Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

At 1:00 AM, Chen Yansen posted a group photo from Pinbei’s 618 Grand Promotion celebration on Weibo.

In the picture, there was everything: an outdoor barbecue, hot pot, beer, and more.

On top of 1.5 times their overtime pay, everyone also received a lucky red envelope with a random amount from 1,000 to 10,000 yuan.

In the last photo, Chen Yansen stood in the middle of over thirty employees who had won the 10,000-yuan grand prize, his face beaming with a brilliant smile. The atmosphere was incredibly lively.

「Meanwhile.」

「Hang City Ali Headquarters.」

Xu Kun, Li Bin, Du Yaoyao, Tang Qin, and the others looked at the photos and couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret.

They knew that Pinbei’s compensation and benefits system was identical to the old FoxTao’s. The overtime pay alone was a substantial monthly income.

Ali’s benefits were good too, but overtime pay?

There wasn’t a single cent, of course.

After all, everyone was ”volunteering” for overtime. Bringing up money would be unseemly.

「8:30 AM, Zhuxianzhuang Science and Technology Park.」

The Moss Smart Speaker was set to launch in just over an hour. Chen Yansen felt that pricing it at 799 yuan for the domestic market was bound to result in less-than-satisfactory sales.

But from a strategic standpoint, the Moss Smart Speaker was, after all, a major product for Orange Technology.

So, after parking his car, he walked straight into Building 9.

He went to his office and followed his usual routine of checking data and handling work emails. Once he was done, he stood by the window, chewing on a straw as he looked down at the grounds below.

Employees from Pinbei, Orange Technology, Orange Pay, and Toutiao were filing into the building one after another.

Before the launch, the Moss Smart Speaker team had gotten hundreds of major influencers from the digital and tech circles to promote it with articles and videos on channels like Weibo, Toutiao, Youku, and Sohu Video.

Wang Teng had even targeted ”What’s Worth Buying” and FoxTao, placing sponsored, ”must-have” style articles in their product recommendation sections.

They would find out exactly how many units it would sell soon enough.

As for the overseas market, Wang Teng had leveraged Zhou Shouzhi’s connections. Playing up the gimmick of it being the world’s first smart speaker, he easily secured the content rights from Amazon Music, Pandora, Sirius, and Wolfram Alpha.

Recently, Wang Teng had been busy expanding overseas sales channels. For online, he’d approached Amazon and eBay; for offline, he’d contacted Best Buy and Lowe’s.

Ye Qiuping’s negotiations with Paramount were still ongoing. Paramount wanted a 15% commission to share its *Star Trek* merchandise sales channels with Orange Technology.

But Ye Qiuping was only willing to offer 7%. The gap between them was large, and they’d been unable to reach an agreement.

Normally, anything from 5% to 20% was considered a reasonable range. The key issue, however, was that Alexa wasn’t a core character in *Star Trek*.

So, Ye Qiuping’s offer of a 7% commission was, in fact, quite reasonable.

Chen Yansen wasn’t in a hurry. He let Ye Qiuping continue her back-and-forth with the contact at Paramount Pictures.

In any case, he had already secured the lifetime license for the character of Alexa. Whether Paramount agreed or not, the overseas launch date wouldn’t change. He was determined to ride the wave of *Star Trek’s* popularity and hype.

As soon as the clock struck ten, the launch went live simultaneously across seven channels: Orange Mall, Taobao, Gome, Sunning, Dangdang, Yixun, and Amazon.

Chen Yansen glanced at his watch but didn’t rush back to his seat to check the real-time data.

「On the other side.」

At the Jingdong Headquarters, Liu Qiangdong finished his morning meeting with the procurement and sales managers for each category and returned to his office.

This 618 Grand Promotion was crucial for him.

Brokerage firms in Hong Kong Island and the Lighthouse Country had very low valuation expectations for Jingdong—a paltry 6 billion US dollars.

This infuriated Handsome Dong. He first rejected the Hong Kong stock exchange, then Nasdaq, publicly declaring that Jingdong would absolutely not go public for anything less than a 12 billion US dollar valuation.

He put on a tough front, but only he knew the bitterness in his heart.

Multiple investors, including IDG, Redwood Capital, iResearch, Digital Sky Technology, and Tiger Fund, had long been grumbling about him.

”President Liu, I’m not asking you to be profitable, but you can’t just keep losing money, can you? Just get Jingdong listed first, and we’ll talk later.”

Shen Nanpeng of Redwood Capital urged, pushing Liu Qiangdong to initiate the IPO plan. If Jingdong could go public and raise funds sooner, investors like him could cash out and realize their profits sooner.

’But a 6 billion US dollar valuation? Isn’t that just insulting?’

Domestic investment firms had valued Pinbei at 10 billion US dollars. In comparison, Jingdong’s decade-plus of hard work seemed like a joke.

To boost sales figures, Liu Qiangdong had the operations department launch a ton of promotions: ”Computers and digital products from 50% off,” ”Site-wide flash sale on home appliances from 52% off.”

”Snag headphones for 90% off, grab computers for 50% off.”

”9-yuan USB drives, 99-yuan printers.”

”Get 618 yuan back for every 1,000 yuan spent on large appliances, get 61.8 yuan back for every 100 spent on small appliances.”

There was also a special flash sale for the Apple iPhone 4S, with prices as low as 2,999 yuan.

”Huh? It looks like Orange Technology’s Moss Smart Speaker has gone on sale!”

Liu Qiangdong, sitting in his chair, suddenly remembered.

He expertly opened his browser, found the official link to Orange Mall in a bookmark folder named ”Little Brother,” and clicked on it.

’Sales: 1694?’

’This thing has totally bombed, hasn’t it?’

Liu Qiangdong felt a laugh coming on, and the next second, he let it out. ’I was starting to think you could succeed every single time, kid!’ he thought.

Looking at Chen Yansen’s track record, it seemed there wasn’t a single project he couldn’t make successful, whether in e-commerce or manufacturing.

He had won battle after battle, and his record was there for all to see.

Liu Qiangdong understood perfectly well why investors valued Chen Yansen so highly and were willing to give Pinbei a valuation premium of over 20%. To put it bluntly, the guy’s ability to execute was just terrifying.