[PS: There's one more chapter later. I'm writing it now. It may be posted after midnight.]
Judging from Ma Yun's cheerful attitude, Ma Huateng's life was not easy. In fact, it was not easy, but it was quite difficult. Ma Huateng's Tencent was almost unable to pay his salary.
Ma Huateng entered the e-commerce market confidently. Under Boss Jia's guidance, he wanted to enter the corporate market first. He wanted to become an online platform for companies to buy and trade.
Of course, this idea was very good. After all, this was how Alibaba started back then. Unfortunately, the domestic network was still too poor. Only Beijing and Shanghai had internet in the country. Although Telecom had begun to set up the national network, it would take time. Before there was no internet, there was no room for Tencent to survive in the country.
Therefore, Tencent could only be like Alibaba and set up in the foreign market first. However, unlike Alibaba's QQ, Tencent's Taobao platform needed to interact with a large number of companies. For companies to purchase from each other in large quantities, they needed to persuade companies to put their products on the platform.
Moreover, only one or two companies were not enough. There had to be tens of thousands of companies on the platform at the same time for people to trade on the platform.
Although there were at least tens of millions of companies on Taobao later, when Taobao started its business, it was too difficult to get a large number of companies to put their products on this unknown platform. It required companies to go to each other to lobby. Therefore, among the hundreds of employees in Tencent, 80% were people from all over the world.
However, as he ran, Ma Huateng found a bigger problem. That was, even if companies put their products on the platform, the Taobao platform had no room for profit.
Ma Huateng's original plan was to let businesses and customers trade on Taobao's platform. They could take a certain handling fee in the middle.
This handling fee might only be 1%, but as long as the volume increased, 1% was also a very terrifying profit.
However, the problem was that smart businesses would not give Ma Huateng the chance to take the handling fee.
After many merchants put their Taobao products on the shelves, they must put their company's name on the shelves. Then, they should put their company's phone number on the shelves as well. After that, they can directly transact in private and skip Taobao's transaction procedures. Taobao's original plan of collecting processing fees will not allow them to collect a single cent!
On the other hand, Taobao had to maintain its servers and constantly update its website and technology. At the same time, it also needed to hire a large number of marketing staff to travel around the world. The cost of this was far higher than the cost of QQ. Therefore, Boss Jia had invested the same amount of money in these two companies.
However, before the money from QQ had been spent, the money from Taobao was almost gone. That meant that he couldn't even pay his salary.
"I think Old Ma's venture has failed. Why don't you work for me? I will give him the position of Alibaba's vice president!" Ma Yun said proudly. Boss Jia was speechless.
Ma Yun had been Ma Huateng's vice president for more than a year. This time, it was Ma Huateng's turn to be vice president for Ma Yun.
Unfortunately, Boss Jia couldn't watch Tencent collapse like this.
"I'm going to look for Ma Huateng. Are you coming?" Boss Jia asked faintly. Ma Yun nodded immediately. Of course, why wouldn't he go? Ma Yun wanted to go before, but he was thrown out by Ma Huateng. Now that he was going with Boss Jia, he wanted to see if Ma Huateng still had the guts to throw him out.
Therefore, the plane that just landed in Yuzhang flew directly to Yao Du after a short preparation. When they arrived, the sky was already dark. Ma Huateng was about to go to bed.
Then, he heard the doorbell of his apartment ring. He looked at the walkie-talkie and saw Ma Yun's annoying face.
"Old Ma, I'm here to look for you. Open the door!" Ma Yun said with a smile.
"Get lost. Don't come here to show off!" Ma Huateng scolded. However, Ma Yun really came all the way from Hangzhou to look for him at night. Ma Huateng couldn't really not open the door.
However, Ma Huateng didn't expect that when the door opened, the first person to come in was not Ma Yun, but Boss Jia.
"Chairman!" Ma Huateng was shocked and quickly looked at his clothes. Then, he looked at the environment of the apartment. Fortunately, the cleaning lady had already come to clean it once. It was very clean and not as bad as before.
"Your apartment is not bad. It doesn't look like the apartment of a chairman with a net worth of tens of millions of USD!" Boss Jia said with a smile. Ma Huateng's apartment was very beautiful and modern. It even had a walkie-talkie.
But in the end, it was just an ordinary apartment. Although the cost of living in Yao Du was quite expensive, it was only 1000 RMB per month. Compared to Tencent's current size, this apartment was quite low-key.
"The company isn't making any profit. Every penny has to be spent on the blade. How can I dare to live in a good place?" Ma Huateng said helplessly. Then, he secretly looked at Boss Jia. He was afraid that Boss Jia would come to find him to punish him.
"Okay, we haven't seen each other for so long. Let's have a good chat!" Boss Jia said with a smile.
"Chairman, what about me?" Ma Yun, who was on the side, heard that something was wrong. There were three people here!
"You go and buy some wine for me and order a table of supper!!" Boss Jia threw 100 RMB to Ma Yun. These days, 100 RMB was enough to buy a table of pretty good supper.
"Ah!" Ma Yun's face was very bitter. But since Boss Jia had ordered him, he could only run to buy supper.
"Okay, have you thought of a way to get Taobao out of this predicament?" Boss Jia looked at Ma Huateng and asked directly.
"No!" Ma Huateng shook his head weakly. He didn't have the momentum that he had when he first started his business. Now, he was tired and powerless from all kinds of trivial matters. Moreover, the company's situation was getting worse and worse. He really couldn't give out the next month's salary. If Boss Jia didn't come to find him, he would have to apologize to Boss Jia and lose the tens of millions of USD that Boss Jia had invested.
When he was in Fusang, Daqian, everything was very smooth. Why did everything not go well here?
What made him even more depressed was that Ma Yun's company was developing smoothly. It was said that Goldman Sachs took the initiative to ask him to help them get listed. They were all entrepreneurs. Everyone had the surname Ma. Why was there such a big gap?
Could it be that he was going in the wrong direction? Should he also be doing instant messaging software?
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