The offer of 30 million yuan for a 51% stake was unanimously approved by the team. For the founding team of Qidian, this offer was like a pie falling from the sky.
The capital market had not matured yet, and their business model had not been fully recognized by the market. The Qidian team had been looking for money in the capital market for a long time without any success. But now, not only was money delivered to their doorstep, it was much more than they had expected.
Therefore, before the person in charge of Qidian returned to Shanghai, he immediately represented the entire team to sign the contract with Makino Technology.
The team was exempted from the pre-investment transfer, and the pre-investment financial audit was also waived. Li Mu's straightforwardness was beyond imagination. He sent out the offer yesterday, signed the contract today, paid the money on the same day, and immediately started preparing to launch a reading channel on YY.
The reason why he was so casual was that Li Mu was very confident in the ability of the team. On the other hand, he did not have much money, only a few tens of millions. If he decided to invest quickly, it would leave a good impression on other entrepreneurial teams that Makino Technology was generous and quick to pay.
However, just because he was casual with the money, it did not mean that Li Mu did not think about it carefully. At the current stage, it was meaningless to hope for online novels to make money. The net interest rate in this industry was unimaginably low. Looking at the current business model, subscriptions and authors split 5: 5. In other words, the gross profit margin was 50% of the revenue. However, this 50% had to bear all the company's operating costs, staff salaries, office space, office supplies, financial losses, and corporate taxes. In the end, there might not even be a few percent left. In addition, the total volume was small, so there was no hope for profits.
However, what Li Mu valued was the future of this industry. What was behind the web novel was an excellent content library, a strong user adhesion, and a wide development space. Excellent content could produce a natural centripetal force for users and bring a huge advantage to the promotion of the platform. Moreover, excellent content could greatly increase the loyalty of users to the platform. At present, these excellent web novels were just digital words, but in the near future, they could be transformed into powerful and high-quality IP, which could be transmitted to film, animation, games, and other derivative directions, and become a hit in this field.
In the future, if YY wanted to increase the user's stickiness, it would be very difficult to rely on short, fragmented information and blogs. However, high-quality novels were different. High-Quality serialized novels could create a strong stickiness for users, allowing users to log on to the platform to read them every day. This was a very strong advantage. In the near future, the YY Reading Channel would be opened. All the content would be loaded and provided for all YY users to read. Not only would this increase the volume of YY's content, but it would also increase the stickiness of YY users and promote the rapid development of the entire Internet literature.
Moreover, in the future, Makino Image's demand for high-quality IP would continue to increase. Taking down this high-quality copyright library in advance would be a great supplement to Makino Image's strength. At the same time, Wanying Real Estate had a film and television base project that was about to start. These high-quality IP could be quickly digested through the film and television base, a super platform in the film and television industry, forming an entire industry chain.
…
When Li Mu was acquiring the IP at the speed of light, and the world's media was reporting about his two big projects, Li Mu, who was at the center of the controversy, received news that Lin Ching-ah came from the US.
Li Mu had asked Li Ziwei to pass on his request to her last time. He asked her to investigate the two key movements of Microsoft according to his direction. She had already replied to him.
First, it was regarding Microsoft's MSN project team's employees.
Lin Ching-ah had used routine investigations and hired high-end private investigators to conduct a thorough investigation on Microsoft. After a few days of investigation, the private investigators came up with the following conclusions.
First, when MSN announced it was stopping its maintenance, all the MSN employees were not fired. Instead, they were transferred internally within Microsoft. This was unusual.
Based on Microsoft's past practices, they would not lay off so many employees after a department was abolished. This had never happened before. Also, transferring so many employees internally will put a lot of pressure on the other departments. Microsoft must have put in a lot of effort to absorb such a large team.
Just the KPI assessment alone will have a negative impact. Team A has 150 employees, and they have 100 million USD of manpower and 1 billion USD of KPI. It should not be a problem for them to complete the assessment. But suddenly, they were asked to take in at least 30 employees from other departments, and all of them are highly paid. The increase in manpower cost is at least 20 million USD a year, and this will affect the department greatly. Also, 30 new employees, especially those who were in charge of other departments, will increase the department's workload and slow down the whole team.
Microsoft is willing to pay such a high price to retain these people. This proves Microsoft's social spirit is not dead.
Secondly, some of the old employees in MSN chose to resign because they could not adapt to their new positions. However, as Li Mu guessed, these people returned to Microsoft one after another. This further proved Li Mu's guess. If Microsoft did not want to play the social card again, they would not have spent so much effort to summon back these employees who had already resigned.
Third, and this is the most direct proof. The private investigators had conducted a close investigation on these former MSN employees and found out their working hours had increased recently.
Among the many private investigations on Microsoft employees, the most typical one was an engineer named Anglo. Ever since the private investigator started investigating him, he had been working from 8: 30 am to 10: 00 pm every day. There was a weekend in between, and he was also working overtime on Saturdays. He also worked from morning to night.
To prove this person's work schedule had changed, the private investigators checked his credit card spending records.
Americans rarely carry cash when they go out. Credit cards and cash checks were the main means of payment. Credit cards were the most commonly used. A person's credit card spending records were enough to draw a portrait of his behavior.
Just a month ago, for a few months, Anglo's credit card spending records showed that he rarely worked overtime. For example, after 6.00 pm on weekdays, he spent almost every day on his credit card, and the places where he spent his money were gas stations, cafes, supermarkets, bars, cinemas, and other entertainment and leisure places. This proves that this person basically did not work overtime a month ago.
Moreover, when they checked his spending every weekend for the past few months, they found that he would often fly from Seattle to San Francisco on Friday night, and then fly back to Seattle from San Francisco on Sunday night. The private investigators continued to investigate and found that Anglo's wife and children had settled down in San Francisco. So he would go back to San Francisco to accompany his wife and children every weekend.
However, from more than a month ago until now, Anglo had never flown over San Francisco again. Why? Because he worked overtime at Microsoft's headquarters every Saturday.
Interestingly, the private investigators also made a very unexpected discovery. In order to get the whole chain of clues, they checked Anglo's wife to see if she would go to Seattle every week to accompany Anglo. They found that Anglo's wife had only come to Seattle once in the past month, but her credit card had booked five rooms in a high-end hotel in San Francisco. Each time, it was a few hundred dollars a night. Moreover, the person who went there for a rendezvous with her was her fitness coach.
In short, the chain of evidence at the personnel level was very obvious. According to Li Mu's nuclear weapons logic, they were all Microsoft's uranium reserves. Now, they had all been mined by Microsoft. This proved that Microsoft was indeed going to do something in the nuclear field.
Secondly, they investigated Microsoft's recent actions in data processing centers, computer rooms, and bandwidth. The results were also very clear.
An offshore company that Microsoft actually controlled had invested 200 million US dollars in Chicago to build three large data processing centers. There were also three data processing centers in Texas under construction. At the same time, this company had signed agreements with many companies that provided data processing services, locking in a large number of computer rooms and bandwidth redundancy.
Microsoft was different from Makino Technology. The core product of Makino Technology was to link users all over the world together through text, voice, video, music, and hobbies. In this case, Makino Technology had a great demand for data processing capabilities. In contrast, after Microsoft stopped using MSN, most of its products were software tools. Users of these software did not need to be connected to each other. They only needed to be connected to the headquarters to ensure updates and daily information exchange. Therefore, their demand for data processing capabilities was several levels lower than that of Makino Technology.
Makino Technology was like a super aluminum factory with the highest output in the world. Its power consumption was so high that it had to invest in many power plants all over the world to reduce costs and ensure power supply. But Microsoft was like a beef production base with the highest output in the world. Its demand for power was not as high as aluminum electrolysis. But such a company, whose main business was to raise cattle, had built many power plants. There must be a secret behind this.
This was the second basis for Li Mu's judgment of Microsoft's actions. He had confirmed that Microsoft was mining uranium and had invested a large amount of power. Even if he had not seen the thousands of centrifuges hidden in the dark, he was sure that what Microsoft was doing was nuclear weapons!
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