Honor Mobile's general manager, Zhao Liangyun, stared at the Honor 7 and Honor 7 Plus sales curves until the numbers seemed to blur. A two‑hundred‑yuan price cut, pushed out less than a month after launch, should have jolted demand. It did—briefly. Sales ticked up for a heartbeat, then the second flash sale from Huaxing Technology smashed the rebound flat, sending the Honor 7 line back into a trough. Worse, the early adopters who had queued with confidence now felt like suckers; a mere month later, the sticker price slipped, and a belated two‑hundred‑yuan top‑up card could not thaw their resentment. Praise turned into one‑star grumbles, and those grumbles began to cling to the Honor brand like burrs. Zhao knew he had already spent the last of the autonomy his position allowed; one cut was his ceiling. A second would need headquarters' blessing—and two cuts inside thirty days would make Honor the punchline of the industry. He could only grit his teeth and tell his team to ramp up publicity: the product must not be allowed to collapse on their watch.
While Honor wrestled with buyer anger and brand drag, Huaxing Technology was tallying something far more encouraging. Yang Qiang walked into Heifeng's office with a stack of fresh statistics and the glow of a landed project. In under three days, roughly twenty million new users had registered Huaxing accounts, and legacy users had completed real‑name verification en masse. Of those, nearly twenty million cleared a 500‑point purchase score, almost ten million cleared 600, and almost five million topped 700. It was a windfall of verified demand and, just as important, a living map of credit quality and consumption capacity.
Heifeng weighed the sheet, then the clock. Three million units still sat in inventory. The principle of "no more than three times" tugged at him—hype fatigues, patience thins—but the numbers argued there was still headroom to satisfy genuine buyers, particularly among the high‑score cohort. The "real‑name purchase score" blends age bands with recent Alipay credit behavior and Tencent QQ information. Fill in only the basics, and you might crest a bit over 600; cross 650 and, in practice, you were signaling steady income, stronger credit, and the habit of paying. Those 650‑plus users, in Heifeng's eyes, were the core people whose needs Huaxing should meet first, and who, treated well, would harden into long‑term loyalty.
He convened a high‑level meeting. For more than an hour, they argued timing, stock, and public sentiment: release everything and let the uproar burn out, or trickle, maintain scarcity, and risk turning goodwill into fury? When they rose, they had a plan for the third round. Huaxing's official site pushed a new notice at dawn the next day. It was a small sentence with a big filter: users with real‑name purchase scores above 600 would receive a chance to buy at ten o'clock the following day—use it or lose it. The phrasing did two jobs at once. It rewarded verified, higher‑quality accounts and told the broader market that Huaxing would privilege credibility over bots and scalpers. Predictably, the 600‑plus crowd surged to the site to confirm their eligibility, while the operations team, under Heifeng's instructions, finalized the scaffolding for a release sized to calm the storm.
Nine fifty‑one a.m. arrived, and with it the crush. Experience from the first two sales had taught buyers to be early and merciless on the refresh key. Ten o'clock flicked over; the buy buttons lit; countless fingers struck. Five seconds late, the buttons went gray. Sold out. The collective disbelief was almost comic. Everyone knew it would be hard to grab—no one expected the computer to be still "thinking" while the stock vanished. Anger spiked. Comments sharpened. Timed curses bloomed under Huaxing's official Weibo. Then, at exactly ten, a second post landed: users with scores above 600 could head to the official site to place a pre‑order, first-come, first-served. The mood flipped in place. Those who had been inhaling to swear exhaled and clicked. Pre‑sale was the second lane, and it was wide enough to move the pressure off the flash‑sale bottleneck without opening the gates to everyone at once.
The threshold was not rare—bind QQ and Alipay, keep your credit clean, complete the basics, and most would sit at or above 600—but it was enough to exclude a long tail of throwaway accounts and opportunists. More importantly, it felt fair. People who had identified themselves, shared data, and demonstrated responsibility were being acknowledged by the company. Under the Weibo push, traffic poured into the new page. Heifeng watched the graphs roll and allowed himself, finally, to plan the landing. After this pre‑sale, he believed, the blaze around Huaxing's phones would begin to cool from a bonfire to a steady hearth. Production could ease from a sprint to a competent marathon. The arithmetic backed him up: close to a million units had already entered the market across the three waves. Ten million phones in a month—many small brands never touched that over a year. That kind of throughput was not only revenue but narrative capital, the number investors, suppliers, and regulators remembered.
Across town, Zhao Liangyun's problem was the mirror image of Heifeng's solution. Honor's rushed price cut had metastasized into a reputational bleed; early buyers felt abandoned, and later buyers were unconvinced. Once negativity anchors itself to a model name, ad spend works like bailing a boat with a teacup. Meanwhile, Huaxing's deliberately tiered access—flash sale to spark heat, score‑gated chance to calm anger, then pre‑sale to channel demand—kept transforming fury into forward motion. One side was teaching buyers to wait for the next cut; the other was training them to formalize identity, improve credit standing, and be ready when the window opened. In a market where component parity narrowed hardware gaps to whiskers, the difference was governance: who trusted whom, who felt respected, who believed the queue was honest and the reward worth the wait.
When the dashboards finally stabilized that night, Huaxing's executives could see the contours of a new normal. The company had found a way to sell fast without looking capricious, to privilege good users without sounding elitist, and to pull a month's worth of shipments into the channel while promising the crowd that tomorrow would be better organized than today. For rivals, the lesson hurt: slash too soon and you train your base to doubt you; communicate clearly, segment fairly, and even a five‑second sellout can end in applause instead of abuse.