Yi Anguo did not refuse the olive branch extended by Penguin Company, nor did he have any objections to Penguin Company's conditions for becoming a shareholder.
The reason why Penguin did this was not only optimistic about the development of Quiet Online Supermarket, but it was also a helpless move.
In order to enhance its own strength and fight against competition from Taobao, Penguin established a C2C shopping website Paipai.com similar to Taobao a few years ago, and later added several subsidiaries.
But without exception, the results are poor and continuous losses are no match for Taobao.
The reason is of course because Boss Ma of Taobao Company, under the operation of She Tunxiang, not only acquired Yahu China, but also obtained a billion US dollars in cash financing, defeated its rival eBay, and greatly increased its strength.
Originally, these have nothing to do with Penguin. We are not on the same channel. You develop your Internet shopping website and I develop my social chat software. Naturally, there is no competition.
But Penguin QQ is a free social software after all. In addition to developing games to make money, it can only rely on advertising revenue to obtain income. This is why many people were not optimistic about Penguin QQ at the beginning.
But Mahuatong saw that Taobao’s e-commerce was developing quite well. He also believed that in the era of the Internet economy, e-commerce and online shopping would be a major development trend in the future.
In September 2005, Penguin launched Paipai.com, which focuses on C2C. At that time, Taobao had only been online for two years. With hundreds of millions of Penguin QQ members, Paipai.com has nearly 50 million registered users in two years, ranking second in domestic C2C.
But as Taobao worked hard, Paipai was quickly beaten down.
But Mahuatuan didn't want to give up e-commerce, and the C2C Paipai.com that he finally built was directly killed by Taobao, which made him feel very unhappy.
Instead, Mahuatong began to prepare to build a B2C e-commerce platform to compete with Taobao's B2C e-commerce platform.
Since I can’t defeat you on the C2C e-commerce platform, then I will defeat you on the B2C e-commerce platform.
However, the opinions within Penguin Company are somewhat inconsistent. They believe that building a B2C e-commerce platform will most likely not be a match for Taobao. It will be thankless and the key is losing money!
At this time, Zhou Mengdie came to the door and told Ma HuaTian that Hualong Investment Company wanted to invest in Penguin Company.
Hualong Investment Company was the investor of Jingjing Online Supermarket, which made Ma Hua's thinking begin to change.
Since Penguin cannot do e-commerce, then I will invest in a well-developed e-commerce platform to compete with Taobao's e-commerce platform.
I can even invest at the same time and support several e-commerce platforms to deal with you Taobao together.
Instead, Mahuatong used this to get in touch with Yi Anguo and proposed a mutual investment proposal.
In order to promote this cooperation, Mahuatong personally discussed with the South African company, the major shareholder, and believed that the South African company held too many shares, which was very unfavorable to Penguin's shareholding structure.
Now Penguin's development has encountered a bottleneck. Under the global financial crisis, Penguin's stock price has plummeted and its market value is shrinking.
There happens to be an investment company that wants to invest in Penguin Company and acquire Penguin Company's shares, and is willing to pay a 25% premium to acquire Penguin Company's shares at a high price.
This reason alone was of course not enough. Mahuatong told the other party that Penguin wanted to invest in Anjing Online Supermarket.
The South African company invested US$32 million in Penguin and successively acquired more than 46% of Penguin's shares. In just a few years, when the stock price was at its highest last year, the return on investment was close to 20%. hundred times.
Even though the stock price has plummeted and Penguin's market value has shrunk a lot, the return on investment is still as high as 150 times.
Moreover, the South African company is firmly optimistic about Penguin's development prospects. Even though the company's financial situation is a bit poor during the global financial crisis, it still has not thought about reducing its shares in Penguin.
Therefore, in the face of Mahuatuan's persuasion to sell their shares in Penguin, the South African company was actually very resistant at first.
But Mahuatuan is not a temperless person. He bluntly said that if the South African company insists on reducing its holdings of Penguin shares, then he will still accept the investment from Hualong Investment Company directly at the current stock price, or even Lower than the current stock price, sell 50% of the company's shares.
As a result, the shares of Penguin held by the South African company will be diluted by 50%.
Hualong Investment Company will also be willing to compensate the founders of Penguin Company for their diluted shares. After all, Hualong Investment Company still holds a large share after compensating several founders for their diluted shares. .
At this time, the Penguin founder team holds 37.5% of the shares, of which Mahuatong holds approximately 14.43%, Yi Anguo personally holds an undisclosed 10.43%, and the South African company holds 37.5%.
Yi Anguo's personal undisclosed shareholdings are mainly divided into shares under the names of multiple people. Among them, the eldest daughter Yi Xinyi holds 2%, and Yi Yunlong, Yi Yufeng, Yi Meifeng, and Chen Feilong each hold 1.5%, and the rest is held by Yi Anguo himself.
However, this is not a distribution of property, but Yi Anguo does not intend to hold shares publicly, but if he holds more than 5% of the shares, he must hold a sign to disclose his identity, so Yi Anguo can only use the identities of several of his children to hold shares.
If Penguin sells 50% of its shares, even if it compensates half of the 37.5% held by the founder team, the diluted shares will only be reduced by 18.75%, leaving 31.25%.
After the South African company's shares have been diluted, only 18.75% is left, making it the second largest shareholder. Hualong Investment Company will become Penguin's largest shareholder.
After weighing the pros and cons, the Eastern and Southern Africa Company agreed to Mahuatong's request and sold 16% of Penguin's shares at a premium of 25% to the market price.
After reducing its holdings by 16%, the South African company still holds 21.5% of Penguin's shares and is still Penguin's largest shareholder, while Hualong Company has become Penguin's second largest shareholder.
Yi Anguo was still very satisfied with the final result.
Mahuatong and other founder teams are also very satisfied. For them, they have not lost anything.
At this time, Chen Xuejiao, after completing the investment in Qiangdong Company, flew to Silicon Valley in the United States without stopping and founded the American branch of Hualong Investment Company.
But before the U.S. branch was established, she began to take the initiative to look for investment targets.
Because Yi Anguo gave her many investment goals, and even had strict requirements on the best time to invest.
Although Chen Xuejiao didn't know, where did Yi Anguo get the information on these investment targets? But this is not very important. She knows that she only needs to follow the instructions and complete each investment according to the strategies and goals set by her boss. She does not need to care about anything else.
As for the US dollars needed for investment, she doesn't have to worry about it, because Yi Anguo has already prepared a large amount of funds for investment in Silicon Valley in the United States.
As soon as Chen Xuejiao arrived in the United States, she settled in and immediately started working. Her first goal was to find a small company named The Point, a young man named Andrew Mason, and send him 400 yuan. $10,000 in angel round financing.
The Point Company is actually just a small start-up company that was invested by several founders. It has not raised any financing so far.
The company The Point was actually originally founded by a man named Eric Lefkofsky.
The Point is actually the predecessor of Groupon, and Groupon created the group-buying network, the originator of a new Internet transaction model.
Groupon has two main founders, Andrew Mason and Eric Lefkofsky.
In 2006, Andrew Mason was still a music student at Northwestern University, but he was very interested in programming and ran a website called "Policy Tree".
Local entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky, seeing Mason's skills in programming and making web pages, recruited him to work for his company.
After several months of observation, in January 2007, Lefkofsky asked Mason to work at another of his companies called The Point, which was the starting point for Mason's involvement in founding Groupon.
The Point is a social networking site similar to a task publishing platform. Someone posts a task or event on the platform, and then calls on people to complete it within a time limit.
The start-up was not a success, and its reach was limited to Chicago at the time, with no ability to expand nationally.
Early top managers, including Lefkofsky and Mason, met weekly to figure out how to grow the business.
In mid-2008, the team came up with a new idea: Since people can convene different people through The Point to accomplish something together, why not convene dozens of people who want to buy the same product to see if it can Help them get group discounts?
This idea was actually proposed by Andrew Mason in the early days of The Point, but the company did not implement it. Now Lefkofsky thinks it is feasible, but it has been opposed by other early executives, including Mason, on the grounds that Doesn’t fit with the company’s core mission.
However, one event affected their thinking, which was the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis that broke out in 2008. The crisis has brought credit markets to a standstill, increasing financial pressure on companies, and the desire for cash flow has forced people at The Point to make changes.
In November 2008, Groupon was born, but at that time The Point only regarded it as an auxiliary project internally and did not anticipate its subsequent take-off.
However, it is still early in November 2008, but the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States has brought the credit market to a standstill. The Point Company has encountered difficulties in financing. If it cannot borrow money, it will have no cash flow.
Several company executives and founders, eager for cash flow, began to want to make changes to the company.
But if you want to make changes to the company and launch new projects, you also need funds, and what the company lacks most now is funds.
So the company fell into an endless loop. If it didn't make changes, the company could only wait for death. If it wanted to make changes, the company had no money.
The only way now is to find investment from venture capital institutions.
But at this time, a major event happened in the United States. The brother company declared bankruptcy and closed down, which had a huge shock to the entire global economy.
In just one month after the brother company declared bankruptcy, the price of international crude oil futures fell from its peak of US$147 per barrel to US$111 per barrel.
The subprime mortgage crisis in the United States has further worsened and spread to the world. At this time, it is very difficult to raise funds from venture capital companies. All venture capital companies have shrunk and basically stopped investment activities. .
At this time, everyone is on the sidelines, so why would they want to invest? Having cash in hand is the way to go.
(End of chapter)
