Chapter 544 - 396: Don’t Even Think About E-commerce, or I’ll Crush You! 7 Million Units in a Single Week!

Qian Du Weigou was personally spearheaded by the big boss. To make it happen, he and his business team spent over two months convincing platforms like Jingdong, Sunning, and Yihaodian.

Jingdong was backing out just like that? Were they just yanking his chain?

"Pinbei and Ah Li have laid down the law: any merchant who joins Qian Du Weigou will either have their traffic restricted or their store shut down. What choice do the merchants have?"

Xu Lei explained with a bitter smile.

This "choose one of two" ultimatum was a classic overt scheme. It was all about the big bullying the small. If you were weaker, you had no choice but to take the hits.

Jingdong had done it before, and so had Qian Du.

But now, they were the ones getting played!

"Ma Liyun and Huang Zheng are such bastards, aren’t they? Is there any paper trail?" Li Mingyuan cursed.

"President Li, if it were you, would you be stupid enough to send out notifications by email or text?" Xu Lei retorted with a disdainful scoff.

Li Mingyuan fell silent. He had done similar things himself, so he naturally knew how to avoid the risks.

If even he wouldn’t make such a rookie mistake, there was no way Ma Liyun and Huang Zheng would.

Meanwhile, Sunning’s suppliers also rushed to delist their products from Qian Du Weigou.

"@Ma Liyun @Huang Zheng Let me ask you two, what kind of bully platforms are Pinbei and Ah Li? Forcing merchants into a ’choose one of two’ ultimatum? The e-commerce industry can only flourish in a fair and orderly competitive environment. I hope the Market Supervision Association can step in to restrain such malicious competitive practices."

Unable to swallow his anger, Zhang Jindong called them out on Weibo.

"President Zhang, can you please ship the refrigerators first?"

"A man’s word is his bond. President Zhang, surely you haven’t forgotten what you said two weeks ago?"

"FUCK YOU! REFUND!"

"Give me back my ten-yuan refrigerator!"

But as soon as he posted on Weibo, the comments section was flooded with netizens demanding their refrigerators from him.

Zhang Jindong seethed as he read the comments.

’It was a third-party store, and there wasn’t much money from the sales in the account. If I didn’t cancel the orders, was I supposed to just eat the loss myself?’

’They weren’t even products sold directly by Sunning, so on what grounds were they demanding refrigerators from him?’

’These damn buyers!’

"@Zhang Jindong Pinbei is an open e-commerce platform. Merchants are free to come and go as they please, and we would never demand they ’choose one of two.’ President Zhang, you can be careless about what you eat, but not about what you say!"

Huang Zheng retorted self-righteously.

Ah Li, for its part, used Taobao’s official Weibo account to dismiss the accusation with a simple, "A complete fabrication, inconsistent with the facts."

The attitudes of both companies were perfectly aligned: we did it, but we’re not admitting to it!

...

...

「At two in the afternoon」

Chen Yansen pushed open the door to conference room A6, with Chen Jie following closely behind him.

Zhou Shouzhi wasn’t present. He was on a business trip to France to discuss collaborations with local carriers.

Compared to Eastern Europe, Western Europe had a larger population and higher income levels.

If Orange Mobile Phone wanted to increase its international shipment volume, it couldn’t afford to ignore the importance of the Western European region.

The room, over forty square meters in size, was filled with the heads of Orange Technology’s product, R&D, marketing, sales, and customer service departments.

"Old Yan, let’s begin. First, let’s look at last week’s sales data," Chen Yansen instructed Yan Peng, the head of the e-commerce department.

Yan Peng acknowledged, connected his device to the projector, and opened a PowerPoint presentation. He began, "In the fourth week of March, total sales for the mobile phone division were 6.999 million units. New models accounted for 99.15% of that, with 6.94 million units sold. The breakdown by model is: Qingcheng D2 at 5.9 million units, Orange C3S at 766,000 units, and Yaocheng X1 at 274,000 units.

Older models made up the remaining 0.85%, totaling 59,000 units sold. The breakdown for these is: Qingcheng D1S at 29,000 units, Orange C3 at 17,000 units, and Orange C2 at 13,000 units."

It was clear that under the pressure from the new products, the sales cycles for the Qingcheng D1S, Orange C3, and Orange C2 were rapidly nearing their end.

"Zhang Cong, Zhou Ze, use these three older models as a base and adapt them for the African and Eastern European markets. Also, we need to quickly complete the hardware and app ecosystem adaptation for the international versions of the Qingcheng D2, Orange C3S, and Yaocheng X1. Zhou Shouzhi is waiting on them."

Chen Yansen interjected.

"No problem," Zhang Cong and Zhou Ze replied immediately.

One was the Director of the Industrial Design Department, the other the Director of the Hardware Design Department. Though they had no public recognition, they were the core creators of Orange Mobile Phones.

Yan Peng waited for Chen Yansen to finish before continuing, "As for channel distribution: Orange Mall accounted for 17.1%, Pinbei for 33.9%, Tmall Mall for 16.3%, Jingdong for 6.7%, Sunning for 2.7%, Gome for 1.3%, and Kuai Pao Flash Sale Store, carrier online stores, and others made up 6.3%. Online channels in total accounted for 84.3%;

Direct-sale stores and carrier retail outlets accounted for 7.1%, and Cloud Speed Service Stations for 8.6%. Offline channels made up 15.7%."

"Cloud Speed Service Stations have a higher share than Jingdong?" Chen Yansen asked.

"The Qingcheng D2 is extremely popular in the rural markets. The Shencheng Factory has had to restock three times, and demand still outstrips supply," Yan Peng replied with a smile.

Cloud Speed Express has opened over 1,300 service stations across the East China, Central China, and North China regions. While daily sales of 600,000 units may seem high, when distributed across every town and village, it only comes out to a little over 400 phones per location.

With its large screen, low price, and loud speakers, it was perfectly understandable that the 799-yuan Qingcheng D2 was sweeping the rural market.

Chen Yansen’s eyes narrowed slightly as he pondered. ’Should I reduce the screen size, processor performance, and memory, and put out a 499-yuan smartphone?’

But on second thought, he immediately abandoned the idea.

’There’s enough e-waste in the world already. No need to add to the pile.’

’With the Qingcheng D2’s specs, a user could easily get three years out of it.’

’As for what happens after three years... given the profit-driven nature of domestic app developers, the memory footprint of apps will only get larger and larger.’

’Even with the Qingcheng D2’s excellent memory management optimization, it wouldn’t be able to handle apps that balloon to two or three gigabytes each.’

’A dozen or so years from now, a single app could take up tens of gigabytes.’

"New models equipped with the Aurora Future OS account for 28.1% of sales. Over ten thousand applications have been submitted to the Aurora Future Store, with 1,317 apps approved so far. Being understaffed has extended the review process, and developers both at home and abroad are very unhappy about it."

Wang Teng picked up where Yan Peng left off and continued, "I’ve spoken with President Wang in HR. We plan to hire another 80 reviewers in late March and early April."

"Don’t forget to run virus scans on the application software. We need to prevent anyone from using this as an opportunity to cause trouble," Chen Yansen reminded him.

"Don’t worry, Boss. We already have countermeasures in place for that," Wang Teng promised, patting his chest.

Chen Yansen nodded slightly and said no more.

Although each person’s report was brief, the sheer number of departments and topics meant that an hour had passed by the time the meeting ended.

Chen Yansen had just returned to his office when Huang Zheng came looking for him.

"Boss, Jingdong’s products have been delisted from Qian Du Weigou," Huang Zheng reported promptly.

"Lao Ma made his move?" Chen Yansen asked, his eyes narrowed.

He knew very well that with Pinbei’s clout in the industry, it could certainly influence the decisions of merchants. However, that process would be slow, taking three to five days, or even a week.

But from the moment Huang Zheng took action to Jingdong’s surrender, the whole thing took less than three hours. It was highly likely that Ma Liyun had also pressured the merchants, pulling the same shady "choose one of two" move.

Only the number one and number two e-commerce platforms, working in concert, could create such an astonishing impact.

"That’s right. I had our merchant recruitment team ask the merchants privately. They didn’t admit it, but they didn’t deny it either," Huang Zheng said with conviction.

"Li Yanhong wants to get into e-commerce? Did he ask for my opinion?"

Chen Yansen glanced out the window and snorted coldly.

In the search engine sphere, Qian Du Network is a behemoth!

But in the e-commerce industry, Pinbei was going to be the one ’bullying the small’!

「As evening fell, at the Qian Du Headquarters Mansion.」

After hearing Li Mingyuan’s report, Li Yanhong’s face turned grim. Jingdong was the first to pull out, and Zhang Jindong, who had been the loudest complainer online, was the second to flee.

Dangdang Network, Yihaodian, and Shunfeng Selection managed to hold out until the end, but only because they had a relatively low overlap of merchants with Ah Li and Pinbei.

With a dark expression, Li Yanhong understood the message from Chen Yansen and Ma Liyun: Don’t even think about getting into e-commerce, Qian Du. If you try, we will crush you!

"Dangdang Network, Yihaodian, and Shunfeng Selection are too small. The combined annual transaction volume of all three platforms is less than 20 billion."

Li Yanhong looked utterly dejected. His ’B2C portal dream’ had been shattered just as it was beginning to feel real!