Chapter 668: Preemptive Listing, Early Fundraising, a 68 Billion US Dollar Valuation! Kuai Pao's New Blood

“We believe the wait will be worth it. The Yaocheng X2 will be a revolutionary flagship model.”

Half an hour later, Chen Yansen responded.

The accompanying image was a Celestial Craft A100 Chip!

“The Celestial Craft A100? Could that be the processor for the Yaocheng X2?”

“Is Orange Technology developing its own phone chips now?”

“Didn’t they release the Celestial Craft T100 before? I heard that both the Little Love and Amazon’s Echo smart speakers use that AI chip.”

“You can drop the ‘I heard’! It’s clear the Celestial Craft T100 was just Tiangong Technology testing the waters. The A100’s performance must be at least on par with the Snapdragon 800. Otherwise, knowing Chen Yansen’s personality, he would never put it in the Yaocheng X2.”

The netizens buzzed with discussion, and it had to be said, the last commenter had a good point.

Anyone could see that the Yaocheng line was Orange Technology’s high-end series. Each model represented the company’s R&D strength and brand image.

Would Chen Yansen gamble on an underdeveloped product?

Absolutely not!

“President Chen, when is the Yaocheng X2 being released? Don’t tell me we have to wait until 2014?”

“The iPhone 5s goes on sale next Tuesday! President Chen, send Apple packing!”

“I want to get a new phone. I’m not satisfied with just getting the Yaocheng X1, but I want to wait for the Yaocheng X2, and I have no idea how long that’ll be.”

Chen Yansen glanced at the comment section but didn’t reply again.

He sat on a soft couch by the pond, picked up a large bucket of fish food, and lavishly tossed handfuls toward the swarming koi.

“Master, everything is ready.”

Just then, Song Yuncheng walked up to Chen Yansen with a smile, dragging two huge 26-inch suitcases.

“Let’s go.”

Chen Yansen put his hands in his pockets, clearly not intending to help Song Yuncheng with the luggage.

Song Yuncheng was already used to it. She pushed the suitcases and followed closely behind him like a little shadow.

Seeing this, Huang Boxiang quickly took the suitcases, placed them in the trunk, then got into the driver’s seat and sped off toward Peng City Guanyin Airport.

“Are we doing the same as last year? First stop, Oslo?”

Song Yuncheng asked in a low voice.

“We’re going to Reykjavik first. We can see the aurora borealis and watch whales breaching,” Chen Yansen replied casually.

The Celestial Craft A100 Chip had already entered the tape-out stage. With nothing important to keep him in Xucheng before the new product launch, he decided to take Song Yuncheng on a business trip to Northern Europe.

Although it sounded a bit absurd, Senlian Capital did indeed hold a 5% stake in Spotify.

They had bought it for 140 million US Dollars last year, and it was now worth 290 million US Dollars, more than doubling in valuation.

It wouldn’t hurt to swing by Spotify’s headquarters while they were there.

Therefore, this “business trip” was 1% business and 99% vacation.

A short while later, Huang Boxiang drove into Guanyin Airport. He then followed Chen Yansen, Song Yuncheng, and two security guards aboard his boss’s Gulfstream 550 private jet.

‘I guess I’m finally moving up in the world. My first time on a private jet, my first time going abroad.’

Lao Huang thought to himself, sitting obediently in his seat after boarding the plane.

「Meanwhile.」

Meitu XiuXiu’s overseas version, BeautyPlus, went live, beginning its path of international expansion.

Lenovo surpassed HP, becoming number one in global PC market share for the first time.

Tesla established an office in Hu City and opened pre-orders for the Model S and Model S LR on its official website.

The low-spec version of the former was priced at 739,000, the high-spec at 859,000, while the Model S LR’s price was a staggering 1,199,000 Hua Yuan.

What Musk didn’t expect was that there were far more suckers in Hua Country than he had imagined. A total of 671 cars were sold on the first day.

Among the first batch of people to order the Model S LR were Lei Yijun, He Xiaopeng, and Li Xiang.

Qian Du took the initiative to back down, successively canceling subsidy campaigns for Qian Du Delivery, Group Buy, and DiDi Dache. This three-month-long O2O war had left Li Yanhong physically and mentally exhausted.

Although Pei Yi could have held on longer, ending the price war was a healthy move for Kuai Pao’s development.

The 6 billion that Senlian Capital and Qian Du had poured into the market wasn’t for nothing. At the very least, the food delivery, group buying, and ride-hailing markets had nearly doubled in size compared to six months ago.

Of course, the hot sales of low-end phone models like Qingcheng, 360, and Redmi, the endless emergence of internet phone cards, and the widespread adoption of payment tools like Orange Pay, WeChat Pay, and Alipay also contributed to expanding the market’s capacity.

At the beginning of June, Kuai Pao’s daily food delivery orders were at 10 million, with 4 million for group buys and 1.7 million for grocery delivery.

Now, the daily average has reached 18 million for food delivery, 7.3 million for group buys, and 5.7 million for grocery delivery, totaling 31 million orders and commanding an 80% market share.

Not counting the R&D, operations, and business development staff at headquarters and various branches, the number of full-time riders alone had soared from 90,000 to 170,000—a shockingly fast expansion.

The number of part-time riders, initially limited to just over 60,000 due to registration restrictions, had now surpassed 300,000.

In the competition against Qian Du, the biggest advantage of having more employees was that whenever Qian Du’s operations and business development staff encountered them offline, they would often turn and run, terrified of running into a short-tempered Kuai Pao promotion manager who might grab them and give them a beating.

After all, if a real fight broke out, a Kuai Pao employee could just shout from a street corner, and dozens of Cloud Speed Couriers, Kuai Pao Riders, and staff from Orange’s directly-operated stores would come running.

These guys all had base salaries, full benefits, and quarterly bonuses; they were all colleagues.

Meanwhile, most of Qian Du’s delivery riders were outsourced, dispatched from agencies, or temporary workers. In their eyes, the Kuai Pao employees were their “future colleagues.”

So, even if they saw a Kuai Pao promotion team chasing down and beating a Qian Du business manager, they would just stand aside and watch the show, muttering under their breath, “Beat those bastards to death!”

To them, the tech staff at Qian Du Headquarters only ever did one thing: squeeze delivery times and lower the pay per order.

Most Qian Du Delivery riders, once they got familiar with the routes and the layout of the local businesses, would jump ship to Kuai Pao at the first opportunity.

Qian Du?

Even a dog wouldn’t deliver for them!

Some riders would work part-time for Kuai Pao during the day and for Qian Du at night. After a while, most of them would give up on Qian Du.

This was because in terms of pay per order, order dispatching, route planning, order-rush bonuses, and their support system, Qian Du couldn’t compare to Kuai Pao.

Seeing Li Yanhong pull back his lines, Pei Yi held an overnight meeting with the general managers of the East China, North China, Central China, Northeast, Southeast, and Southwest regions. They held a large conference, hammered out new policies, and launched a counteroffensive against Qian Du.

Although Qian Du held less than twenty percent of the market, that still amounted to seven or eight million orders a day—a prize that couldn’t be ignored.

The first batch of recruited university graduates, after a month of training, were assigned to branches all over the country to handle the food delivery, group buy, or grocery delivery businesses.

Li Zijie was one of them.

Kuai Pao usually assigned employees based on proximity, either to their interview location or their ID card’s registered address.

The reason was simple: employees were generally more familiar with the places where they grew up or went to university, allowing them to handle business more effectively.

For example, assigning an employee from Jinling to the Northeast market, where they knew no one and had no connections, would put them at a natural disadvantage.

Li Zijie was from Luzhou and had studied in Hu City. After some consideration, he chose to stay in Hu City.

“Ah Jie, I heard you’re from Luzhou?” Xu Xiangguo, who was walking ahead, suddenly turned his head and asked.

He was the promotion manager for the Pudong Chuansha station. Having been with Kuai Pao for two years, he was a veteran employee and also Li Zijie’s business “mentor.”

Once Li Zijie became a permanent employee, Xu Xiangguo would receive a “mentoring bonus” of 2,000 yuan.

This was Kuai Pao’s “veteran-mentors-newcomer” model.

For the sake of the bonus, the veteran employees were very enthusiastic toward the newcomers.

Xu Xiangguo meticulously guided him on everything from work to daily life, afraid that Li Zijie wouldn’t adapt to Kuai Pao’s promotion work and would just up and quit without a word.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t bear to lose Li Zijie, but rather that 2,000 yuan bonus.

“Yeah, Brother Xu,” Li Zijie replied.

“Why didn’t you choose Luzhou as your work location? Luzhou was Kuai Pao’s former headquarters, after all. The foundation there is solid. All you’d have to do is migrate the original delivery merchants and Qian Du’s merchants over to Kuai Pao, and you could just lie back and collect commissions.”

Xu Xiangguo asked curiously.

“I just wanted to be a little farther from home,” Li Zijie said, making up a casual excuse.

His ex-girlfriend was in Luzhou. Given the nature of a Kuai Pao promotion manager’s job, there was no telling when he might run into her on the street.

That was the real reason he didn’t want to work in Luzhou.

Besides, Hu City had a large population and a developed economy. Since a Kuai Pao promotion manager’s income mainly came from commissions on Group Buy sales volume, staying in Hu City meant he could earn more money.

“Sigh, I’ve actually been thinking about going back to my hometown, but I can’t bear to part with my merchant resources in Hu City.”

Xu Xiangguo was in his early thirties. His wife had just had a baby, and she and his parents were all back in his hometown of Hang City.

If he applied for a transfer back home, the merchant resources he had accumulated over the past two years would be gone, and he would have to start from scratch in Hang City.

“Brother Xu, how about you go back home and transfer all your merchant resources to me?” Li Zijie chuckled, joking.

“Stop daydreaming. If you want to make money, you start by pounding the pavement.”

Xu Xiangguo shot him a look and then led him into a foot massage parlor.

As Kuai Pao delved deeper into the local lifestyle services sector, industries like KTVs, bars, hair salons, massage parlors, and foot spas had all been brought into its business scope, and their sales volumes were not low.

As soon as Xu Xiangguo entered, he shouted to the young woman at the counter, “Where’s Brother Li? I’m here to talk business with him.”

“Oh, it’s Manager Xu! President Li is in a meeting upstairs. Please wait a moment, I’ll go get him right now.” The receptionist immediately picked up a walkie-talkie. “President Li, President Li, Manager Xu from Kuai Pao is here.”

“Junior Brother Xu, I’m just… testing a new employee. Ouch, a little gentler there.”

President Li’s voice came through the walkie-talkie.

Before Xu Xiangguo could react, he added, “Junior Brother Xu, second floor, B88. Come on up, we can talk at leisure.”

‘What does “testing a new employee” mean?’

Li Zijie was completely bewildered.

There were thousands of university graduates like him at Kuai Pao, all slowly learning the rules of the industry under the guidance of their mentors, injecting fresh blood into the company.

Just as Pei Yi and Li Yanhong were locked in a fierce battle, Pinbei completed its IPO application with the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Street’s brokerage firms were busy preparing for the roadshow, and Huang Zheng appeared on the streets of the Lighthouse Country as the CEO of Pinbei.

To everyone’s surprise, Pinbei had actually beaten Ah Li and Jingdong to the punch, officially starting the countdown to its public listing.

At this time, brokerage firms in the North American Region gave Pinbei a valuation of 68 billion US Dollars, with a tentative issue price of 30.6 US Dollars per share.

As for whether investors would accept it, that would depend on the marketing prowess of institutions like Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley.

Ma Liyun learned of this through his investor channels, and his brows instantly furrowed. How could he not know what devious plan Chen Yansen was cooking up?

It was nothing more than a move to be the first to go public, to seize the investment capital from the overseas e-commerce market ahead of everyone else.

Thinking of this, Ma Liyun couldn’t sit still any longer. He could ignore Liu Qiangdong, but he could not underestimate Chen Yansen. He picked up the phone and called Cai Xin.