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Liu Datou received a huge investment of US$5 billion from Xiao Qi in July last year. After the first start-up capital was received, he began intensive preparations in August.
According to the plan he sent to Xiao Qi, after the Spring Festival here, he will take his elite soldiers and generals to the UK to officially start another big challenge in his life.
At this time, Xiao Qi will not only send financial personnel to supervise, but more importantly, Xiao Qi also wants to take over Liu Datou's work and train several real estate talents of his own.
The Wenzhou trio are very smart, but they simply lack experience in large-scale real estate construction and operation. Their real estate speculating methods are extremely weak compared to those of Hong Kong businessmen.
If they had moved to another place to promote their business, I'm afraid they wouldn't have such a prestigious reputation.
Xiao Qi knew that after Liu Datou tasted the benefits in the UK in his previous life, he gradually shifted the focus of his career to the UK, and gradually gave up the territory of Hong Kong, which only existed as his hometown and hometown.
So his development definitely took more than two or three years.
But Xiao Qi also knew Liu Datou very well. After he established a foothold in the UK and saw how easy it was to make money and his assets doubled again and again, he would definitely want to kick Xiao Qi away.
, making money alone - Liu Datou definitely does this kind of thing often.
So Xiao Qi directly approached the richest man in the UK, Richardson, to invest in the company, which was also regarded as an aspect of supervision.
Although according to Xiao Qi's considerations, Richardson will definitely be thrown away by Liu Datou like Xiao Qi in the end, but this time can be a huge step back. It will take at least five years before Liu Datou has such courage and confidence.
.
By that time, Xiao Qi has already earned what he should have earned, and there is no need to accompany Liu Datou to attract hatred in the UK. It doesn't matter if he quits.
Anyway, this matter can be regarded as an investment, and the profit has been made at least several times. Xiao Qi will not be able to figure it out.
Moreover, if Xiao Qi had not taken advantage of his previous life experience, Liu Datou would have been able to prosper in the UK.
Some money can be earned for a lifetime, while some money can only be earned once and then left. Not all businesses and investments can always be in your hands. That would be too whimsical and too tiring.
For example, Xiao Qi will never get involved in the British water, electricity and other basic livelihood industries that Li Chaoren plans to invest in.
Okay, leaving this topic aside, Xiao Qi’s other acquisition target has now come to a natural conclusion.
That is the Skype company that has been negotiating for almost half a year.
Skype was acquired by eBay in 2005 for US$2.6 billion. In its previous life, they would sell 65% of their shares to a consortium of investment companies in September this year.
One reason is that eBay suffered heavy losses during the financial crisis, and the other reason is that Skype's operating profitability has been poor over the years, falling into losses every year, and it is not very consistent with their main business.
Xiao Qi has entrusted Blackstone Group to discuss Skype with eBay since April last year.
Blackstone Group is the most patient in investment negotiations. It usually takes a long time, but the success rate is very high. It was the same this time.
When eBay originally invested in Skype, they had anticipated losses, but the problem was that they did not anticipate that they would encounter a financial crisis.
Looking at eBay's financial report for the fourth quarter of last year, it was very ugly. In the first and second quarters of this year, eBay's performance did not rebound significantly, and Blackstone Group did not give up and continued to negotiate for price increases. So eBay finally changed its attitude.
changes.
But the price they asked for at the beginning was a bit high.
It was clear that Blackstone Group had raised the price to the US$2.6 billion of their purchase price, but eBay knew that Xiao Qi was not short of money and directly quoted a high price of US$3 billion before New Year's Day.
When foreigners sell companies, it does not mean that they must make money after buying the company. Sometimes if the losses are serious, they are willing to get rid of the burden cheaply.
Although Skype cannot be considered a serious loss, eBay's shareholders increasingly feel that it has nothing to do with their main business. If they abandon it earlier, they can return to the correct and single-minded operation of the c2c online business platform.
But the price of 3 billion is a bit embarrassing for Blackstone Group, because after all, it has been spent with you for several months, so it can't be a lot of money at all, right?
So after a period of arduous communication and negotiation, eBay finally lowered the price to US$2.8 billion and refused to lower it any further.
When Blackstone Company came up, Xiao Qi also understood the reason.
At this time in my previous life, there was no such thing as WeChat, so it was impossible to have such a popular instant voice communication tool.
It was only a few years later, after everyone saw the popularity of WhatsApp, that they copied this product and established companies such as MiLiao and WeChat.
Nowadays, WeChat, which has similar functions to WhatsApp, can show off its power in the world. Although they have not found the profit point of Skype, they are still unwilling to sell it at a low price.
For Xiao Qi, he is not afraid that the money will be a little more expensive, but he is afraid of long nights and dreams. It would be bad to wait until others wake up from the financial crisis and then compete with him for business. He has a lot of money when buying companies in Europe and the United States.
of disadvantage.
Therefore, Xiao Qi made a decision directly and asked Blackstone to help complete the entire transaction.
Including commissions, taxes and other procedures, Xiao Qi will spend a total of about 3.2 billion US dollars. This business can be considered a mid-range acquisition in the United States today.
But compared to Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype two years later in 2011, Xiao Qi's deal was a bargain.
Of course, this business is not just for Xiao Qi to make money. If WhatsApp can grab enough shares in the instant messaging market and cover places that WeChat cannot, then Xiao Qi can hold it in his hands.
If whatsapp and WeChat overlap with each other, then Xiao Qi will have to sell it to make a profit.
In fact, compared to the achievements of its previous life, WhatsApp is not developing smoothly now. Its users worldwide are only 150 million. The reason is that it cannot make ends meet and eBay is unwilling to invest on a large scale.
In Xiao Qi's opinion, the registration fees and annual fees for WhatsApp in the future are not a good idea, because free is always the mainstream in the online world.
Even if you want to make money, you have to make money where users can't see it.
For example, connecting to the merchant's online mall system, such as binding the bank card system, such as advertising push, such as value-added services, etc. - just like WeChat.
This is not a very difficult thing, because the Internet era is coming soon, and whoever has hundreds of millions of loyal customers will have an absolute advantage in the market.
Think about it, an Internet company that spans developed countries in Europe and the United States controls the consumption habits and information of more than 5.6 billion users. How many merchants and advertisers will go crazy?
Compared with the mall cooperation fees and advertising revenue fees, those annual fees of US$0.99 per year are simply too weak!
In fact, WeChat has already started to do a good job in this aspect, but what is strange to Xiao Qi is that Whatsapp has not learned from WeChat at all, but insists on following their way, which makes Xiao Qi
I have to lament that these managers in Europe and the United States are really inflexible.
But that’s fine.
If they had learned about the WeChat company early, where would it be Xiao Qi’s turn to take advantage?
Skype's losses last year reached 210 million U.S. dollars, which is nothing compared to eBay's net profit of more than 5 billion U.S. dollars. However, they have lost a total of 1 billion U.S. dollars in the past three years. Listed companies like eBay have already lost
Very impatient.
Speaking of which, this is where a private company like Xiao Qi takes advantage. He doesn't have to consider what others think, he can just buy it if he wants to.
Moreover, Xiao Qi also knew that by 2010, Skype would control its losses to around 30 million. Compared with the 280 million users it had at that time and the 23 billion messages it processed every day, this loss was completely acceptable.
Ignore it.
In Xiao Qi's hands, even if the registration fee of US$0.99 is removed, the day of turning losses into profits will be much earlier.
Not to mention anything else, as long as Xiao Qi announces that he will use WhatsApp users to build an online mall, then this will be another huge giant online b2b2c platform.
But when that time comes, Amazon will be unable to sit still.
Compared with the Internet consumer market of mobile phones and tablets, which have unlimited potential, the Internet consumer market of computer terminals is much worse in terms of timeliness and convenience.
Once the WhatsApp mall is established, Amazon will be hit. I wonder if Bezos will be itching to hate it.
Of course, it is not the time for WhatsApp Mall to be established yet.
Xiao Qi's first step is to work hard to expand the number of WhatsApp users, let them come in regardless of cost, use WhatsApp, and become loyal users who cannot live without WhatsApp.
Once they have strong user stickiness, no matter whether Xiao Qi operates an online b2b2c mall or other industries in the future, these users will be the most likely potential user group.
Think about it, a super large company with as many as 600 million loyal users is so big in the world, where can’t it go? (A great activity of pie-in-the-sky, cool mobile phones are waiting for you! Follow it~ click / Chinese website public (Add a friend on WeChat - add a public account - enter ddxiaoshuo), join now! Everyone will win a prize, now follow the ddxiaoshuo WeChat official account!) (To be continued, please search Piaotian Literature, the novel will be better and updated faster !