Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

Liu Qiangdong’s heart skipped a beat. He knew Chen Yansen had seen through his intentions, but his goal had been achieved anyway.

As for the issue of Orange Pay, he agreed without much hesitation. After all, Jingdong’s own payment tool was nowhere near ready.

It was only natural to pay a price for piggybacking on Pinbei’s traffic.

”President Zhang, I have no problem with that,” Liu Qiangdong replied immediately.

”Good. I’ll get the ball rolling on this. Send someone to Xucheng to sign the contract and arrange to go live as soon as possible.”

Zhang Lei said with a nod.

Sure enough, just as Chen Yansen had predicted, Liu Qiangdong agreed to the partnership without much thought.

This type of partnership model might have been novel in 2011, but a dozen or so years later, it would be commonplace.

Ah Li and Sunning, Jingdong and Yihaodian—they all used similar partnership models.

After receiving Zhang Lei’s reply, Chen Yansen assigned Gao Weilin and Song Yuncheng to follow up on the partnership.

”Boss, partnering with Jingdong could negatively impact the merchants in Pinbei’s electronics and home appliance categories. It won’t help us develop our own merchant base.”

After hearing Chen Yansen’s plan, Song Yuncheng frowned slightly and voiced his opposition.

”We’re a platform. We don’t have ’exclusive’ merchant resources. Just feed parameters like sales volume and gross margin into the algorithm and let it handle things. Whoever sells the best gets the traffic, simple as that.”

Chen Yansen knew perfectly well that merchants had no loyalty. They went wherever the money was.

If Jingdong’s electronics and home appliance products could sell tens or hundreds of millions on Pinbei, the brands behind the scenes would proactively jump out, bypass Jingdong, and establish partnerships directly with Pinbei.

”Okay, I understand.” Song Yuncheng stood there and pondered it seriously for a good while before nodding in agreement.

”Old Gao, how are things going with Kuai Pao?”

Chen Yansen grunted and looked at Gao Weilin.

”They’re still busy renting an office and hiring people. But Pei Yi poached about twenty former employees from a bankrupt group buy website. These people have a lot of restaurant industry connections and are very familiar with expanding offline business. Once the initial prep work is done, their growth won’t be slow.”

Gao Weilin replied with a smile.

As it was his first real investment project, Gao Weilin naturally paid closer attention to it.

”Okay. Keep a close eye on the technical integration for me. Make sure there are no slip-ups.”

Chen Yansen nodded slightly, then turned to give Song Yuncheng some instructions.

With the explosive growth in business for Orange Technology and Pinbei, Orange Pay was in urgent need of operations engineers, security experts, and risk management specialists.

Wang Xueting, Xiong Li, and Zhang Junjie had been poaching people like crazy recently. To save time, they were specifically targeting Wealth Treasure.

Headhunters waited outside Wealth Treasure’s headquarters every day. When they saw an employee getting off work, they would approach and ask, ”Sir, are you considering a job change?”

It got to the point that Ma Liyun couldn’t stand it anymore and called to warn Chen Yansen to tone it down a bit.

Chen Yansen paid him lip service but secretly continued doing as he pleased.

After Song Yuncheng and Gao Weilin left the office, Chen Yansen picked up Pinbei’s weekly business report and casually flipped through it.

Registered users reached 40 million, daily active users were 10 million, daily orders exceeded 4 million, and daily sales were close to 300 million.

Of course, Orange Mobile Phone sales accounted for sixty percent of that.

In terms of actual scale, Pinbei was about one-fifth the size of Jingdong and one-twentieth the size of Taobao.

This was also the main reason Chen Yansen agreed to partner with Jingdong.

He didn’t want to go to extremes like Pinduoduo and put a cap on the platform’s growth potential.

So from the very beginning, his plan was to use low-priced products to attract traffic while using high-priced goods to elevate the platform’s brand perception, avoiding the negative impression of being cheap and low-quality.

As for product quality, the platform had a security deposit mechanism. If any merchant tried to pass off shoddy goods as high-quality ones, Chen Yansen would penalize them without hesitation.