On March 26, 130 Internet companies signed the "China Internet Self-Discipline Convention" at the Yanjing Great Hall, and Song Yi attended the signing ceremony.

Almost all the Internet giants from the mainland were present, and Song Yi also saw many familiar faces, including Pony Ma from Penguin, Mr. Ma from Alibaba, Director Li from Baidu, Ding Sanshi from NetEase, and Lei Jun from Kingsoft, etc.

The founders of Internet companies are all quite young. Pony Ma and Ding Sanshi were both born in 1971. Lei Jun and Director Li are also of the same age. Director Li and Pony Ma both have technical backgrounds, and the two of them can get along well when they get together.

Song Yi doesn't understand technology, but he understands the development trend of Internet products. Pony Ma certainly won't ignore the major shareholder Song Yi and will take the initiative to talk to him.

Xiao Ma Ge said to Song Yi: "I have studied the product inschool and found that it is somewhat similar to another Korean website CYworld. After inschool went online, CYworld launched an online personal space called "Mini Nest". I have also been considering whether to launch a similar online community recently."

When Song Yi heard what Xiao Ma said, he was impressed by Xiao Ma's keen insight. MySpace was launched in 2003, and Facebook was launched in 2004. The rise of the two major social networking sites made Xiao Ma pay more attention to the Penguin dating function.

Penguin's strategic development department wanted to launch a new social product. At that time, Penguin had two research and development directions, one was blogs and the other was CYworld. In the end, the Penguin team created a platform for self-presentation and interaction with others, which combined the advantages of blogs and CYworld, but was different. This platform is the famous Penguin Space.

Thinking of this, Song Yi decided to give Xiao Ma Ge some tips, "The biggest function of Penguin is its social attribute. We can learn about each other's latest developments through real-time chat."

"For Penguin friends who I haven't contacted for a long time, but I want to know their updates, Penguin can actually provide users with an online space to display the latest updates," said Song Yi.

"Online space? Like the inschool homepage?" asked Xiao Ma Ge.

"No, no, no, inschool and Penguin are fundamentally different. As you said, just like CYworld's 'Mini Nest', you can also create a dedicated space for users, where users can post messages and tell friends about the new things he/she encountered today, and can also upload their personal photos to the space. Don't computers in Internet cafes have cameras now? You can use the camera to take photos and then upload them to the space." Song Yi said.

Xiao Ma Ge suddenly had an idea, "Users can also comment on their updates and photos, just like a real-time interactive chat."

"This online space is like the users' house on the Internet. Since it is a house, we can decorate it to make it more beautiful and provide different decoration plans. Maybe some users are willing to pay to choose more beautiful space templates." Xiao Ma Ge's mind was completely opened up, and he felt more and more that there was hope for this matter.

Penguin is now in high spirits. On November 10, 2001, China Mobile launched the "Mobile Dream Network" plan and first piloted it in Pengcheng Mobile.

SP value-added services enabled Penguin to achieve monthly break-even for the first time in 2001. At the end of 2001, Penguin's revenue was close to RMB 50 million and its net profit exceeded RMB 10 million. Penguin also became one of the earliest profitable Internet companies.

At that time, Internet companies almost all survived by relying on the SP business of operators. Portal SPs are short message services provided by portal websites. At that time, there were mainly Sohu, Sina, NetEase, China.com and Tom.

Their text messaging services include ringtones, pictures, dating, news, games, etc. These companies are constantly adding new content. This kind of dating title looks very tempting, but in fact there is no real content. When you click in, sorry, the few dollars you spent are gone.

Penguin is a specialized SP company. Unlike other SMS service providers, Penguin only focuses on derivative SMS with monopoly advantages. Your Penguin friend sends you a message, and you receive the SMS. You want to check the content of the Penguin friend's message, so you click on it.

Song Yi also envied Penguin's good luck. From 2002 to 2004, the SP business would continue to flourish, and Penguin would have a few more good years. In the next two years, SP companies with outstanding performance, such as Kongzhong and Linkcom, would be listed on NASDAQ.

When Song Yi envied Xiao Ma Ge, Xiao Ma Ge envied Song Yi even more. 50 million in revenue seems to be a lot. The monthly revenue of "Legend of Mir 2" in February was more than 50 million. At present, Penguin is still just a younger brother in front of Xinya.

Some gaming media estimated that the revenue of "Legend of Mir 2" in February has exceeded 100 million yuan, but Xinya Network is not a listed company, so the media are just guessing.

Pony Ma plans to take the other founders of the company to the United States this year to visit the E3 video game exhibition. However, Penguin's foundation is not stable at present, and it remains to be considered whether to develop the game business or the online space business first. Perhaps he can also test the waters by first acting as an agent for an online game like Xinya Network did.

Although "Legend of Mir 2" made money, Song Yi was not without worries. In March, "Legend of Mir 2" was hit by a large-scale border equipment duplication incident.

When the player enters Mengzhong City from the Viper Valley, he can quickly trade his equipment to his friends to achieve the effect of copying the equipment. Xinya Network improved this BUG as soon as possible. However, a smart player immediately discovered a new BUG: he first logged into "Legend of Mir 2" on a computer, and the moment the game character entered Mengzhong City, he immediately logged into the game character on the computer next to it. At this time, an identical game character would be copied on the Mengzhong Continent.

Since copied equipment is different from equipment spawned in the game, the equipment you spawn from a copy has a brand new background ID and is legal by default.

The ID of the duplicate equipment is exactly the same as the old equipment, so when the server is restarted, the duplicate equipment disappears instantly. Some players bought duplicate equipment without knowing it and suffered a lot of losses.

They told the official of "Legend of Mir 2" about the situation. Li Yu suggested that Song Yi announce that "Legend of Mir 2" would be free for one week to compensate the players' losses, but Song Yi did not agree to this solution.

It is obvious that someone is using the loopholes of the game to commit fraud, but the official announced a free week to retain players. Isn't this a typical solution to compromise? Song Yi feels that the work of cracking down on illegal plug-ins and studios that use plug-ins to make profits in "Legend of Mir 2" is imminent. "Legend of Mir 2" contacted the players who bought the duplicate equipment, and Xinya Network compensated the players for their losses and issued higher-level equipment. The game IDs that sell duplicate equipment will be banned.

A gamer complained in the 17173 game forum, saying that he and his friends actually shared a game account and he was not aware of the sale of duplicate equipment. Now that the official has banned his account, he really can't accept it.

There are also many players who share game accounts in "Legend of Mir 2". For example, I go online during the day and you go online at night. I go online from Monday to Friday and you go online on Saturday and Sunday. In addition, Xinya's game point cards are not cheap, and sharing accounts also reduces the cost of playing games.

Song Yi originally wanted to implement the real-name system for games ahead of time, but he did not take the lead. The real-name system for games in mainland China was not officially implemented until 2012. If Xinya launched the real-name system for games now, it would only push game users to other companies.

The revenue of the game "Legend of Mir 2" accounts for 40% of the online game market, but Xinya cannot rest on its laurels. NetEase launched the online game "Westward Journey Online 2" this year, and Shanda's "Heaven" is still working hard to expand its user base.

Even though Song Yi invested in Penguin and NetEase, they will sooner or later become the biggest competitors of Xinya in the mainland game market. If nothing unexpected happens, Penguin has entered the game market since 2003 and gradually grown into the king of social + games.

Song Yi and Xiao Ma Ge were chatting happily here, and Mr. Ma from Alibaba came over. Xiao Ma Ge and Mr. Ma had known each other for a long time, and he introduced Song Yi to Mr. Ma.

Teacher Ma was all smiles. He took the initiative to step forward and hold Song Yi's hands, not letting go for a long time. "It turns out to be Mr. Song from Xinya. I have heard of you for a long time. Nice to meet you."

Compared with Mr. Ma, Song Yi prefers to deal with Xiao Ma Ge. Song Yi's attitude is more enthusiastic. "Mr. Ma, in the Internet industry, you are our big brother. I still have a lot to learn from you."

Mr. Ma's eyes lit up. He had always been called Mr. Ma, but this was the first time he was called Mr. Ma. It sounded very pleasant to him. After graduating from school, Mr. Ma worked as a teacher at Hangzhou Institute of Electronic Industry for six years before leaving school to start his own business.

Song Yi said that his father was a university professor, so he felt very friendly when he saw the teacher. Teacher Ma smiled even more and told him his purpose, that he came to invite Song Yi and Xiao Ma Ge to participate in the third West Lake Sword Contest.

In September 2000, Mr. Ma and Jin Yong sent out invitations to Internet entrepreneurs to have tea and discuss swordsmanship by the West Lake. The first batch of star entrepreneurs included Wang Zhidong of Sina, Zhang Chaoyang of Sohu, Ding Sanshi of NetEase and Wang Juntao of 8848 e-commerce network.

When Mr. Ma learned that Song Yi had invested in Penguin, NetEase and Hikvision in the mainland and was also a well-known angel investor, he became even more enthusiastic towards Song Yi and he wanted to invite Song Yi to Hangzhou to visit Alibaba Group.

Alibaba has now completed its A and B rounds of financing. In the B round of financing, Masayoshi Son invested 20 million US dollars in Alibaba. In the following 19 years, Masayoshi Son has always stood with Mr. Ma.

Taobao went online in 2003. In February 2004, Alibaba received a $102 million Series C financing, again led by SoftBank. In December 2004, Alibaba raised another $82 million, with SoftBank investing $60 million.

In August 2005, Mr. Ma met his third benefactor, Yahoo founder Yang Zhiyuan. Yahoo invested $1 billion and handed over Yahoo's China business to Alibaba in exchange for 40% of Alibaba's shares.

Alibaba has just survived the Internet winter of 2001. Among the Internet companies in mainland China, no company is as rich as Xinya Network. In Mr. Ma's opinion, "Legend of Mir 2" is a money-printing machine.

Now Mr. Ma and Song Yi are in love and they hit it off immediately. The reason why Alibaba was able to defeat EAby and Eachnet is that Taobao insisted on the free strategy.

Without Yahoo's $1 billion, Taobao would have found it difficult to implement its free strategy and would not have been able to grow into the world's largest e-commerce platform.

Taobao is a C2C model, while JD.com is a B2C model. The former mainly serves individual sellers, while the latter mainly operates its own business. JD.com was established in January 2004. In the next two years, the two major e-commerce giants in the mainland will begin to change the shopping concepts of all Chinese people.

Song Yi has no intention of setting up a shopping website in the mainland to compete with Taobao and JD.com, but he will not give up on the huge cake of e-commerce.

Shin-A Network Co., Ltd. is also developing an e-shopping website called Sohan Network with a domain name of www.sohan.com. As the name suggests, you can search for any Korean product on this website and then place an order online.

The first batch of products to be placed on Sohan.com include cosmetics, food, clothing and electronic products. Shin-A Network Co., Ltd. has purchased land in eight places, including Seoul, Incheon, Chuncheon, Daejeon, Gwangju, Daegu, Busan and Jeju, where intelligent logistics centers will be built in the future.

South Korea has a land area of ​​only 100,000 square kilometers, which is about the same size as Jiangsu Province. These eight logistics centers can already deliver goods from Sohan.com's self-operated warehouses to 95% of South Koreans.

In 2021, Jiangsu Province's online retail sales exceeded RMB 1 trillion, and JD.com's total revenue also exceeded RMB 1 trillion in 2022. Jiangsu Province's per capita GDP exceeded US$20,000 in 2022, reaching the level of developed countries.

If we take Jiangsu Province as a reference, if Sohan.com can become the largest e-commerce platform in South Korea, its annual revenue will be at least 100 trillion won, or about 600 billion yuan. After all, Jiangsu Province has a population of 85 million, while South Korea has only 50 million.

South Korea's large conglomerates have monopolized food, clothing, housing and transportation in South Korea. Sohan.com can serve more small and medium-sized businesses and break the monopoly of the chaebols.

The reason why Song Yi has been committed to expanding New Asia Media is because New Asia Media will directly affect Sohan.com. His mid-term goal is to make New Asia Media surpass CJ Entertainment and become the largest media group in South Korea.

Just imagine, when the same clothing, food, cosmetics or electronic products that appear in movies, TV series, games and animations produced by New Asia Media appear on Souhan.com, would you have the urge to place an order online?

For example, the same lipstick that Jun Ji-hyun wore in "My Love from the Star", the same jacket that Lee Bo-na wore in "The Heirs", etc.

According to the time schedule, Dae Jang Geum will be finished by the end of 2002, and will be a big hit in Asia in 2003. By then, Souhan.com will be online soon, and the launch time of Souhan.com should be similar to that of Taobao.com. Souhan.com has four versions: Chinese, English, Korean, and Japanese. Souhan.com's overseas markets are mainly China, Japan, and Southeast Asian countries. As for the huge South Asian market, the New Asia system has simply given up, and whoever wants to play can play.

If Xinya Network holds the two powerful tools of Sohan.com and inschool, it will be equivalent to unifying the social + e-commerce market in Korea. Xinya Network is equivalent to Penguin + Alibaba in Korea.

If Sohan.com can really help millions of individual businesses in South Korea, then millions of individual businesses also mean millions of votes. If one day Song Yi wants to give up business and go into politics, maybe his support rate will be higher than that of his cousin Zhou Mengzhun. After all, Song Yi has no shortcomings except for the continuous scandals.

Since he was planning to develop e-commerce and now had a ready-made teacher, Song Yi naturally humbly asked Teacher Ma for advice. The two also discussed why the e-commerce website 8848 was now in bankruptcy.

Since June 2001, my8848 website has been in arrears with suppliers. In September, it began to receive advance payments but not deliver goods. The company owed more than 200 suppliers. On September 20, the court sealed up my8848 website, and China's earliest and most well-known e-commerce website went bankrupt.

Mr. Ma believes that when 8848 was established, the equity was very chaotic, and the largest shareholder, a company in Pengcheng, never showed up. The shareholders were unable to coordinate their relations, and the registered capital had not yet been in place when the court seized the company.

In order to cater to capital and pursue financing, 8848 deliberately pursued sales and increased GMV data. The company has been blindly pursuing expansion, but the higher the sales, the lower the gross profit. In the initial stage, the company did not calculate the cost, so the more it sold, the more it lost.

Song Yi thought that JD.com had been losing money when it was doing equity financing, but its losses were under the control of Dong Ge. The low profit margin helped JD.com grow rapidly. JD.com suffered losses for more than ten years from its establishment to its listing. Without the continuous transfusion of funds from Capital Today, JD.com might not have survived until the day of its listing.

In addition to shopping websites, Song Yi also plans to develop Sohan.com into a travel e-commerce website, similar to Ctrip.com. Tourists can book hotels, concert tickets, tourist attraction tickets, KTX train tickets, and pre-book taxi transfers through Sohan.com.

If Song Yi wants to realize this idea, then the New Asia Group must increase its investment in major Korean entertainment companies and first become a major shareholder of SM Entertainment.

In this way, tourists can buy SM Entertainment's artists' concert tickets, physical albums, celebrity peripherals, etc. on Souhan.com. Of course, in addition to SM Entertainment, Song Yi also plans to invest in JYP Entertainment and YG Entertainment at the same time.

Before Girls' Generation debuted, the first girl group to become popular in Asia was actually JYP's Wonder Girls. Their famous song "Nobody" was very catchy.

However, if New Asia becomes a major shareholder of SM Entertainment, it will be difficult for it to invest in JYP Entertainment and YG Entertainment.

Song Yi plans to buy 5%-10% of JYP Entertainment and YG Entertainment this year. He first needs to ensure that all artists from SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment and YG Entertainment are listed on InSchool, especially Park Jin-young from JYP. Among the bosses of the three major entertainment companies, Park Jin-young has always been a hot topic. He actually has the potential to become one of the earliest Internet celebrities in Korea.

Imagine if a foreign tourist watched a Korean drama produced by New Asia Pictures at home and had the idea of ​​traveling to Korea.

So she bought a ticket from Korean Airlines through Sohan.com and applied for a visa online. After she landed, she used a taxi she called through Sohan.com to go directly to the hotel to check in.

She booked tickets for Gyeongbokgung Palace and other attractions on Sohan.com, and bought tickets for TVXQ's concert on Sohan.com. When she wants to buy some celebrity merchandise or albums as souvenirs, she still chooses Sohan.com.

When she was ready to return home, she wanted to buy some Korean cosmetics, Korean ginseng and Korean clothes. Sohan.com would still pack all the gifts for her and send them back home by express. When she got home, these gifts would almost arrive with her.

Sohan.com provides one-stop travel services to foreign tourists. With this travel experience, Song Yi believes that this tourist will definitely believe that Sohan.com can buy any Korean products. If Sohan.com's revenue limit in the Korean market is 600 billion yuan, if the Korean wave culture can sweep Asia, then Sohan.com's revenue target limit in the overseas market will also be about 400 billion yuan. 600 billion + 400 billion, Sohan.com's size can almost catch up with the domestic e-commerce giant JD.com 　See you tomorrow 　　 　 (end of this chapter)