Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 240 Guandan and Happy Landlord
Although Tencent is now a leading internet company in China, it is still in its early stages, so Mr. Ma has never considered acquiring any company.

Only after Tencent went public and had ample capital did it gradually begin its acquisition spree.

However, the acquisition did give Mr. Ma an idea.

Renren.com is now encroaching on Tencent's core business. If it continues to develop in this way, Tencent's growth momentum will definitely be greatly affected.

With Xiaonei.com being so aggressive, its own profits are constantly being squeezed. Rather than continuing to fight like this, it would be better to just acquire Xiaonei.com.

Mr. Ma was a little worried. Tencent was just starting to feel better, so where would the money come from to acquire Xiaonei.com?

Based on my estimated revenue from Xiaonei.com, it is worth at least 200 to 300 million yuan, while Tencent's current valuation is no more than 1 billion yuan, and it only has tens of millions of yuan in cash on hand, which is far from enough to acquire Xiaonei.com.

Unless, through mergers and acquisitions.

Besides giving money, mergers and acquisitions also require giving some shares. To put it bluntly, it's about recruiting them into your own camp. In return, you not only have to give them money, but also promote them and make them part of your organization.

He doesn't rule out acquiring Xiaonei.com, because Xiaonei.com has developed in such a short time, and its gameplay is too outrageous, with various operational methods that are overwhelming. If its team could be absorbed into Tencent, it would definitely be a great help to Tencent's development.

However, Tencent's largest shareholder is not itself, but MIH, a subsidiary of South African Media Group, which now holds 40% of the shares and is seeking to acquire all of IDG's Tencent shares. If it wants to acquire Xiaonei.com, it will have to give shares to Xiaonei.com's team, and MIH's shares will be diluted. So whether this matter can be successful depends on MIH's intentions.

So, Mr. Ma immediately called the person in charge at MIH to ask for their opinion on the acquisition of Xiaonei.com.

Coincidentally, the other party was also paying attention to Xiaonei.com, but they hadn't figured out who the operating company and founder of Xiaonei.com were. Suddenly, when they heard Mr. Ma say that he was interested in acquiring Xiaonei.com, they were quite interested in it, so they verbally expressed their support. As for how much money and shares the acquisition would cost, they told Mr. Ma to talk to the Xiaonei.com team first and see how big their appetite was.

Mr. Ma felt that a price he could accept was 30 to 50 million yuan in cash, plus 8-12% of the shares.

If it's 30 million in cash, it will be paired with 12% of the shares; if it's 50 million in cash, it will be paired with 8% of the shares.

Given that Xiaonei.com has only been established for a short time, and yet it received tens of millions of yuan in cash, plus about 10% of Tencent's shares, Mr. Ma felt that if it were him, he would definitely agree without hesitation.

Chen Cheng learned about Tencent's desire to acquire him from Ding Yuan of Inspur.

So far, Xiaonei.com has not posted any business contact information. In addition, it is a personal website and Chen Cheng is very low-key. Mr. Ma cannot find any information about the owner of Xiaonei.com.

However, Renren.com has already reached a deep cooperation with Inspur and has also put Inspur's logo in the bottom bar of its homepage. Although Tencent has not used Inspur's servers, Inspur has long since found various connections to establish contact with Mr. Ma. This time, Mr. Ma just happened to see the opportunity and asked them to help pass on a message.

When Chen Cheng heard that Tencent wanted to discuss a merger with him, he was genuinely interested for a moment.

In the long run, if we don't compete with Tencent, Tencent will definitely be able to continue to grow and expand with its super product QQ, eventually achieving widespread success and a market value of hundreds of billions of US dollars.

If I could exchange my Renren.com for 10-20% of Tencent's shares, I could basically live a life of ease. I dare not say I'd make it onto the world's richest list, but I'd definitely be number one on China's richest list.

If Tencent could leverage the support of Xiaonei.com, its future market value would definitely be higher than in its previous life, and a market value of several hundred billion US dollars would not be an unrealistic dream.

But then Chen Cheng thought again, even if Renren.com were given to Tencent, it would still be Renren.com. Given Tencent's previous operational approach, they would treat the domestic market as their core battleground, and the overseas market wouldn't be very attractive to them.

Therefore, it is impossible for them to take Renren.com overseas or even replace Facebook as a world-class product.

Instead of doing that, I might as well work harder myself and at least make "Facebook" work.

So he told Ding Yuan on the phone: "President Ding, please pass on a message to President Ma, saying that Xiaonei.com is not considering a merger for the time being."

Ding Yuan was quite straightforward and didn't try to persuade him further. Instead, he simply said, "Okay, I'll tell them right now. To be honest, I don't think Xiaonei.com needs to accept a merger right now. If President Chen puts more effort into operating it for a while longer, who knows who will be the one acquiring whom?"

Chen Cheng raised an eyebrow, a few thoughts forming in his mind. If Renren.com could acquire Tencent in the future, it would have been a rebellion against the heavens in his previous life, but in this life, it might not be impossible.

It's unlikely that Renren.com can completely replace QQ in the short term, and it's unlikely to eliminate the other party, but it's not difficult to encircle and suppress it and make it lack resources.

Next, as long as Tencent's revenue sources and development space can be blocked in all aspects, QQ will become a sealed mythical beast. Sealed, it has no way to go to heaven or hell. But if it can be taken into its possession and the seal is lifted, it will surely soar to new heights.
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Mr. Ma was quite surprised when he received the reply from Inspur.

He had initially thought the difficulty in negotiating the merger would lie in the other party's likely exorbitant demands, but to his surprise, they were simply unwilling to negotiate. Left with no other option, he had to temporarily abandon the idea and continue directing his technical team to emulate Xiaonei.com in product development, focusing on quickly developing all the features Xiaonei.com offered.

This time, he didn't repeat the mistake of "like a bear breaking corn" (a Chinese idiom meaning to do something haphazardly and indiscriminately). Instead, he expanded the team, added manpower, and established the QQ Games business group. He planned to use QQ Games to turn the tide and win back users' time from Renren.com.

He said seriously at an internal meeting: "Renren.com's current Fishpond and Drift Bottle are products that are very good at capturing users' time. In addition, it also has a chat function and can roam chat history. Therefore, users spend more time on Renren.com than on QQ. At this stage, we must come up with new products to arm ourselves and get users to spend their time and energy on our QQ ecosystem again. The QQ Games platform is the top priority next!"

Tencent employees were tired of constantly imitating Xiaonei.com, so when it came to developing new products, everyone immediately rekindled their fighting spirit and prepared to win this battle.

At the same time, Chen Cheng also accelerated the development of campus games, and half of the newly arrived technical team were assigned to the campus games business unit, striving to make campus games the number one card and board game platform in China.

Currently, the biggest enemy is Lianzhong, and the potential enemy is Tencent.

Chen Cheng gave the school's game team three trump cards. The biggest one was the gameplay of Guandan. The trademark, patent and intellectual property rights registration had already begun. The latter two were likely to fail to be registered, but Chen Cheng didn't care.

Besides Guandan, he also gave the game team another trump card, which is Happy Landlords.

Before the emergence of Guandan, the three-player mode of Happy Landlords was the undisputed king of Chinese card games, enjoying immense popularity both online and offline.

Moreover, Happy Landlords and Guandan are quite different. Happy Landlords is indeed very fun, and unexpected card games often bring unexpected comedic effects. Guandan, on the other hand, makes people completely immersed in the game. Although the sense of immersion is strong, the comedic effect is somewhat weaker.

In their past lives, many internet celebrities gained a large following and even left behind a lot of classic quotes by live-streaming themselves playing Dou Dizhu (a popular Chinese card game). These quotes, such as "Everyone stand up," "Pour Auntie a cappuccino," and "Eat the monitor on the spot," have been popular online for more than a decade.

If the game mode and atmosphere of Happy Landlords were replicated, user engagement would be much higher than that of ordinary games.

Moreover, Chen Cheng's biggest advantage is that this game mode has not yet become popular online. It wasn't until after 2008 that three-player Dou Dizhu gradually became popular. In addition to QQ's Happy Dou Dizhu, there are also many other games with a large user base such as JJ Dou Dizhu and Tian Tian Dou Dizhu. If he were to create one now, he would be the pioneer who created the game.

In three-player Dou Dizhu, the most popular versions are the Joker version and the version with multiple bombs.

The advantage of these two versions is that they can increase the number of bombs in the game, thus doubling them continuously and increasing the multiplier of the game exponentially. Combined with the god-like item, Happy Beans, the game can become even more exciting.

The third trump card is Chen Cheng's plan to launch Happy Beans in the school game. Such a good product concept is also a rare original concept in Tencent's early days. It would be a waste not to use it.

In his view, by first launching two games, three-player Dou Dizhu and four-player Guandan, along with the Happy Beans feature, they could basically dominate the market. Once these two games were developed and promoted, Lianzhong and QQ Games would essentially be rendered useless.
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As December arrived, the weather in Jiangcheng grew increasingly cold.

The damp cold of southern cities makes sitting indoors feel colder the longer you sit. As soon as you get out of bed, you're wrapped in a thick cotton-padded coat and trousers.

More than 100 people have gradually arrived at the office space of the campus network. Chen Cheng specifically instructed the administration not to worry about the electricity bill and to keep the air conditioning on 24 hours a day, just like the heating in office buildings in the north, so that the entire office area can be kept at a comfortable temperature of more than 20 degrees Celsius.

After all, most of the people he recruited were working in the north, and these people were having some difficulty adapting when they first arrived in Jiangcheng.

In December, Renren's revenue was not significantly affected by the pre-sale promotions for Singles' Day, and the continuous launch of Renren Shows continued to stimulate users' spending impulses.

Chen Cheng believes that once the school games are launched and the model of exchanging school coins for Happy Beans is introduced, the game revenue will skyrocket, and may even exceed the membership revenue.

During this time, in addition to keeping a close eye on the development of Renren.com, he also kept an eye on some information from the south, because in his memory, SARS cases seemed to have started to appear in the south in mid-to-late November. He didn't know when rumors would start to circulate, but he kept thinking about Shen Luning's family's pharmaceutical company.

In his plan, as soon as he received even the slightest hint of something, he would immediately remind Shen Zhou to switch to selling Banlangen (Isatis root).

In order to keep track of the user's movements, he even ran keywords in the background, such as words like pneumonia, contagion, and infection. Once he found relevant content in user posts or forum posts, he would personally check what it was about.

In mid-December, he found a post on a fishpond in a southern city. The post said, "Brothers and sisters in Chacheng, please be careful. The hospital is said to have a contagious disease that is difficult to treat. Try not to go out recently!"

Under this post, a group of people questioned and a group of people criticized, and it seemed that no one believed this explanation.

Chen Cheng suddenly realized that the post must be about SARS cases.

(End of this chapter)