Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

Letting a competing website open a store on one’s own platform—in 2011, this was the first time such a thing had ever been done.

”The more unconventional it is, the more it sounds like something he would do. After all, this is the man who sold his company while the project was still on the rise. What wouldn’t he do?”

Zhang Yong shook his head and said.

Ma Liyun hadn’t expected to gain yet another rival after acquiring FoxTao.

Now that Pinbei and Jingdong were cooperating, he sensed a new trend, likely pushed by venture capital firms in the background.

”When Wu Ming reported his work yesterday, he asked if we should block Pinbei’s merchants on FoxTao. What do you think?” Ma Liyun asked again.

”Let’s not rush a decision. I’ll go talk to Chen Yansen.”

Evidently, Zhang Yong didn’t approve of suppressing Pinbei and was more inclined to find an opportunity to cooperate.

After all, he wasn’t one of Ah Li’s founders. Though he seemed powerful and influential, he was essentially just a high-level executive.

From a business perspective, he believed that leveraging the good relationship they had built during the previous acquisition, focusing on cooperation was the correct path.

Jack Ma frowned for a moment, but his expression quickly relaxed. He smiled and said, ”Then I’ll leave it to you to handle.”

Besides Jingdong, Ah Li also had rivals like Sunning, Yihaodian, Yixun, and Paipai Network. One more, Pinbei, wasn’t a huge deal.

After all, beyond general e-commerce, many vertical e-commerce platforms were competing with Ah Li for market share.

Therefore, although Ma Liyun felt that Pinbei—backed by Penguin and allied with Jingdong—was developing at an unimaginable speed, he didn’t pay it too much mind.

His focus right now was more on buying back the 40% of Ah Li’s shares held by Yahoo. Fortunately, Yang Zhiyuan had already shown some flexibility, and they were now in the negotiation and pricing stage.

What Ma Liyun needed to do now was simply to continue raising money to complete the buyback. Only then could Ah Li go public according to his plan.

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Chen Yansen didn’t care what Ma Liyun thought. From the day he founded Pinbei, competition with Ah Li had been inevitable.

From a business standpoint, Ah Li’s tactics were nothing more than a few types:

First, market segmentation: increasing the number of brand merchants on Taobao Mall to cut into the traffic and merchant resources of other B2C platforms.

Second, trademark wars and public opinion suppression: Take this year’s Double Eleven, for example. Ah Li had previously filed trademark applications for ”Double Eleven” and ”Double Eleven Shopping Carnival.”

Jingdong competed head-to-head with Taobao on Double Eleven, and the very next day, they received a lawyer’s letter from Ah Li.

Simply put, Jingdong could not promote the ”Double Eleven” sales event on its own website, or it would be considered infringement.

Third, the ”choose one of two” Investment Attraction tactic, forcing merchants to make a choice.

However, Chen Yansen wasn’t worried. He had countermeasures for all three points.

Moreover, his goals were different from those of Ma Liyun and Liu Qiangdong.

Their core objective was to make money, whereas Chen Yansen only wanted to scale up his profit model and increase his number of employees.

President Chen’s top priority right now was hiring! Hiring! Hiring!

On the afternoon of the 30th, he received the payroll confirmation reports from Orange Technology, Pinbei, Cloud Speed, and the Orange Phone Factory.

Orange Technology had 347 employees, with labor costs of 9.39 million Hua Yuan, for an average salary of nearly 30,000.

Pinbei Technology had 269 employees, with labor costs of 5.74 million Hua Yuan, for an average salary of just over 20,000.

Cloud Speed had 9,478 employees, with labor costs of 63.18 million Hua Yuan, for an average salary of about 7,000 Hua Yuan.

The Orange Phone Factory had 6,241 employees, with labor costs of 44.61 million Hua Yuan, for an average salary of about 7,000 Hua Yuan.

At this point, the total number of employees in the companies under Chen Yansen was approximately 16,000, with Cloud Speed Express and the Orange Phone Factory accounting for over ninety percent of them.

Next month, Kuai Pao would be added to the list.

For November, he had a total of 12,292 wisps of Human Dao Fire!

Converted to Divine Dao Fire, that was 122 wisps. Chen Yansen finally felt a flicker of anticipation.