Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

”One hundred billion Hua Yuan? In less than two months?”

At the Hang City Ali Headquarters, Ma Liyun’s eyes lit up when he heard the news. He immediately decided: Yu’e Bao had to be ruthlessly copied.

The potential returns from 100 billion in idle funds were far more than the five to six hundred million in annual book profits. More critically, it could upgrade a payment tool into financial software, boosting user retention and ecosystem synergy.

Furthermore, keeping that 100 billion in Yu’e Bao could generate at least a million new orders a day for Pinbei, creating a complementary relationship between their e-commerce and financial services.

For context, the Ali e-commerce division’s average daily sales were around 3 billion Hua Yuan. On the day of the Double Eleven promotion, they sold 19.7 billion Hua Yuan, approximately 6.6 times the usual amount.

Meanwhile, Pinbei’s average daily sales were 800 million, and on the day of the Double Eleven promotion, they sold 7.03 billion Hua Yuan, approximately 8.8 times their usual amount.

This showed that using Yu’e Bao to lock in user funds and prevent them from flowing to competing websites could effectively boost a company’s own e-commerce volume.

”What’s the development progress on Pocket Change?”

With this in mind, Ma Liyun asked Lu Zhaoxi.

”About 45% complete. The architecture design is finished, and we’re currently working on the account system, transaction processing module, and profit calculation engine. We expect to have all core R&D finished before the end of January. Integration with the fund companies will need to begin in February.”

Lu Zhaoxi answered immediately.

For Ali, Q4 was always the busiest quarter. The Double Eleven and Double Twelve promotions came one after another, followed by preparations for the Christmas and New Year’s Shopping Festival and the New Year’s Goods Festival. Naturally, the development of Pocket Change had slowed down considerably.

”It needs to go live by the end of February!” Ma Liyun commanded.

In his view, Pocket Change was far more important than Taobao Delivery. It held immense strategic value for Alibaba and deserved their full effort.

Lu Zhaoxi wanted to ask for another half a month, but one look at Lao Ma’s determined expression told him this wasn’t a negotiation, but an order. So, he nodded heavily and agreed through gritted teeth.

”Mr. Ma, from what I know, companies like Huawei, ZTE, Xiaomi, 360, and NetEase have all purchased Orange Technology’s voice development toolkit and are preparing to enter the smart voice assistant market. Should we follow suit?”

Jiang Fan, who was currently the Vice President of Aliyun and in charge of the Aliyun Phone business, suddenly spoke up.

The Aliyun Phone was a step above the 360 Mobile Phone. Although both were essentially custom-branded devices, Ali had integrated features like cloud computing, big data, a security center, and cloud services on top of the Android system to create the Aliyun OS.

From the Celestial Language W700 to the Little Hornet W619 and Big Hornet W806, quite a few smartphones were running the Aliyun OS.

Ma Liyun licensed the Aliyun OS to other phone manufacturers for free. His goal, similar to that of Zhou Hongyi, Ding Lei, and others, was ultimately to compete for the traffic gateways of the mobile internet.

”We can,” Ma Liyun said with a slight nod after a moment of thought.

Although Ali had some technological foundation in the field of artificial intelligence, their research focused on different areas. Different fields require different expertise, and in voice recognition and generation, Orange Technology had the most advanced tech in the country.

He and Wang Jian had discussed this in depth once. With Ali’s R&D capabilities, developing a voice recognition tool wouldn’t be difficult, but surpassing the performance of the competition would be quite challenging.

Compared to the 20 million one-time licensing fee, purchasing the patent license was the most cost-effective option.

”No problem,” Jiang Fan quickly replied.

”Now that we’re done with work, let’s talk about something happy. Since we met our 2012 performance goals a month ahead of schedule, on behalf of the board of directors, I’ve decided that at the end of the year, we will issue stock option rewards ranging from three hundred to two hundred thousand shares to all Ali employees at P5 level and above.”

Ma Liyun announced with a smile.

Hearing this, Lu Zhaoxi, Zhang Yong, Jiang Fan, and the others couldn’t help but smile.

Although their salaries were high, no one would ever complain about having too much money.

The junior P5 employees would get three hundred shares, while they were the ones getting two hundred thousand. Calculated at a price of thirty US Dollars per share, these options were worth at least forty million Hua Yuan.

「At the same time.」

Chen Yansen stood on the second-floor corridor of Office Building Six, looking down at the dense crowd of employees below. He loudly announced Pinbei’s second stock option incentive plan: everyone from customer service staff to the CEO would receive rewards ranging from five hundred to two hundred thousand shares.

Just like the first time, 25% would vest each year, to be fully received over four years.

After the company went public and the lock-up period ended, the shares could be freely traded.

Zhang Wenbo, Xiang Pengfei, Zhang Yifeng, Hu Yun, Zhuang Rui, and the others were all visibly excited, grinning like fools.

They were no longer the naive rookies they had been two years ago and understood the value of Pinbei’s equity very well. At 11 US Dollars per share and a total of 2 billion shares, even just 100,000 shares could potentially be cashed in for tens of millions in the future.

Huang Zheng, Cai Qiming, Chen Peng, Fei Qiweng, Xiong Li, and other mid-level managers who had joined later were also overjoyed.

2012 was about to end. Although they had received overtime pay, Pinbei’s nearly 3,000 employees had been busy from the beginning of the year to the end. Many programmers, operations staff, and customer service representatives had had precious little time to rest.

Chen Yansen’s stock option incentive came at the perfect time, giving everyone’s morale a huge boost.

”Over the next three days, our colleagues in the HR department will meet with each of you to sign the option agreements. We still have one more Double Twelve promotion left in 2012, so let’s keep up the great work.”

Chen Yansen added with a smile.

The moment his voice fell, a roar like a tidal wave erupted throughout the entire building.

When the employees of Orange Technology, Today Technology, and Orange Pay heard the commotion, they couldn’t help but smile knowingly. They knew for sure that the boss was handing out cash like crazy again.