Rebirth of America, this is my era

Chapter 297

January is summer in Australia, with the lowest temperature reaching 20 degrees Celsius. The sunny weather attracts many tourists to the beach, and the fact that it is surrounded by the sea has spawned many water activities.

Banana boat, kayak, water sofa;

Walking ball, motorboat, deep sea snorkeling;

If you can name the project, you can find it here.

For most people living in the northern hemisphere, Australia in December is a holiday paradise. But for the Johnson family who spend most of their time in the Bay Area, water sports are not that interesting.

Whatever is here, California has, and whatever is not here, Ethan Jones can make available to California.

Faced with this fact, the core purpose of their coming to Australia is to change the place and change their mood.

For example, I went to the Sydney Opera House, which was built only two years ago, to listen to a Christmas Eve theme concert;

But Thomas didn’t think it sounded good;
For example, on Christmas Day, I attended a dance party of the indigenous Gediger people;

The scene was lively, but also really crowded;
For example, I went to the Hunter Valley, Australia’s wine-producing region, to learn how to make wine;
Thomas bluntly stated that Australian grapes are not as good as California grapes;
And went to Kangaroo Island, and had a close encounter with Australia's national treasure...

"Hey, hey, hey! Carrot! Don't provoke me!"

"Oh - white radish! Why do you like to steal other people's food so much?"

"Damn! That's shit! Don't you two go smell the shit on the ground!"

"Oh Sxxt!"

"Ethan! Look at these two! They are not listening at all! Hurry up and call them over!"

When a shrill roar resounded through the sky, the red and white figures that were playing on the grass suddenly raised their heads, stared with round eyes, nostrils bulged, and looked around with horror.

Ethan laughed out loud at the scene that looked more like a lightning strike than a fear. He put his right hand to his mouth and blew a loud whistle. The crisp sound attracted the little guys to look in the direction of the sound. After seeing Ethan clapping at them, they hurriedly took small steps and rushed over.

Then, she fell headfirst into Ethan's arms.

Not only that, they also turned their heads instinctively.

He cast a frightened look at Evelyn who was roaring beside him.

This situation made Evelyn so angry that she threw the leash in her hand to Ethan.

Without saying anything, he turned and left.

"Oh - you two are in trouble -"

Seeing his sister's angry look, Ethan rolled up the leash with a smile and gently whipped the furry child twice, "Why don't you hurry up and catch up?"

The furry children seemed to be able to understand human words, but it seemed that Ethan's beating made them feel pain. Before he finished speaking, they had already jumped out and chased Evelyn all the way, wanting to get away from the seemingly kind but beating demon...

Carrot and Turnip are two Scottish Shetland ponies that Roy Disney gave to Ethan a few months ago as a gift to congratulate Johnson on the success of his home console.

One head is auburn, the other is snow-white. At first glance, everyone would call him a handsome boy.

That's why, when they met Evelyn, the girl fell in love with them.

In order to be able to interact with the little guys every day, Evelyn even bought a house for them next to her own villa, and hired a special breeder to take care of them.

But unfortunately, even though Evelyn bought the best feed for them, fed them the best horse grass, and even specially asked the Imperial Valley in California to supply them, and fed them the best imperial carrots without wood cores and earthy smell, they were still shy.

She only shows affection in front of Ethan.

To be honest, this fact confused Evelin. She didn't understand why, in order to make the two ponies close to her, she had specifically told the breeders not to feed the ponies carrots.

When she is the only one who can feed the sweet and delicious snacks...

Why are these two guys like ungrateful wolves and impossible to tame?

Oh no!
The wolves in Hoh Xil can even recognize car logos!

So why are these two ponies so stupid?

Could it be that their good looks are earned through their intelligence?
Whenever Evelyn expressed doubt, Ethan would laugh secretly, because he would never say that while Evelyn was feeding the two little ones carrots, he would also secretly feed them some apples, oats, corn and soybeans covered in syrup.

When the candy-loving horse meets Ethan, who feeds him candy directly...

There must be something fishy going on if these two little guys don't grab Ethan's trouser legs and rub them hard!
After all, no matter how delicious carrots are, they are not as sweet as syrup!

Hehe ~
After spending nearly a month in Australia and going on a spontaneous trip with Thomas and Linda, carrying carrots and radishes, Ethan returned to California feeling a little lost.

It's really wonderful to live a life where you do nothing and spend money recklessly.

If he didn't have so many rivals, each of whom wanted to tear his bones and marrow dry, he would probably have already found a successor to temporarily take over the position of president.

But now that he has returned to normal life, Ethan has returned to work, and the first thing he did was to call Steve Ballmer, who had been on vacation in North America.

"Did anything major happen here during my absence from North America?"

Although Ethan has promoted this bald man to the chairman of Destiny Pictures, as long as he remains as secretary, the daily task of collecting intelligence will still fall on him.

Of course, he no longer has to do these tasks himself. In the past year, Ballmer has had two assistants, and now all the hard work belongs to the young people.

After hearing Ethan's question, Ballmer immediately took out a document from the folder and handed it over. Not only that, he also said: "Boss, although a lot of things happened in North America during your absence, those things are not important to us."

"The only case that may require our attention is the Chrysler case."

Ethan opened the file and took a quick glance, and the whole picture came to his mind.

Chrysler is an automobile company that has become an important force in the American automobile industry since it acquired the Dodge brothers in 1928. It is known as the American Big Three along with Ford and GM. But this success came to an abrupt end in 1973, because the oil crisis and the introduction of new automobile emission standards made their muscle cars instantly become "junk" in the market.

In order to meet market demand in a short period of time and produce lighter and more efficient small cars, they did not want to start from scratch and came up with a roundabout idea. They bought shares of Japanese Mitsubishi and let it be reborn under the name of Chrysler. They used Japanese technology and low labor costs to directly supply cheap goods to the American market.

To put it simply, it is OEM.

But unfortunately, before they could officially launch their products into the market, the U.S. antitrust agency had already taken action, prohibiting U.S. automakers from forming U.S.-Japan or U.S.-Europe alliances because they felt that these actions would allow Japanese or European automakers to enter the U.S. market at a lower cost, and the profit-seeking behavior of U.S. capitalists would cause a large number of U.S. workers to lose their jobs.

When this fact came to light, Chrysler had no choice but to slam on the brakes, stifle its own desires, and hastily launch its domestically developed products to the market. However, due to insufficient R&D time, insufficient testing time, and cutting corners in the manufacturing process, a bunch of problems broke out as soon as the products were launched on the market.

Then...

They were in deep financial crisis.

A large number of recalls left them with huge debts, and some branches were insolvent and had to go bankrupt. In 1977, they sold their European companies to the Peugeot Group. Then, countless workers received layoff notices and lost their jobs. But even so, Chrysler had no hope of rebirth. The newly appointed executives found that according to the compensation scale and loan interest rates at the time, Chrysler would go bankrupt in two years at most. So, they made a bold decision. Since the Federation felt that the alliance between Mi-Japan and Mi-Europe would cause countless American workers to lose their jobs and force their companies to bear huge social costs alone, they would quit and put the whole thing on the table!
They're going to tell everyone!

It’s not that they don’t want to save the company!

Rather, the Federation wanted to make all of them bear the losses alone with just a few words!

Chrysler directly notified the U.S. Congress last year, demanding that they provide a low-interest or even interest-free loan guarantee of US$1.5 billion in the shortest possible time, otherwise they would immediately declare bankruptcy.

This would result in 10,000 workers being immediately unemployed and at least 30,000 workers being indirectly unemployed.

Although their behavior was somewhat shameless, as Thomas said to Ethan before, when a company can provide jobs for tens of thousands of people, it is actually too big to fail.

So, when the gentlemen in Congress found that if they did not rescue Chrysler, they might face the danger of having their heads blown off by the unemployed people, the U.S. Congress quickly held a meeting and passed a guaranteed loan bill for Chrysler at the end of last year, on December 20th, the day when the Destiny Game was on holiday.

Renzong even signed it into law four days earlier, on January 7, 1980.

With the credibility of the entire federation as a backing, we guarantee that aid can flow unimpeded...

"so……"

"What does this have to do with us?"

Ethan smiled and shook the documents in his hand.

Although it was a question, his eyes were full of admiration.

Ballmer understood what his boss meant and shrugged, saying, "When Congress decided to aid Chrysler and retain their autonomy, everyone knew how great the employment pressure was for the federal government. Especially when a prosperous industry is hit by foreign companies and experiences a recession, the unemployment caused by the recession is unacceptable to the federal government."

"so……"

"If, I mean if, in the future those people like Warner and Commodore come up with some bad ideas, some bad ideas that we can't compete with, we can go directly to Congress to complain and tell those guys how many families will be in crisis if the game of fate goes bankrupt."

"Although we are in the entertainment industry, we also have industrial production, and our production is all carried out in North America. Not only that, we also have manufacturing companies. The work of those people can give us a huge advantage in foreign wars, especially..."

"Michael Blanco and his colleagues are still very special."

"It's okay for those veterans to be unemployed once, but if they are unemployed again when they return to society and work properly...then they will really cause trouble."

Ethan laughed at the unpretentious words.

He admitted that what Ballmer said was exactly what he thought.

But many times, things can be done but words cannot be said.

So Ethan shook his head and said, "Steve, I think you think too much."

“How many people are there in our manufacturing company?”

"It's impossible to achieve the same scale as Chrysler!"

"Oh, boss, I may not have considered this issue. I was negligent." Ballmer did not argue and admitted his mistake directly. However, the next second, he said, "Boss, since this matter has nothing to do with us, I will report other work to you."

"In fact, even if you didn't come to me today, I would come to you."

"Because our company's operating report for last year has been compiled."

"Although the specific figures have not been verified with all parties, there should not be any major problems with our book figures because they are basically consistent with our cash."

"Really?" Ethan liked the news very much. "Let's take a look."

Is it difficult to produce a company’s full-year operating report?

In the paperless office future, this kind of thing will be relatively simple. As long as people in each department do not slack off and enter various data on time, most software will be able to generate corporate reports with one click. Products like Oracle have interactive report generation functions.

It’s just that software cannot be held responsible for its own actions and it cannot go to jail when something goes wrong, so before publishing a report, the person responsible needs to confirm the data they are responsible for.

And this confirmation is also very quick in the age of digital office.

But in this era of paper-based office, this kind of thing is still very difficult. It is very troublesome to flip through paper data, and staff have to check them one by one before filling out the report.

Ethan had wanted to urge all departments to hurry up after work so that he could see last year's operating data in early February, but he didn't expect these people to have done it ahead of time?
This is really...

Looking at the report handed over by Ballmer, Ethan took it and said with a smile: "Are any of you secretly working overtime? I won't pay overtime for voluntary overtime!"

The half-joking words made the big bald man shake his head repeatedly and deny it: "Oh my boss! You really have a very good self-image! Is there anyone in this world who likes to work? How could we secretly work overtime? Isn't that crazy behavior?"

At this point, Ballmer laughed because he was the crazy guy, so he changed the topic and said, “Okay, okay, okay, the reason why our data came out so quickly last year is very simple, because all of our company’s marketing was concentrated in the first half of last year…”

When Destiny Game launched a product last year and put all its marketing efforts into the first half of the year, it only needed to sort out the accounts for the first half of the year, and the subsequent operations would be mechanical routine operations. When the financial report for the first half of the year was already prepared in the second half of the year, it would be very easy to fill out the comprehensive report for the whole year.

As for the rest of the comprehensive report?
This thing is not a problem at all for Ballmer, who studied mathematics but also likes to write essays.

As expected, after opening the report, the first thing Ethan saw was the comprehensive catalog. He skipped over the company introduction and overall strategy, which everyone knew, and directly turned his attention to the company structure.

Destiny Game is a limited liability company whose main business is the research and development, production and sales of electronic games. It is a mixed business of software and hardware. At the same time, it has two wholly-owned subsidiaries, Destiny Pictures and Michael Blanco Manufacturing, which has not yet been split, as well as a 51%-owned subsidiary, Western Design Company, which was co-founded with Bill Mensch, and two laboratories, one called SQL and the other Engelbart.

Destiny Pictures also has a wholly-owned subsidiary, Destiny Music.

Destiny Music also has a 50%-owned subsidiary, Geffen Records, which was founded by David Geffen when he came to Ethan Jones.

As for Apple and Microsoft?
In the former case, when Ethan gave Steve Jobs a check, it was a personal check, so according to normal business procedures, the investment was made in his personal name, and at that time, the Game of Destiny had not been officially established, so the shares could not be transferred to the company in any way.

The latter Microsoft was even simpler. Ethan Jones got 20% of the shares with just a spreadsheet idea, so in the final equity transfer, he was the one who was listed on the list.

In this case, the reports from Apple and Microsoft will not be reflected in the financial statements of Destiny Game.

In addition, there is another company related to the Destiny game, but it will not appear in the financial statements of the Destiny game, that is Nintendo Kyoto Chip Manufacturing Company.

This company existed because it was the Neon agent of MOS 6502. When it was first established, Ethan Jones only obtained % of the shares as a co-owner, because Chuck Pete hoped that Ethan could supervise Nintendo and allow them to sell cheap chips to Neon.

Therefore, the shares of this company still belong to Ethan personally. Even if the cooperation collapses and Western Design resumes supply, this layer of shares has not been transferred by Ethan to the name of Destiny Game.

For the general public, the structure of the Destiny Game is already very complicated, but for Ethan, who has read countless financial statements of giants in his previous life, this structure is really simple and clear.

A tree diagram can break it down.

After confirming that Ballmer had not made a mistake in the company's structure, Ethan turned the page with confidence. When he looked at the financial report, the revenue of Destiny Game...

It made him overjoyed!

(End of this chapter)