Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

It was Saturday, the day after he returned to Xucheng, so the Science and Technology Park was quiet and deserted. Fewer than a third of the staff were working overtime.

Chen Yansen parked his car, took the elevator to the top floor, and pushed open the door to his office.

A money tree sat on his desk, lush and green as it grew toward the sun.

He turned on his computer and logged into the data backend.

Chen Yansen first checked Pinbei’s core data. With top-tier traffic funnels from QQ and WeChat, supplemented by traffic from the Orange Application Mall, Lingxi Browser, and Toutiao, both its daily active users and daily sales were steadily increasing. Last week, the average daily transaction volume had astonishingly reached 900 million yuan.

More than double Jingdong’s!

The top-tier categories were food, home goods, women’s apparel, and beauty. The second tier consisted of digital appliances, outdoor sports, mother and baby products, and lingerie. Categories like men’s apparel, footwear, entertainment, auto accessories, and luggage accounted for the smallest percentage of sales.

From the category structure, it was easy to see that Pinbei’s user base was still predominantly female.

In the domestic market, Orange Mobile Phone’s shipments had already surpassed Mountain Star’s. According to estimates from the Yiguan Data Network, if Mountain Star failed to increase its sales pace in Q4, it was bound to lose its title as the top seller of smartphones.

The Orange F1, priced at 99 US dollars, and the Orange F3, at 399 US dollars, were selling extremely well in Nigeria and Abyssinia. The former served the low-end market, while the latter targeted the high-end, specifically competing for customers of the Mountain Star Galaxy series, the Apple 4S, and the Apple 5.

Factoring in the sales data for the Orange F2 and Lemon D1, weekly sales could reach 150,000 to 160,000 units.

As a result, Cao Dahua had no choice but to expand the training program for after-sales repair staff. In addition to dispatching personnel to East Africa, he also had to prepare for the Eastern European Market and the company’s domestic offline stores.

Sales of the Alexa Smart Speaker in the European and American Markets were gradually stabilizing, hovering around 20,000 units per day. It might not seem like much, but the Moss Smart Speaker was only selling 6,000 units per day across all platforms in the domestic market.

The Market Department’s full-year sales forecast was: 8 million units for Alexa, 2.4 million units for Moss, for a total of just over 10 million units.

Chen Yansen was well aware that the total market capacity for smart speakers would continue to rise over the next few years. It would eventually peak at 200 million units annually before beginning a steady decline.

However, given the limitations of network infrastructure, the economy, the app ecosystem, and sales channels, selling 10 million units in 2012 was already an exceptionally impressive achievement.

Ten minutes later, Chen Yansen closed the data backend and opened his email.

The first email was an industry research report from the Forest Research Company. It detailed the data plan prices of mainstream carriers in the Lighthouse Country and the current state of the short-form video sector.

Chen Yansen’s eyes widened in slight surprise as he scanned the report. When it came to setting mobile data prices, the telecom carriers in the Lighthouse Country were every bit as ruthless as China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom.

They offered two types of billing models: tiered pricing and unlimited plans. There were also significant price differences between carriers, depending on their network coverage.

The price per gigabyte of data ranged from 7.5 to 20 US dollars. Higher prices meant faster network speeds, and vice versa.

As a result, most mobile users in the Lighthouse Country opted for unlimited data plans. The price was higher, but it saved them from worrying about huge bills for data overages.

For example, T-Mobile’s Unlimited 4G plan started at 70 US dollars per month and included unlimited talk, text, and data.

The upside was its low price, but the downside was slightly slower speeds and more limited coverage.

Sprint’s Everything Data plan was priced at 109.9 US dollars per month and also included unlimited talk, text, and data. However, they were known to secretly throttle the connection speeds of heavy data users.

MetroPCS’s ”4G LTE for All” plan offered unlimited talk, text, and 4G data for just 55 US dollars a month, but its coverage was currently limited to only 14 cities.

Overall, mobile network speeds in the Lighthouse Country were in a transitional period, shifting from 3G to 4G LTE. The 4G network was still in its early days, while 3G still commanded over seventy percent of the market share. Average download speeds ranged from 5 to 20 MBps.

’At least short-form video apps have some room to breathe.’

Chen Yansen silently assessed.

In fact, his judgment was correct. Smartphone penetration in the Lighthouse Country was around 50%, and with the 4G network rapidly expanding, the hardware conditions were in place for the creation and sharing of short-form videos.

The progenitor of short-form video, Vine, had already launched back in January.

Instagram had yet to build a video-sharing feature into its app. However, according to the analysis from the Forest Research Company, available information indicated that Instagram had definitely begun research and development on a short-form video feature.

It was clear that internet entrepreneurs in the Lighthouse Country had already targeted the short-form video sector; they just hadn’t yet figured out the recommendation algorithms or a clear path to monetization.

Chen Yansen leaned back in his chair, already formulating a plan to tackle the North American market.

’It can’t be helped. To launch a short-form video app domestically, I’d have to wait at least another two years. It’s better to develop in overseas markets first, use the user data from Europe and America to optimize the recommendation engine ahead of schedule, and accumulate a user base.’

’Once the time is right, I’ll charge into the domestic short-form video sector.’

’Who should be in charge of the overseas market?’

’Liang Bo?’

’Is he up for it?’

Chen Yansen muttered under his breath.

’Liang Bo is technically skilled, but when it comes to business development, he’s just... adequate. He’s never made any major blunders, but he’s also never proposed an operational plan that was truly brilliant.’

’As for Zhou Shouzhi, I still need him to develop the smartphone markets in Europe and America.’

For a moment, Chen Yansen was torn. Should he have Zhou Shouzhi manage it as well, or should he find someone new for the role?