Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

May 20th, another perfectly ordinary Sunday.

Chen Yansen slowly opened his eyes, went into the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, then changed into a fresh white T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. He leisurely walked downstairs, slid into the driver’s seat of his Bentley, and headed toward the Science and Technology Park.

The sky was overcast, and the streetscape blurred past him.

He couldn’t help but recall a few news stories he had just seen.

Sina, NetEase, Renren, and Shanda, after seeing that the 360 Mobile Phone was about to break one million in sales, had all announced their entry into the mobile phone industry. They planned to partner with handset manufacturers to launch their own custom phones.

The number of smartphone users had surpassed PC users for the first time, and the scales were beginning to tip from PC internet to mobile internet.

Additionally, Yang Zhiyuan of Yahoo had finally relented and agreed to Ma Liyun’s stock buyback request. The two parties had reached an agreement: Ah Li would use 6.3 billion US Dollars in cash and 800 million US Dollars worth of Ah Li preferred stock to buy back 20% of its shares held by Yahoo.

The remaining 20% would be bought back at the IPO price when Ah Li went public.

Yang Zhiyuan had invested 1 billion US Dollars in Ma Liyun’s company in 2005. Seven years later, he recouped 7.1 billion US Dollars from just half of his shares. Once Ah Li went public, the other half of the shares would be worth at least 24 billion US Dollars.

In nine years, Yahoo had made a staggering 30 billion US Dollars.

It was perhaps the best investment decision Yang Zhiyuan had ever made in his life.

Once this matter was completely resolved, Ah Li would likely initiate its IPO plan. Along with Jingdong, the two major domestic e-commerce platforms were both heading down the path of fundraising and public listing to secure more capital for development.

Chen Yansen, however, wasn’t the least bit worried. The 300 million US Dollars provided by Penguin alone was enough to cover Pinbei’s operating expenses for two to three years, not to mention the 60 million in gross profit coming in daily.

This was also the reason he had been reluctant to accept any financing.

Ten minutes later, Chen Yansen drove into the Science and Technology Park and parked next to a Gusteau.

He raised his wrist to check the time. It was exactly 5:30 AM.

He couldn’t help it. He was currently getting less than four hours of sleep, waking up early every day. With nothing better to do, besides reading and studying in 0418, his only options were to come to the company to review business reports, restructure the Aurora OS architecture, or optimize the algorithm model for the Moss Intelligent Voice Assistant.

As he passed the beverage machine at the front desk, he spotted a bottle of mango yogurt. Chen Yansen grabbed it and walked straight into the elevator, heading up to his office on the top floor.

He turned on his computer and logged into the data backend.

Pinbei’s current daily active users were holding steady at 50 million, with mobile users accounting for 23% of that. Compared to last December, this was a full 15% increase.

This clearly showed how rapidly smartphone sales were growing in the domestic market.

In 2011, smartphone shipments were only 80 million units. But in the first four months of 2012, cumulative shipments had already surpassed 60 million. Many data research firms in the tech circle predicted that smartphone shipments in 2012 could very well break the 200 million unit mark.

The only problem now was that 3G data plans were too expensive, which greatly restricted the development of the mobile internet.

Otherwise, Pinbei’s mobile user share should be at least 40%.

Regarding this, Chen Yansen’s hands were tied.

Getting the three major carriers to spit out the meat they already had in their mouths was practically impossible.

Unless a big shot from above gave the order!

Chen Yansen remembered clearly. In his previous life, it wasn’t until the second half of 2013, when he went to Hu City for an internship, that he had bought a China Telecom corporate plan card on the Taobao Network.

The monthly fee was 19 yuan for 1GB of nationwide data, and any data used beyond that was 10 yuan per GB.

But in 2012, data prices were still sky-high. Users even had to turn off their mobile data when they slept, terrified of waking up to find they owed the carrier enough money to buy a house.