"There is a future, but Lu Yun's approach requires a lot of money to subsidize merchants in the early stages. It's fine to use price wars to seize the market, but he doesn't have enough money to play like that. Moving too fast can easily backfire. Last year, Alibaba's total transaction volume was inflated to 8.7 million US dollars, but the actual profit was only 1 yuan. Basically, they worked for nothing all year. Not to mention, they had to pay for employee salaries, sales staff, programmers, and advertising costs. Most importantly, he hasn't found a way to make a profit yet. My investment now wouldn't be very effective."

"President Shen, didn't you just say that it's better to help someone in need than to add flowers to brocade? You have a lot of clever ideas, so why don't you help Lu Yun find a way out? I've seen him, he's such a pitiful person, so thin he's unrecognizable."

Pitiful? Goodness, Xu Xin's words left Shen Fang a bit dumbfounded. He felt sorry for Lu Yun, but Lu Yun was still clueless and relied solely on his enthusiasm. He had managed to con people into giving him 12 "golden men" (a metaphor for his lack of knowledge), and then he encountered the internet winter and almost starved to death. So, he was indeed pitiful.

However, Shen Fang still doesn't plan to invest. Taobao hasn't even been launched yet, so there's no need for him to make a move now. Actually, Shen Fang originally planned to have Tencent create an e-commerce platform, but after discussing it with Pony Ma and others, they didn't think much of it. Now that they see how easy it is to make money from games, they're single-mindedly focused on making games, Q coins, and money.

Virtual currency and virtual games are so simple, like printing money. E-commerce is so troublesome. They are programmers, not salespeople. When they hear that e-commerce involves this and that, they complain.

Shen Fang is speechless. If he doesn't want to do it, he doesn't want to do it. He can just invest some shares himself. YiGou hasn't even launched yet, and Taobao is waiting to copy them. There are still more than four months left, so there's no rush.

As for why we chose Taobao instead of Jingdong?

Jingdong has always been an unlucky company. Because it advertised "tenfold compensation for fakes" and guaranteed genuine products in the 3C digital market, it engaged in a price war with Taobao and suffered continuous losses until it finally started to make a profit in 2016.

The reason he was able to make money was because of his reputation over the years, which gradually made users believe in the authenticity of Jingdong products.