2003: Starting with Foreign Trade

Chapter 474 Opportunity for Backdoor Listing Emerges (Seeking Monthly Tickets)

The first two hours after the site opens are when traffic is at its highest. People who get the news from other channels come to check it out. But the discounts are so low, and they're all for brand names!

Men are fine, but women have a hard time controlling their spending desires.

So what if it's overstock? They often buy discontinued items too, but I've never seen discontinued items this cheap. Besides, there are so many women's clothing brands, especially some that have just gone out of season. They should still be wearable next year.

It's so cheap, it's really hard to control my spending!
Actually, there were quite a few e-commerce websites in 2007, covering all walks of life. Besides Taobao and JD.com, some of the more well-known ones included eBay, EachNet, Amazon, Yahoo, and so on.

In addition, Dangdang.com, the largest online bookstore in China, which previously capitalized on Tan Jincheng's fame, and Paipai.com, a subsidiary of Tencent, also had considerable influence during this period.

Paipai.com was established in September 2005. It didn't make much progress in its first year. It only started to grow this year, thanks to the boom in online shopping and the traffic generated by Tencent's QQ.

Despite its considerable reputation, Paipai.com, which claims to be one of the top three C2C platforms in China, has extremely low transaction data, making it practically a slacker.

Paipai.com sells everything, just like Taobao. Compared to Taobao, Paipai.com can also directly drive traffic from QQ, making traffic much more convenient than Taobao.

However, it just couldn't take off. It gave people the impression of being just a place to top up QQ coins. Another reason is that although Taobao has a lot of counterfeit goods, Paipai has even more outrageous counterfeit goods.

Paipai.com, once criticized by netizens for having no real goods besides QQ coins, has a very low percentage of Tencent's financial reports despite its huge user base, with only 5000 million users as of the end of the second quarter of this year.

Tan Jincheng had browsed Paipai.com in both his past and present lives. Not to mention its baffling page design, no one knew where the merchants on it came from.

Taobao publicly discloses its GMV, while Paipai.com probably doesn't disclose its GMV because it's too low. Paipai.com's Q2 financial report shows that the number of online products exceeded 10 million, with a growth rate of 20%.

The total number of online products is laughable. As for the 20% growth rate, what was the average growth rate of online shopping in 2007? It was 90.4%.

Tan Jincheng admired Pony Ma's courage to announce this 20% growth rate. In the era when online shopping was at its most aggressive, Paipai.com's growth rate was far below the market average.

The 20% growth rate reveals just how poor Tencent's DNA is in the online shopping sector.

To put it simply, these days any big company could easily create a decent e-commerce website and still achieve a growth rate of only 20%. For Tencent, with its massive user base, to only achieve this growth rate is truly a case of using the best equipment to produce the worst results.

Tencent's investment department got involved in Orange Technology and invested in the Orange Products project. It was precisely for this reason that their own son was too disappointing, so they wanted to see if they could raise another one.

Paipai.com was later sold to Jingdong. Tencent used its resources and cash to invest in Jingdong. After supporting it for so many years, it got shares in Jingdong, which can be considered worthwhile in a sense.

During the golden decade of online shopping, Paipai.com did absolutely nothing. Other e-commerce websites, whether they eventually went bankrupt or were sold, at least enjoyed a few years of popularity. Paipai.com, on the other hand, was nothing from beginning to end.

From 11:11 AM to midnight, it was a little over 12 hours. It was impossible for Tan Jincheng and Gu Qingqing to stay here indefinitely.

However, I still had lunch with the Orange Products project team at noon.

Today's working lunch was paid for out of Tan Jincheng's own pocket. He ordered it directly from a chef at a nearby hotel, a five-star treatment. Boss Tan really went all out.

"I promised to treat you to a good meal, so I can't go back on my word. Don't be so formal today, just eat your fill, and then take turns resting."

Programmers do earn a lot of money and have good benefits, but the workload is also really high. The website runs day and night and requires a lot of people to maintain it. Even when there are no major events, the workload is still quite high.

The workshop employees of FlashTech and Jinpeng Industry work 12-hour shifts. It's hard work, but it's not like there's no rest time. As long as you arrange your shifts properly, you can relax a bit on your shift change day.

The employees of Orange Technology are not so fortunate. Their working hours are irregular, and they have to work overtime whenever needed. With the internet still not very developed, they mostly live near the Flashpoint Building.

The apartment buildings that have already been delivered are mostly occupied by employees of Orange Technology, in order to make it convenient for them to work overtime.

Despite their comfortable living conditions, many of them are not even familiar with their own living environment. They either go home to take a shower and then come back to work overtime, or they go home and fall asleep immediately.

Among the employees of Tan Jincheng's companies, if you were to ask which company's employees are least familiar with Beicang, it would definitely be the employees of Orange Technology. Their lives, apart from going to get foot massages, are basically confined to the Flash Drive Building area.

Incidentally, the area for foot washing has now expanded to this radius.

These bosses are very cunning; they've opened bathhouses in neighborhoods near apartment buildings. They only dare not mess with Tan Jincheng, otherwise they could have opened one right downstairs in the Flash Drive Building.

However, the area downstairs and the surrounding area really need some tidying up; it's really affecting the image. "Thank you for the treat, boss, but please don't say 'let's have a good meal' anymore; it sounds like a doctor's last words to me."

"Exactly, we often work overtime anyway, so this term always sounds a bit strange."

"Haha, why are you so superstitious at such a young age? I'm just showing you concern. Think about it, besides your parents, even your girlfriends would care about your health and whether you're eating well, right?"

"Pshaw, we programmers don't have girlfriends."

"That's right, we female programmers don't have boyfriends either. Boss, you should save your concern for President Gu. We don't need it."

Before lunch, Boss Tan showed off his skills and won over the Orange Products project team. They finally understood why this boss, who had previously been indifferent, was called a marketing expert.

If he's capable of making fun of himself, what else can't he come up with?

A hearty lunch replenished their energy, and the energetic young man was not going to listen to Boss Tan's advice to take turns resting. He could work as a programmer in any internet factory, but he didn't have many opportunities to be on the big stage.

Seeing that this wouldn't work, Tan Jincheng immediately forced them to rest: "You need to allocate your energy. We're going to be working all night tonight. If you're too excited now, what will you do in the middle of the night?"

After leaving the Orange Products project team, Tan Jincheng and Gu Qingqing went downstairs to her office for a short rest.

"I won't go over there this afternoon. Just keep an eye on things over there, but don't work too hard. Judging from the performance in the first hour or so since it went online, the data shouldn't look too bad. We can even add some fake data to it, you know. Data is all about how people manipulate it."

Gu Qingqing smiled and said, "It should be alright. So many low-priced limited edition items sold out this morning, so the overall GMV shouldn't be too bad."

Each brand, including Adidas, Nike, and other major brands, had a limited-edition low-priced model. Adidas's model sold out in less than an hour, and as the news spread, the limited-edition models of other top brands also quickly sold out.

These top-tier brands alone have already generated over 300 million yuan in GMV. Including other brands of all sizes, Vipshop's GMV reached over 800 million yuan within one hour of its launch.

This data is incredibly impressive for an e-commerce website that is still in the internal testing phase and has only been operating for one day. This is 2007, not 2017, and it is already very rare to have so many consumers supporting it.

"Let's announce to the public that our GMV for the first hour was 1500 million. Doubling it shouldn't be a problem. As for the GMV for the whole day, you can decide how to handle it then."

Doubling it isn't unreasonable, is it? Anyway, we're not a listed company, so outsiders can't possibly know this kind of data. As long as we don't exaggerate too much, our competitors won't expose us, since they also have their moments of boasting.

"Is there something wrong with you not coming this afternoon? By the way, what have you been doing so mysteriously with Huang Ming and Cheng Linfeng these past few days?" Gu Qingqing asked curiously.

Huang Ming had been in charge of assisting with the launch of Orange Products Club, but he was not present at such an important moment today, which is puzzling in itself.

I asked around and found out that he was on a business trip to Xiangcheng. It seems that neither FlashDrive nor ByteDance has any major business in Xiangcheng that would require the head of an investment institution to personally go on a business trip.

Unless there are major events.

Tan Jincheng nodded: "There is something I need to discuss. I have an appointment with President Cheng this afternoon, but it's not convenient to disclose this information at the moment. Currently, only the three of us know about it."

Gu Qingqing suddenly realized that Tan Jincheng would never hide anything from her about Shan Chi's affairs; he would tell her anything she wanted to ask. Now that even she couldn't hear about it, it must be something very important.

Only three people know about this, so it must involve highly confidential matters. Although I'm a little curious, I know that I shouldn't ask questions I shouldn't ask.

Judging from this, her husband is about to make some big move again, something she can't even know in advance, so it must be quite a big deal.

Any project involving ByteDance's Huge Engine is definitely related to the capital market. With the A-share market in a continuous decline recently, Huge Engine, the actual controller of Qilu Securities Beicang Hengshan Road branch, which has completely disappeared from the market, has been called a stock market god.

Buying at the bottom is definitely not the right thing to do at this time, and there's nothing I can't tell myself about this; only three people know, and it involves the capital market.

Only four words came to Gu Qingqing's mind.

"Backdoor listing!"

Are there any listed companies in Xiangcheng that meet the criteria for Flash Technology's backdoor listing?

(End of this chapter)