"Second, it isn't that we go to the customer — the customer comes to us."

"You're telling me customers will come of their own accord and ask?"

Seong-ho Kim nodded firmly and said,

"It amounts to the customer begging us to make the thing for them."

"Begging us to make it for them, is it… Ha ha. You do tell a good joke."

Tak-hyeon Lee let out a short laugh at that.

"There'll be some exaggeration in it, but I see roughly what you mean. In the end you're saying you'll stand on equal footing with the customer, aren't you? In that case it isn't bad. It's a thing worth trying."

Tak-hyeon Lee thought Seong-ho Kim was speaking in exaggerated terms.

But Seong-ho Kim hadn't exaggerated.

If anything, the market would reverse the positions of the stronger and the weaker party so far that what Seong-ho Kim had put into words couldn't hold all of it. He was persuading Tak-hyeon Lee now in order to prepare for it.

But a state of affairs like that couldn't be understood by explaining it, and so Seong-ho Kim only watched Tak-hyeon Lee nodding quietly.

Because even he, who had been through his past life, couldn't get the least sense of how to explain what was going to happen in the future.

Judging that as much as Tak-hyeon Lee had understood was enough, Seong-ho Kim went on to the third reason.

"And third, because what we mean to do isn't simple toll processing. It's work that takes technology, with a barrier to entry that others can't easily climb. And there's the advantage that we can put that barrier up ourselves."

"You're telling me we can raise the wall that keeps other firms out ourselves?"

"Yes. With the know-how we've gained mass-producing memory, we can put up a wall in the foundry market."

"That… is a rather good point."

Tak-hyeon Lee's expression had turned completely from what it was at the start.

The angry look had long since gone, and hearing Seong-ho Kim out, he seemed to be thinking of it as an opportunity —…