Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

The next morning, the top trending topic on Weibo was: Orange Mobile Phone Sells a Whopping 1.36 Million Units!

The second was Qian Du HR Liu Dong, who went viral because of a set of photos and was nicknamed ’Du Niang’ by netizens.

The third topic was the crash of the 12306 ticket booking system. Office workers and college students, desperate to get home, were all letting loose in the comments section, cursing out the 12306 engineers and their entire family trees.

Chen Yansen sat at his desk and glanced out the window. The sky was gloomy, with snowflakes drifting down sporadically.

He opened Liao Wei’s work report. Yesterday, a total of 64,000 Orange C2 phones and 193,000 Orange D1 phones had been delivered before 10 PM.

In addition, Cloud Speed had also reached a front-line warehouse cooperation agreement with Pisen and Yoobao.

Before the Spring Festival, these two companies would stock their best-selling accessories—power banks, phone cases, tempered glass screen protectors, phone stands, and more—in Cloud Speed Express’s central warehouses and terminal service points ahead of time.

Once a user placed an order on Pinbei, a courier could deliver the product to their door within 12 hours.

Of course, this was just a preliminary trial. Combining food delivery with front-line warehouses was Chen Yansen’s ideal business model.

However, Kuai Pao was just starting out and in a stage of rapid growth, so it didn’t have the spare delivery capacity for flash deliveries.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK—!

A knock came at the door.

”Come in!” Chen Yansen called out casually.

The door was pushed open, and He Shuang, the Director of Administration for Orange Technology, walked in holding a document.

”Boss, this is the event schedule and prize budget for the annual party. It needs your approval.”

He Shuang sat down and pushed the document in front of Chen Yansen.

She was previously the Director of Administration at NetEase and had proactively jumped ship to Orange Technology for the higher salary and better benefits.

Chen Yansen nodded slightly and casually opened it.

The venue was once again the Sky Garden, and the event was divided into an opening, performances, an awards ceremony, a prize draw, and a banquet.

He glanced at the prize list: three grand prizes of 100,000 yuan cash each; eighty-eight first prizes of 30,000 yuan cash each; one hundred eighty-eight second prizes of 10,000 yuan cash each; and three hundred eighty-eight third prizes of 6,666 yuan cash each.

Prize for Everyone: one 64GB Orange C2 phone.

Simple and direct, mostly cash.

SCRITCH SCRATCH SCRATCH—

Chen Yansen picked up a pen and began revising the amounts. The grand prize became 200,000, first prize became 50,000, second prize became 30,000, and third prize became 10,000.

”Go with this version.”

Chen Yansen handed the document to He Shuang and instructed her casually.

Orange Technology and Pinbei only offered quarterly bonuses, not year-end ones, so he significantly increased the prize money for the annual party’s draw.

”Understood, Boss.” He Shuang took the document and turned to find the finance department.

As the Spring Festival approached and his portfolio of companies grew, people like Cao Dahua, Pei Yi, and Liao Wei had all sent him messages asking if he would attend their respective annual parties.

Chen Yansen agreed to all of them!

Power and prestige cannot be delegated.

Chen Yansen understood this principle well. Even if it was tiring, he had to make an appearance at the company parties. Otherwise, after a while, his subordinates might even forget who their boss was.

With that in mind, he sent a message to Song Yuncheng: ”Accompany me on a business trip to Hu City tomorrow.”

”Visiting partner platforms or merchants?” Song Yuncheng replied quickly.

”Attending Cloud Speed Express’s annual party,” Chen Yansen stated plainly.

”Boss, I’m a Pinbei employee.”

”If you don’t go, I’m docking your pay.”

”Chen Bapi!”

Song Yuncheng’s pretty face fell, but she gave a helpless smile and ultimately agreed.

「Meanwhile.」

Huang Zhang stood in the conference hall, facing Meizu’s senior executives, and demanded coldly, ”I don’t care what methods you use! If the MX’s monthly sales don’t reach 500,000 units, you can all get the hell out!”

The Meizu MX had been on the market for half a month with cumulative sales of 237,000 units. On its own, that looked decent, but compared to the Orange C2, it was utterly crushed.

How could Huang Zhang not lose face over this?

”Boss, according to the Market Department’s analysis, the proportion of online channels in the smartphone industry is growing. Take Orange Technology, for example. They have no distributors and no physical retail stores, yet they’re selling over 100,000 units a day...”

Li Nan, the director of the Market Department, began to explain slowly.

”Get to the point! Stop rambling and get on with it!” Huang Zhang snapped irritably.

”We should increase our online sales channels. Open stores on Taobao, Jingdong, Pinbei, Sunning, and Gome Mall simultaneously.”

Startled, Li Nan quickly cut to the chase.

”Then do it. Get them online as soon as possible!” Huang Zhang waved his hand, dismissing the meeting.

Ever since Orange and Xiaomi entered the domestic phone market, making money had gotten harder and harder.

In the past, new product launches were all about hyping up the features of core components like the chip, screen, and camera, while material costs and gross profit margins were kept strictly under wraps. But the last Orange Mobile Phone launch had been a real eye-opener for him.

That bastard Wang Teng had stood on stage, in front of users, the media, and competitors, and nonchalantly broken down the Orange Mobile Phone’s R&D, material, production, shipping, sales, and after-sales costs.

He even shared what equipment and instruments were needed to set up an SMT production line.

Although Huang Zhang believed the numbers were padded, in the eyes of consumers, Wang Teng came across as completely sincere.

When buying an Orange Mobile Phone, consumers at least knew where their money was going.

Now that the Orange D1 and Orange C2 were selling like hotcakes, the sales of other phone manufacturers like Meizu, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Coolpad naturally declined.

After all, the market was only so big. Every bite Orange Technology took was one less bite for them.

For a time, all the second-tier domestic phone manufacturers scrambled to launch their own online channel expansion plans.

Powerhouses like Huawei and ZTE, with their strong foundations and extensive channels, were still playing it cool. They believed they should keep a firm grip on their own online sales channels and had no intention of joining third-party platforms.

「Meanwhile, across the ocean at Apple Headquarters.」

Tim was in a meeting with his executives. His idea was to remove the Home button in the next-generation product.

He saw the trend of full-screen gesture controls taking off, thanks to the success of the Orange Mobile Phone.

But Ricchio, as Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, firmly opposed Tim’s proposal.

’What a joke!’

’As the leader of the smartphone industry, we’re supposed to learn from some regional phone brand in Asia?’

Ricchio was inwardly contemptuous. For one, he felt that Tim’s unilateral decision to modify Apple’s core design was disrespectful to Jobs. For another, he believed the Home button was one of Apple’s signature design elements and shouldn’t be altered so easily.

Tim sneered inwardly at Ricchio’s outright rejection, his mind already racing with thoughts of how to oust the man from Apple’s core team.

「1:00 AM the next day.」

The official Orange Mobile Phone Weibo account announced that on the second day of sales, the Orange D1 sold 480,000 units and the Orange C2 sold 170,000 units.

Compared to the first day, this was a relatively significant drop.

The cumulative sales for the first two days surpassed 2.01 million units, with revenue reaching 3.01 billion yuan.

The main reason for such a large drop was that Orange Mobile Phones had switched to a pre-order model across all channels, which naturally dampened consumer purchasing enthusiasm.

With Shencheng City Factory No. 3 not yet operational, yesterday’s sales alone had already taken up half of the current factory’s monthly production capacity.

Cao Dahua hadn’t expected sales of the Orange C2 and Orange D1 to be so explosive. There was nothing he could do but urge Zuo Hongyu and Zhang Jing daily to accelerate equipment debugging and the pace of new employee recruitment and training.

”Brother Zhu, are you going home for the New Year?”

Inside a dorm room at the Orange Phone Factory, a worker who couldn’t sleep asked Li Yunzhu across from him.

”Nope! With our factory’s production schedule, we’re sure to be packed with overtime during the New Year. Only an idiot would go home.”

Li Yunzhu grew especially excited at the thought of triple pay.

In seven days, he could make a guaranteed 3,000 yuan. Since the factory provided food and lodging, he wasn’t afraid of being lonely, only of being broke.

”I actually want to stay for the overtime too, but I haven’t seen my kid in a year. When I went home last year, he was just learning to walk. My mom said he can run now. I have to go back at least once...”

The worker mumbled on.

Li Yunzhu groggily drifted off to sleep. In his dream, he saw Cao Dahua standing on a platform in the middle of the factory. With a grand wave of his hand, he announced that, starting tomorrow, the hourly wage would increase to 25 yuan.

The thought of his 3,000-yuan overtime pay instantly turning into nearly 4,000 made Li Yunzhu chuckle gleefully in his sleep.

...

...

「The next morning.」

Chen Yansen picked a tight-lipped young man from company security who knew how to drive, and together with Song Yuncheng, he headed for Hu City.

At half-past three in the afternoon, the car stopped in front of the Yun Jin Villa District.

Chen Yansen and Song Yuncheng got out of the car and walked straight into the residential complex.

Xiaoli, the driver, turned the car around and went to a nearby hotel to get a room and rest.

Chen Yansen had lived here for over three years in his past life, so he knew the place like the back of his hand. He walked up to the door of number 116 and opened the copper-clad pine gate.

A lush, green courtyard came into view.

In the garden of over two hundred square meters, there was an octagonal pavilion, a pond, a podocarpus tree, a sofa, and lounge chairs, as well as a barbecue pit and a dining area.

”Huh? The last time I came, the yard was still empty,” Song Yuncheng said, looking curious.

”I hired a design company to renovate it a bit. Go on, take a look inside.”

Chen Yansen pointed to the living room with a smile.

Song Yuncheng stepped inside. The living room had a soaring ceiling, a good seven or eight meters high, and the space was so ridiculously large you could have easily played badminton in it.

”Ah!”

Suddenly!

Song Yuncheng cried out as she fell onto the sofa, flailing wildly.

After scrambling to her feet, she demanded indignantly, ”What kind of sofa is this? You can’t even sit on it properly!”

”This sofa cost 260,000 yuan. It’s filled with water, and with the flip of a switch, the water flows, making it feel like you’re sitting in the ocean.”

Chen Yansen grinned mischievously, found the remote, and pressed the start button.

The soft sofa began to rise and fall, just like ocean waves.

”260,000?” Song Yuncheng’s mouth fell open, at a loss for words. She was now earning over a hundred thousand a month and had nearly two million in savings.

Even so, she thought spending 260,000 on something like this was completely insane.

”You’ll soon find out that this 260,000 was absolutely worth it.”

Chen Yansen took Song Yuncheng’s small hand and said with a light chuckle.

”Stop messing around, we have the annual party to attend tonight,” Song Yuncheng said, her cheeks flushing slightly.

”It won’t be a problem. We have plenty of time.”

With that, Chen Yansen sat down on the edge of the sofa with Song Yuncheng.

The gurgling water in the sofa created a gentle, forward-propelling current. Even without Chen Yansen putting in any effort, they rose and fell with its rhythm.

Two hours later, the two of them leisurely sat up. They then went into the bathroom together, quickly washed up, changed into a fresh set of clothes, and headed out the door.

Meanwhile, Xiaoli received Chen Yansen’s message and immediately drove to the entrance of the villa district.