best Buy. Even the empty display boxes were snatched by desperate players!"
"Tell Tom to keep a close eye on the disc pressing plant's capacity and add more production lines immediately," Takuya Nakayama ordered decisively. "We can't afford any hiccups in distribution. This is our best chance to reap a massive cash flow."
"Got it, Tom's already on it. Also, Blizzard's Battle.net system is facing a massive traffic surge. Thanks to the underlying technical support from the engineering team we sent over, the servers managed to withstand this terrifying wave of concurrent users. Mike Morhaime and his team are thrilled and are already planning their next big move. I'm planning to fly to Mountain View next week to meet with them and see how we can deepen our partnership."
"Go ahead, keep in close contact." A glint of ambition flashed in Takuya Nakayama's eyes. "Battle.net is a crucial part of our entry into the PC gaming ecosystem. Tell Blizzard that if they need money, we'll give it to them; if they need technology, we'll provide it. We must establish this brand firmly."
At 4:30 PM, Takuya Nakayama tossed his Montblanc fountain pen onto the desk with a light thud and closed the final proposal in front of him.
He stood up, stretched his stiff shoulders from sitting all day, and his joints gave a faint series of pops.
Just as he was about to grab his coat from the rack and leave early, there was a sharp, urgent knock at the office door.
"Come in," Takuya turned around.
Hideki Sato strode into the room.
He was clutching several sheets of thermal fax paper, their edges already curled. His brow was furrowed into a tight knot, and his pace was frantic, as if he were being chased by a dog.
"Managing Director, we've received a definitive update from NEC," Sato said, his voice crackling with urgency.
Takuya smiled and pointed to the leather chair opposite him. "The sky isn't falling. Sit down and tell me."
But Sato had no mind to sit. He marched straight to the large solid-wood desk and slapped the faxed papers down on its surface with a loud thwack.
The pungent, chemical odor unique to thermal paper instantly filled the air.
"It's a bust," Sato said, pointing to the dense data on the page. His voice was heavy with defeat. "I pulled some strings with a contact in NEC's Display Division and managed to get my hands on their top-secret internal evaluation report. That so-called low-power reflective LCD? They're just selling us a pipe dream!"
Takuya Nakayama glanced down at the Japanese text on the fax. The wall of parameters was enough to give anyone a headache.
"Yield rate too low?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Low? It's a goddamn disaster! You'd have better luck panning for gold in a trash heap," Sato said, pulling out a chair and collapsing into it. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, his eyes bloodshot from days of travel. He looked utterly exhausted. "They haven't solved the core issue with the reflective layer material. The color shift is so bad it looks like a Picasso abstract, and the viewing angle is atrocious—move your head an inch and you can't see a thing. The few barely passable samples they managed to produce in the lab were all hand-picked with magnifying glasses. I threw a million-dollar order at them, and you know what? They didn't even have the guts to take it. Their project lead pulled me aside and told me straight: to meet our mass production standards, they're looking at two or three years, at the earliest."
Two or three years.
In the ever-evolving handheld console market, where things changed by the day, two or three years was an eternity. Even two or three months would be too long—the opportunity would be long gone.
Takuya Nakayama leaned back in his comfortable chair, his fingers tapping the armrest in a steady rhythm—thump, thump.
"It seems this path is completely closed off," he said calmly, showing little disappointment. After all, memories from his past life taught him that technical breakthroughs couldn't be rushed.
Hideki Sato quickly straightened his back, terrified his boss might lose his temper.
"However, Managing Director, while I was inquiring about NEC, I stumbled upon another extremely valuable piece of information."
"Oh?" Takuya stopped tapping. "Let's hear it."
"Sharp," Sato said, a glimmer of hope returning to his dull eyes. "They have a very deep foundation in the liquid crystal field. I made the rounds with several upstream suppliers and learned that Sharp is secretly advancing a reflective color TFT-LCD project. Word is the progress is incredibly fast—they'll finalize the technical specifications by the second half of this year and be ready for mass production early next year."
At the mention of "Sharp," Takuya Nakayama's eyes lit up.
The Father of LCDs!
How could I have forgotten about them?
In this era, Sharp's expertise in display panels was absolutely unrivaled.
"Sharp will have their design finalized by the second half of the year, yet we haven't heard a single whisper?" Takuya Nakayama looked at Sato with a faint, knowing smile.
Hideki Sato's expression instantly froze. A look of unmistakable shame crossed his face before he bowed his head deeply, wishing he could find a hole to crawl into.
"This is a grave failure on my part. The Hardware Department's intelligence network... it truly has massive holes. We were too slow."
Takuya Nakayama stared at him, but instead of a harsh reprimand, his tone was surprisingly gentle.
"In the past, when Sega developed hardware, we were still arcade manufacturers at heart. We were used to taking mature—even nearly obsolete—cheap components from the market, assembling them like building blocks into a highly cost-effective solution. Then, we'd fight our rivals using that cost advantage and our invincible lineup of games."
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