Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

At 1:00 AM, Chen Yansen posted a group photo from Pinbei’s 618 Grand Promotion celebration on Weibo.

In the picture, there was everything: an outdoor barbecue, hot pot, beer, and more.

On top of 1.5 times their overtime pay, everyone also received a lucky red envelope with a random amount from 1,000 to 10,000 yuan.

In the last photo, Chen Yansen stood in the middle of over thirty employees who had won the 10,000-yuan grand prize, his face beaming with a brilliant smile. The atmosphere was incredibly lively.

「Meanwhile.」

「Hang City Ali Headquarters.」

Xu Kun, Li Bin, Du Yaoyao, Tang Qin, and the others looked at the photos and couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret.

They knew that Pinbei’s compensation and benefits system was identical to the old FoxTao’s. The overtime pay alone was a substantial monthly income.

Ali’s benefits were good too, but overtime pay?

There wasn’t a single cent, of course.

After all, everyone was ”volunteering” for overtime. Bringing up money would be unseemly.

「8:30 AM, Zhuxianzhuang Science and Technology Park.」

The Moss Smart Speaker was set to launch in just over an hour. Chen Yansen felt that pricing it at 799 yuan for the domestic market was bound to result in less-than-satisfactory sales.

But from a strategic standpoint, the Moss Smart Speaker was, after all, a major product for Orange Technology.

So, after parking his car, he walked straight into Building 9.

He went to his office and followed his usual routine of checking data and handling work emails. Once he was done, he stood by the window, chewing on a straw as he looked down at the grounds below.

Employees from Pinbei, Orange Technology, Orange Pay, and Toutiao were filing into the building one after another.

Before the launch, the Moss Smart Speaker team had gotten hundreds of major influencers from the digital and tech circles to promote it with articles and videos on channels like Weibo, Toutiao, Youku, and Sohu Video.

Wang Teng had even targeted ”What’s Worth Buying” and FoxTao, placing sponsored, ”must-have” style articles in their product recommendation sections.

They would find out exactly how many units it would sell soon enough.

As for the overseas market, Wang Teng had leveraged Zhou Shouzhi’s connections. Playing up the gimmick of it being the world’s first smart speaker, he easily secured the content rights from Amazon Music, Pandora, Sirius, and Wolfram Alpha.

Recently, Wang Teng had been busy expanding overseas sales channels. For online, he’d approached Amazon and eBay; for offline, he’d contacted Best Buy and Lowe’s.

Ye Qiuping’s negotiations with Paramount were still ongoing. Paramount wanted a 15% commission to share its *Star Trek* merchandise sales channels with Orange Technology.

But Ye Qiuping was only willing to offer 7%. The gap between them was large, and they’d been unable to reach an agreement.

Normally, anything from 5% to 20% was considered a reasonable range. The key issue, however, was that Alexa wasn’t a core character in *Star Trek*.

So, Ye Qiuping’s offer of a 7% commission was, in fact, quite reasonable.

Chen Yansen wasn’t in a hurry. He let Ye Qiuping continue her back-and-forth with the contact at Paramount Pictures.

In any case, he had already secured the lifetime license for the character of Alexa. Whether Paramount agreed or not, the overseas launch date wouldn’t change. He was determined to ride the wave of *Star Trek’s* popularity and hype.

As soon as the clock struck ten, the launch went live simultaneously across seven channels: Orange Mall, Taobao, Gome, Sunning, Dangdang, Yixun, and Amazon.

Chen Yansen glanced at his watch but didn’t rush back to his seat to check the real-time data.

「On the other side.」

At the Jingdong Headquarters, Liu Qiangdong finished his morning meeting with the procurement and sales managers for each category and returned to his office.

This 618 Grand Promotion was crucial for him.

Brokerage firms in Hong Kong Island and the Lighthouse Country had very low valuation expectations for Jingdong—a paltry 6 billion US dollars.

This infuriated Handsome Dong. He first rejected the Hong Kong stock exchange, then Nasdaq, publicly declaring that Jingdong would absolutely not go public for anything less than a 12 billion US dollar valuation.

He put on a tough front, but only he knew the bitterness in his heart.

Multiple investors, including IDG, Redwood Capital, iResearch, Digital Sky Technology, and Tiger Fund, had long been grumbling about him.