Chapter 394 - 186: Advancing Side by Side

Chapter 394: Chapter 186: Advancing Side by Side

Before long, it was late September.

Jiang Miao arrived at the new Little Nanshan Headquarters in Xinxiang.

POP... CRACKLE... BANG...

The sound of firecrackers filled the air.

Witnessed by the assembled guests, Jiang Miao cut the ribbon, then took the microphone and said, "I declare that Phase I of the Hailufeng Company Headquarters is now officially in operation."

The guests and employees broke into applause, all smiles.

CLAP! CLAP! CLAP!

Thanks to the contracting company working overtime, the renovation work for Phase I of the Little Nanshan Headquarters was completed before the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Phase I occupied a hundred mu of land, with a construction area of fifty mu. The main building itself sat on fifty mu, stood eighty-eight meters tall, and had twenty-one floors. The twenty-first floor consisted of five rooftop villas.

Although it was called the main building, it was actually a complex of five interconnected towers. Each tower had a base area of ten mu, forming a square footprint 81.6 meters wide.

The five towers were arranged like the dots on a five-sided die, connected to each other by elevated skybridges.

After exchanging a few pleasantries with the guests, Jiang Miao led Ke Yong, Li Zixuan, and the others into the headquarters building.

Jiang Haibo had gone to the Gannan Branch a few days prior to handle some matters, and his brother-in-law was representing Hailufeng Company at a feed industry conference in the Capital City.

Among the company’s senior executives, the others were all busy moving their offices or preparing month-end summary reports. Thus, Jiang Miao was left to inspect the new headquarters by himself.

He entered the central tower of the headquarters. The first floor was a lobby with a seven-meter-high ceiling, containing a reception desk, two security rooms, a bank of five elevators, two emergency stairwells, a company product display area, a wall detailing the company’s history, and a bulletin board.

The decor was very simple, with walls covered in faux-marble porcelain tiles. The ceiling was a suspended one made of gypsum board, fitted with simple, round, flush-mount lights.

The entire style was minimalist.

This wasn’t because Hailufeng Company lacked funds, but because Jiang Miao had specifically requested a minimalist design. Throughout the headquarters’ renovation, they had made extensive use of porcelain tiles and aluminum panels. The door and window frames were also primarily aluminum alloy, with no composite wood materials whatsoever.

The renovation company had recommended many types of doors and windows, including honeycomb-core doors that cost only five or six hundred yuan each, and faux-wood doors for one or two thousand yuan. However, not a single one of these composite wood doors was free from off-gassing formaldehyde and other harmful substances.

Jiang Miao had pushed the renovation company to finish the headquarters quickly so they could move out of their cramped offices in Nanhu Village, but that didn’t mean he was willing to overlook issues in the process.

To minimize formaldehyde and other harmful gases in the new building, he had rejected all composite wood as a construction material.

This extended to the furnishings. For shelving units, cabinets, and desks, he chose either all-iron shelves and cabinets or solid-wood desks with iron frames.

Since Jiang Miao didn’t trust the so-called "solid wood" from various manufacturers, he had the purchasing department buy a large batch of raw lumber and hire carpenters to make the desktops and other fixtures. Due to the massive bulk order, the price of the solid wood was very cheap.

The reception desk in the first-floor lobby, for instance, was a single, massive slab of Golden-Thread Nanmu wood over ten meters long. It had been custom-made at a woodcraft factory called "Old Jiang’s Root Carving" for just over a hundred thousand yuan.

As the face of the company, it was essential to use high-quality materials for this.

Meanwhile, the desks for the regular offices were made from large-diameter South American walnut.

Because they had used a large quantity of environmentally friendly materials and avoided latex paint and composite wood, Jiang Miao checked the air quality with his appraisal panel after half a month of ventilation and cleaning. Finding no excessive levels of pollutants from the renovation, he decided to officially open the new headquarters.

Taking the elevator, Jiang Miao went up to his office on the 20th floor.

Besides his own office, Jiang Haibo’s office and the Secretarial Department were also located on this floor.

Below his floor were the Legal Department, Supervision Department, Human Resources Department, Finance Department, Security Department, Market Research Department, Purchasing Department, Logistics Department, Attendance Department, Public Relations Department, and Shareholder Management Department. There were also a number of smaller, essential offices that weren’t full-fledged departments, such as the Environmental Protection Office, Charity Office, External Relations Office, Team Building Office, and Psychological Counseling Office.

All of these departments were concentrated in the central tower.

The other four towers housed the offices of the company’s various business divisions and subsidiaries.

The northeast tower was the office building for Hailufeng Real Estate Company, Xinkangle Medicine, and Hero Dairy.

The northwest tower housed the Aquaculture Division, Feed Division, Agriculture Division, Logistics Division, Physical Retail Division, Technology Division, and Internet Division.

The southeast tower contained the liaison offices for the Gannan Branch, the Qiongzhou Branch, the Monan Branch, and any future branches that would need a presence at headquarters.

The southwest tower was for the Sales Division, the E-commerce Division, and the Management Trainee Training Center.

Jiang Miao pulled open the curtains. Through the one-way glass, he could look down on the entirety of Xinxiang Village, as well as the East Field Staff District directly across from the headquarters.

Phase I of the staff housing district was also complete. Five hundred apartments had already been renovated, also following a low-formaldehyde, natural-stone-free design plan to ensure employees could move in safely.

The renovation company was now working overtime to finish the remaining thirteen hundred apartments, while Phase II of the project had begun simultaneously.

Because Hailufeng Company was building its own staff housing, the momentum of real estate price growth in the neighboring Jinting Bay was suppressed.

After all, without the high-income employees from the Hailufeng Company Headquarters to buy up property, relying solely on purchases from nearby villagers made it exceptionally difficult to inflate housing prices.