Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

Everyone was excitedly discussing it on the Orange community forums.

”Has Orange Mobile Phone grown a conscience? They’re actually not doing hunger marketing anymore?”

”My cousin works at the Shencheng Factory! He heard that Orange Mobile Phone built four new mid-sized production bases at once! After December, everything will be in stock!”

”Damn! Won’t the scalpers be screwed then?”

”Hey, person above me, you’re not a scalper, are you?”

”All scalpers should die! The phone’s official price is 1999 yuan, but they dare to sell it for 2500. They’re making more than Chen Yansen himself!”

Zhang Yanan stopped reading there. The thread had gone off-topic, with all the subsequent replies just cursing out scalpers.

Previously, Orange Mobile Phone’s monthly shipment was only 500,000 units. Compared to the annual smartphone market of two to three hundred million units, it was just a drop in the bucket.

Although anyone could buy an Orange Mobile Phone, the delivery times varied. Scalpers exploited this time difference, adding 300 to 500 yuan to the price of each phone they sold.

Even though Orange Technology’s e-commerce department required customers to provide their ID information and limited the number of orders per IP address, they still couldn’t stop the scalpers.

Many users who were eager to get an Orange Mobile Phone actually paid extra to buy from scalpers, causing the phone’s price on the secondary market to climb higher and higher.

「Elsewhere.」

Lei Yijun sat in his office, pointing at the manager in charge of battery procurement and yelling at him.

He never would have imagined that he would fall into the same pitfall that Orange Mobile Phone had.

Because Xiaomi Mobile Phone users were constantly complaining about overheating issues, Lei Yijun wanted to switch battery suppliers and optimize the design flaws in the charging power.

He also imitated Orange Technology by switching to a back cover material with better heat dissipation.

Who would have known that when the first batch of batteries arrived, they discovered the dimensions were off from the production requirements? The automated assembly equipment couldn’t be used, so they had to manually stuff the batteries into the slots.

”President Lei, this batch of 20,000 units... should we return them, or...?” Li Wanqiang asked in a low voice, looking at the procurement manager who was getting an earful.

”Have the factory find some people to install them manually.”

Lei Yijun said wearily.

Mountain Star was throttling Xiaomi’s screen supply, the contract manufacturer was complaining that Xiaomi’s order volume was too small, and now the batteries were having problems. The shipping date kept getting pushed back.

Users were cursing him out every day for playing games with them!

Lei Yijun decided that getting the product supplied was the most important thing for now.

At this moment, he finally understood why Chen Yansen had been willing to spend a fortune to build his own factories.

At least when it came to production capacity, he was finding it incredibly difficult to coordinate everything right now.

He had known for a while that DST had switched its investment to Orange Technology, giving it a 9 billion US dollar valuation.

The market was large, but every bite Orange Technology took was one less bite for Xiaomi.

Only then did Lei Yijun realize that he had still underestimated this rival.

「Three days later, Double 11 arrived.」

In Taobao’s digital appliances section, it took the Orange Mobile Phone only three hours for its sales revenue to surpass the Apple 4.

After all, the official Hua Country version of the Apple 4S hadn’t been released yet. The Apple 4’s specs were falling behind the times, and since the Apple 4S was already available overseas, not many people were willing to buy last year’s old model.

At 11:58 PM that day, the total sales for the Orange Mobile Phone reached a staggering 490,000 units!

Just 3,000 units short of breaking the 500,000 mark!

Zhang Yong decisively hinted to the product director of the digital category to have his people pad Orange’s numbers with 3,000 fake orders, pushing the sales data to an even 500,000.

Early the next morning, Ali made a public announcement.

Taobao Mall’s third annual Double 11 sales event had achieved a cumulative sales revenue of 6.13 billion yuan!

Compared to 2010, this was an increase of more than tenfold.

Meanwhile, Jingdong’s sales revenue was only 1.06 billion yuan!