Chapter 336: 4 billion burned? Chen Yansen: You have to admit defeat with an attitude. If he wants to fight, then continue!
On October 31st, autumn is approaching.
The sky was gloomy and a drizzle of autumn rain was falling outside the window. I was in Office Building No. 3 of Hangzhou Shuyuan Software Park.
As soon as Hu Weiyi finished the product development meeting, she pulled Wang Zihao aside to discuss the product preheating of OFO bikes, the resource arrangement on the first day of launch, and the launch plan on the App Store, Android App Market, Wandoujia, and Orange App Store.
Wang Zihao sat in his seat, glanced at the scene outside the window, and couldn't help but sigh inwardly. He didn't quite understand Chen Yansen's thoughts. He was doing a good job as the director of Pinbei's advertising, but Chen Yansen had to kick him to Hangzhou to be the COO of Hu Weiyi.
Does he know about shared bikes? No.
Does he understand the overall operation of the project?
don't know.
But when he went to Chen Yansen with questions, he said: "If you don't understand, go and learn. OFO bikes must have someone to look after them."
This sentence made Brother Hao happy for a long time. By the time he came to his senses, he had already arrived in Hangzhou.
"Mr. Wang, you are most familiar with the people in charge of projects such as Toutiao, Lingxi Browser, AutoNavi Maps, and Kuaipao. All the cross-platform cooperation matters in the future will depend on you."
Hu Weiyi said softly with a smile on her face.
She did not dare to object to Chen Yansen's arrangement. After all, OFO Bike is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Senlian Capital, and she, like Wang Zihao, is an employee.
In fact, Wang Zihao's private status is much higher than hers.
Although the other party is not yet qualified for the position of Chief Operating Officer (COO), Wang Zihao has served as the marketing director of FoxTao and Pinbei Mall. His connections in the circle are extremely strong and he can easily get resources from major portals and social software.
With Wang Zihao around, OFO Bike will never lack traffic resources.
What's more, compared with professional managers, Hu Weiyi doesn't dare to say how strong her abilities are.
She needs to get used to the position of CEO, and so does Wang Zihao.
In order to ensure full control over the OFO project, Chen Yansen not only temporarily transferred a group of personnel from AutoNavi and Kuaidi Dache to support the development work, but also placed his own people in the personnel, finance, legal affairs and other departments.
Hu Weiyi only has operational rights and partial decision-making power!
His authority is equivalent to that of Liao Wei of Yunsu Express, Zhang Yiming of Byte Technology and others.
Chen Yansen was too lazy to test human nature, so he started directly with personnel and finance. He would only feel at ease if he brought them under the unified jurisdiction of the headquarters.
People’s hearts are fickle!
"No problem, Mr. Hu. Brother Sen has said in advance that once OFO bikes are launched, the daily exposure in the first week will not be less than 30 million."
Wang Zihao responded with a smile.
Others don’t have this confidence, but he does!
The Orange App Store, Toutiao, Lingxi Browser and Amap alone can provide OFO bikes with around 20 million exposures.
In addition, Penguin originally wanted to invest in Didi Bike, but after learning that Chen Yansen had launched OFO bike-sharing, Liu Zhiping asked Lin Chenfeng to cancel the plan immediately and prepare to participate in OFO bike's Series A financing.
30 million? Hu Weiyi smiled softly and sighed secretly: It feels so good to have someone close to you. Money is given to you, people are given to you, and resources are given to you.
It turns out that starting a business can be so simple! You know, her Geek Car magazine has been established for three years, but it has never been popular, and it has been kept alive by advertising fees from car manufacturers.
I don’t make much money, but I don’t live a comfortable life either.
After deciding to take over the OFO bicycle project, she sold the "Geek Car" magazine to Li Bin of Yiche.com, and it is now being incorporated into the company.
"I heard from my investment bank friends at Yanjing that Cheng Wei of Didi Bike has been in frequent contact with investors recently. I'm afraid he wants to expand the scale of investment again."
After Hu Weiyi finished talking about work, she started chatting casually with Wang Zihao.
"Although the market for shared bikes is huge, the upper limit of the profit margin is low. With Didi Bike helping us cultivate the market in the early stages, we can actually save a lot of manpower and material resources. Starting early does not mean you will definitely win. Mr. Hu, you must have confidence in our products."
Wang Zihao didn't care.
He had been with Chen Yansen for more than two years and had experienced many business wars, big and small, but he didn't take Cheng Wei seriously at all.
He knows very well that in addition to Didi Bike, there will be a lot of competing software products.
Unless they are like Kuaidi and Didi Dache, desperately spending money to grab market share, automatically refreshing the preferential benefits of up to 14 yuan per customer three times a day, regardless of new or old customers, and making their peers afraid to join in.
No entrepreneur or venture capital firm dares to follow the speed at which Kuaidi and Didi Dache are burning money.
While the two were talking, in Yanjing, hundreds of kilometers away.
Li Yanhong looked at the financial statements of Didi Dache for a long time in silence, his eyebrows twisted together like a braid.
Didi Dache spent more than 90% of the 1.2 billion yuan in funding for its E round of financing in just one month, and now there is still 50 million yuan in the account.
Xiang Hailong cancelled the subsidy program for old customers in North China and East China three days ago. The subsidy per order on the driver side was also reduced from 5 yuan to 2 yuan. Currently, the only discount left is for new customers' first order.
Upon seeing this, Cheng Weixing changed the instant discount for old customers of Kuaidi Taxi into the previous lucky red packet arrangement, with amounts ranging from 5 to 12 yuan. Old customers could receive 5 to 8 yuan, while new customers could receive 9 to 12 yuan.
The driver’s order subsidy is reduced to 3 yuan to prevent Didi Taxi from counterattacking!
Both parties tacitly suspended the subsidy war!
From October 1 to October 27, Kuaidi and Didi Dache spent a total of 2.2 billion yuan to cultivate users' habit of hailing taxis.
In places like Yanjing, Tianjin, Hucheng, Jinling and Lucheng, taxi drivers will not receive any orders at all unless they download the online taxi-hailing software.
Since the advent of taxi apps, who would still stand on the roadside in the cold wind and hail a taxi?
Nowadays, passengers often hail a taxi before they even leave the building, and by the time they reach the gate of the community, the driver has just arrived.
“On October 28, Didi Taxi’s average daily order volume was 1.34 million!”
“On October 29, Didi Taxi’s average daily order volume was 1.07 million!”
“On October 30, Didi Taxi’s average daily order volume was 856,000!”
Once the subsidies stop, the relationship returns to zero.
Li Yanhong took a deep breath and forced himself to suppress his annoyance. At the current rate, Didi Dache's daily order fulfillment volume would fall to 600,000 or even below 500,000 in less than half a month.
Although Qiandu Map has improved its online car-hailing order business, there are only a few hundred thousand orders per day.
If Didi Chuxing's orders really fall below 500,000 in half a month, the daily gross profit will probably not be able to cover the labor cost expenditure.
What's more, with Kuaidi Dache watching closely from the side, it is almost impossible for Didi Dache to make a profit.
"It's time to talk."
Li Yanhong rubbed his dry eyes, raised his head and talked to himself.
In his opinion, there was an 80% chance that Chen Yansen could not bear it anymore.
Thinking of this, he picked up the phone on the table and called Penguin's vice president Liu Zhiping.
Last time at the Internet Conference, he asked Ma Wenteng to mediate, and later took the initiative to break the verbal agreement of "not engaging in a subsidy war". Therefore, Li Yanhong couldn't save face, so he wanted to use Liu Zhiping to convey the meaning of "seeking peace" to Ma Wenteng and Chen Yansen.
Although Chen Yansen's behavior of using a third-party APP to carry out subsidy activities was extremely unkind, it was Li Yanhong who took the lead in restarting the subsidy war on taxi-hailing apps.
To a certain extent, it was indeed Li Yanhong who broke the rules first.
However, in Ma Wenteng's eyes, neither of these two people was a good person and they didn't give him any face at all.
He said nice things and was willing to accept mediation, but then he turned around and came up with all kinds of tricks, ignoring his words.
But he did not have the slightest aversion to Chen Yansen. Instead, he admired him even more. As a businessman, credit is useless.
Especially between Kuaidi and Didi Dache, both have burned through more than one billion yuan, so it doesn't matter if they burn another few billion yuan.
Winner takes all!
With an average daily business volume of 10 million orders nationwide, who wouldn’t want to enjoy it exclusively?
The other side.
Liu Zhiping was sitting in Ma Wenteng's office, chatting about the latest shared bicycle project.
"Cheng Wei is a talented person with a keen business sense. He started working on online ride-hailing services and now he's working on shared bikes." Liu Zhiping said, holding up the teacup and taking a sip.
"It's a pity that we failed to get Didi Bike's angel round, and Li Fukai of Innovation Works got the advantage."
Ma Wenteng commented with a chuckle.
WeChat’s cumulative registered users have exceeded 280 million, with more than 100 million daily active users. This undoubtedly indicates that Penguin made the right bet and successfully gained access to the mobile Internet.
In addition, his investments in projects such as Pinbei, Kuaipao and Kuaidi Dache made him a lot of profit, and he was naturally in a good mood.
"If you miss Didi Bike, don't you still have OFO? Instead of investing in Cheng Wei, you should continue to bet on Chen Yansen."
Liu Zhiping put down the teacup and spoke in a firm tone.
"This guy seems to have a cheat code. Which young man can earn 50 billion US dollars at the age of 20? I heard that the media in Europe and the United States have praised him to the sky and regarded Zuckerberg as the American version of Jensen Chen."
Ma Wenteng picked up the teapot, refilled Liu Zhiping's cup with tea, and then said with a smile.
Zuckerberg? The American version of Chen Yansen! Liu Zhiping was choked by his saliva, and quickly covered his mouth and nose, coughed sideways a few times, and his face turned red. After a while, he recovered and said, "Zuckerberg is eight years older than Chen Yansen, right?"
"Who made Chen Yansen's net worth higher than his?"
Ma Wenteng shrugged his shoulders, thinking back to Song Yuncheng who was following Chen Yansen, and sighed in his heart: This guy is quite suitable to be a son-in-law, but he seems to have a girlfriend.
“Buzz buzz buzz——!”
Liu Zhiping was about to speak when the cell phone in his pocket rang. He took out the phone and was surprised.
He was not surprised that Li Yanhong called him, but he was surprised that the other party called him so late.
According to his and Ma Wenteng's estimation, Li Yanhong would not be able to bear it after mid-October.
If it were someone else, they might fight with Chen Yansen for a few more rounds and burn billions of funds, but Li Yanhong is different. He has very low tolerance for a new project. If there is no profit in half a year, the project and the person in charge will be eliminated.
This is also the main reason why Liu Zhiping is certain that Li Yanhong will admit defeat.
"It's Li Yanhong's call." Liu Zhiping placed the phone flat on the table and explained to Ma Wenteng.
"Robin can't take it anymore, just answer it and see what he wants to say." Ma Wenteng supported the frame of his glasses, pushed them upwards, and replied without thinking.
Liu Zhiping nodded, pressed the answer button, and then pressed the speakerphone.
"Martin, I have something to trouble you with." Li Yanhong went straight to the point without beating around the bush.
In his logic, as the third largest shareholder of Kuaidi Dache, Penguin certainly wants to end the subsidy war as soon as possible, which is a good thing for everyone.
"Robin, you tell me first." Liu Zhiping asked knowingly.
“I want Mr. Ma to act as a middleman and sign a formal agreement with Chen Yansen to end the subsidy war,” Li Yanhong replied.
"Robin, first of all, the legal effect of this agreement is questionable. Secondly, after the subsidy war between Kuaidi Dache and Didi Dache ends, what will happen if a new online car-hailing app emerges?"
Liu Zhiping asked back.
He knew, and Li Yanhong knew it too, that the best way to resolve the conflicts and disputes between the two companies was to merge them.
Everyone was playing dumb, waiting for the other to speak first.
"Mr. Liu, what you mean is that we should continue to burn at the current rate of 1.2 billion Huayuan per month?" Li Yanhong asked.
"Mr. Li, you have to understand one thing. The major shareholder of Kuaidi Dache is Chen Yansen." Liu Zhiping did not respond and kicked the ball back.
Seeing that the other party did not accept the challenge, Li Yanhong hesitated for more than ten seconds, then smiled bitterly and said, "Boss Liu wants to help Kuaidi and Didi merge? Is this what Boss Ma or Chen Yansen wants?"
If this is Chen Yansen’s idea, as long as he agrees to it, the subsidy war in the online car-hailing industry will end.
"I and Mr. Ma said that I can't guarantee whether Mr. Chen will agree. Of course, if the valuation of Didi Dache is reasonable enough, I think Chen Yansen will not reject the merger proposal."
Liu Zhiping said slowly.
The implication is that if Li Yanhong is willing to bleed, he will go and talk to Chen Yansen.
"Didi Dache raised 1.2 billion in its E round of financing, with a valuation of 8 billion." Li Yanhong understood what Liu Zhiping meant, his face darkened, and he said with narrowed eyes.
He has no objection to the merger!
But Chen Yansen should not think of bullying others too much. The valuation of 8 billion Huayuan cannot be given up even a cent!
"Mr. Li, Didi Dache's valuation is inflated. Half of its value is due to subsidies."
Liu Zhiping frowned, looking displeased, and secretly cursed Li Yanhong for not seeing the situation clearly.
Half? Cut 4 billion in one go? Li Yanhong took a deep breath, his anger rising.
The 1.2 billion yuan of Didi Dache's Series E financing was solely invested by Qiandu.com. Including the 80 million yuan in the D round, the 100 million yuan in the C round and the 30 million yuan in the B round, not counting the investment in human and traffic resources, the capital investment alone reached 1.41 billion yuan.
Qiandu.com holds 44.4% of the shares. Based on a valuation of 4 billion, it can only cash out 1.76 billion. After working hard for half a year, it only makes 300 million?
Li Yanhong was extremely dissatisfied! "Boss Liu, this price is not sincere at all. If Penguin and Senlian Capital want to continue the fight, I will fight them till the end." Li Yanhong had a cold face, and a fierce look flashed in his eyes.
At worst, you can make additional investments and continue playing with Kuaidi Taxi!
Liu Zhiping snorted coldly and said bluntly: "This is Chen Yansen's offer, Robin, a loser should have the awareness of a loser."
"Did Didi Taxi lose? I don't think so!"
After saying that, Li Yanhong hung up the phone angrily.
"It's hard to tell what's going on. Robin is a good technical person, but his management is terrible. Qiandu has not been able to come up with any decent products except search and Tieba in recent years."
Ma Wenteng lowered his mouth corners in disdain, then picked up the teacup, took a sip carefully, and gave a faint comment.
"Then I'll call Mr. Chen back."
Liu Zhiping said.
Ma Wenteng nodded without objection.
Liu Zhiping picked up his phone and called Chen Yansen: "Li Yanhong refused."
"He wants to admit defeat, but also wants to maintain his dignity and take the opportunity to make a fortune, but he refuses to lower his offer. He really wants it! I understand, Mr. Liu, thank you." Chen Yansen was speechless.
If Qiandu does not pursue the investment funds, in another half a month, Didi Dache’s market share will fall below 10%. Perhaps only then will Li Yanhong face the reality.
If Li Yanhong makes additional investments, the worst that can happen is that we can continue playing for another month!
He has already communicated with companies such as Penguin, Ali, Goldman Sachs, DST and Huake, and can start the C round of financing at any time.
How can Qiandu.com, fighting alone, compete with the combination of Internet capital, state-owned capital and foreign capital?
At the same time.
Cheng Wei, who was kicked out by Li Yanhong, is at the highlight moment of his life. IDG Capital led the investment, followed by Sequoia Capital and Siwei Capital, and won the A round of financing for Didi Bike with 300 million yuan.
It has become the leader in the shared bicycle industry! (End of this chapter)
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