I can become stronger by paying salaries. I have one billion employees!

Chapter 167 Pinduoduo + JD.com VS Alibaba, Orange F1 tickets sold out! (Seeking monthly votes)
"Kuaipao? They received 3000 million yuan in angel investment from Senlian Capital?"

In an office in the PT district, Zhang Xuhao opened a Sohu news article, his brows furrowing instantly, filled with regret.

He hadn't expected Chen Yansen's investment style to be so decisive.

After realizing their own underhanded tactics, they didn't give anyone a chance to negotiate. First, they denied that Senlian Capital had any intention of investing in Ele.me, and then they turned around and invested in a competing website.

This clearly shows that Chen Yansen is not pessimistic about the food delivery model, but only about Ele.me.

Zhang Xuhao recalled calling Zhu Xiaohu of GSR Ventures, only to be met with another refusal to invest further in Ele.me, which dashed his last hope.

"No! We need to find funding quickly. If Kuaipao expands, Ele.me will be in danger."

After a moment's thought, Zhang Xuhao made up his mind.

While he was actively contacting venture capital firms, investors from Sequoia Capital, GSR Ventures, and Hillhouse Capital began to research Kuaipao.

After all, the fact that Chen Yansen took a liking to her must mean she has some potential.

Kang Guodong and Pei Yi, who had just returned to Luzhou, received calls from several venture capital firms.

But now that they only have 20% equity left and 3000 million yuan in funds, they no longer have to worry about money, so they rejected them all.

"Old Pei, this feels amazing!"

Kang Guodong looked at Pei Yi across from him and grinned.

"Once we take Kuaipao public, we'll give these people a good slap in the face." Pei Yi was equally delighted.

Previously, the two had begged investors to give them a chance, even if it was just for an hour, to hear their business plan, but no one paid any attention.

After securing funding from Senlian Capital, venture capital firms immediately changed their attitude and became incredibly enthusiastic towards them.

The two knew in their hearts that this change was brought about by Chen Yansen, not by Kuai Pao's own strength.

"Let's go check out Luyang District first. Office rents are low there, and it's right next to the pedestrian street..."

Kang Guodong, holding a stack of documents, dragged Pei Yi out of the school.

……

……

“Mr. Chen, you didn’t tell me the truth last time.” After being rejected by Kuaipao, Zhang Lei of Hillhouse Capital called Chen Yansen again.

"Mr. Zhang, don't misunderstand! After you mentioned it last time, I had my investment analyst research the food delivery industry. I felt it had potential, which is why I invested in Kuaipao."

Chen Yansen laughed and said, "You're lying through your teeth."

The implication is that he only considered investing in a food delivery website after Zhang Lei reminded him.

"When will President Chen come to Yanjing again so we can all get together again?" Zhang Lei didn't really care and changed the subject with a smile.

All he needed to do was confirm that Chen Yansen was interested in the food delivery industry.

"Mr. Zhang, is there something else?" Chen Yansen sensed the hidden meaning in the words and asked with a smile.

"Two things: first, Hillhouse Capital wants to invest in Pinduoduo; second, they want to facilitate your cooperation with JD.com to jointly seize Ali's market share."

Zhang Lei got straight to the point, without hiding anything.

When communicating with a smart person like Chen Yansen, speaking directly is more efficient.

"Mr. Zhang, if I may ask, is this Hillhouse Capital's idea, or Liu Qiangdong's?"

Chen Yansen did not immediately refuse, but instead asked more questions earnestly.

Recently, he heard that Liu Qiangdong and Ali were competing fiercely.

NewFoxTao scraped reviews of JD.com's self-operated products without informing JD.com, drawing criticism from JD.com.

As a result, FoxTao blocked JD.com's products, kicked JD.com out of the B2C cashback mall, and joined forces with Dangdang and Suning to try to isolate JD.com.

Currently, JD.com merchants are no longer even eligible to register for the FoxTao Super Cashback event.

It's worth noting that FoxTao brings JD.com 3-5 million RMB in sales every month.

This infuriated Liu Qiangdong!
"This is the result of discussions between me, Tiger Fund, and DST Lead Capital."

Zhang Lei spoke slowly.

Hillhouse Capital, Tiger Brokers, and DST jointly invested over a billion US dollars in Liu Qiangdong, naturally not wanting to see him fail.

"Mr. Zhang, let's put the financing aside for now. I'd like to hear the specifics of how we'll cooperate first," Chen Yansen asked.

"JD.com can open up its 3C digital and home appliance resources to Pinduoduo, while Pinduoduo needs to open up its food, clothing, beauty and baby product resources to JD.com. We can discuss the specific cooperation methods gradually."

Zhang Lei replied.

Chen Yansen chuckled inwardly; Zhang Lei and Liu Qiangdong had certainly played their cards right.

Although both JD.com and Pinduoduo are B2C e-commerce platforms, JD.com combines self-operated and third-party merchants, while Pinduoduo is an open platform without its own self-operated business.

According to Zhang Lei's proposed cooperation model, the day the cooperation breaks down will be after JD.com has thoroughly cleaned up Pinduoduo's merchant resources.

"I'm sorry, I don't see any sincerity from Dong." Chen Yansen decisively refused.

Pinbei's biggest advantages today are, firstly, the primary traffic from Tencent's main portal, and secondly, the more than 2 merchant resources accumulated during its time with FoxTao.

Taobao claims to have 5 million sellers, but the number of true core merchants is less than 500, with the majority being C2C individual sellers.

Chen Yansen has always been the one taking advantage of others; for Liu Qiangdong to try and pry resources from him is simply a pipe dream.

Zhang Lei was taken aback and cursed inwardly: This kid is really not easy to fool.

He thought for a moment and said, "Mr. Chen, please feel free to share your thoughts. I'll help you communicate with Liu Qiangdong."

This is the advantage of having a middleman. If Liu Qiangdong had come to negotiate in person, the talks would probably have fallen apart by now.

Either one side makes concessions, or the meeting ends in discord.

"Cooperation is possible, and I can agree to drive traffic to JD.com, but I have two conditions: First, JD.com's self-operated platform must be listed on Pinduoduo; second, Orange Pay must be added to JD.com's payment module."

Chen Yansen replied.

At this time, JD.com users only have two payment options: online banking and cash on delivery.

Six months ago, Liu Qiangdong terminated the cooperation with Zhifubao because he felt the fees were too high. However, when he tried to apply for a payment license, he found that the application process had become hundreds of times more difficult. In short, the authorities were strictly controlling the number of licenses issued.

By being slow in this step, Liu Qiangdong is essentially three or four years behind.

Seeing that the application was hopeless, Liu Qiangdong planned to create his own payment tool by acquiring a third-party payment license.

However, acquisition targets are still being screened.

In addition, the development of a payment system takes time, and in the previous generation, JD Pay was not finally launched until 2014.

Chen Yansen's idea is simple: Liu Qiangdong wants to increase sales, which is fine, but he wants to help Pinduoduo complete its digital home appliance category, thereby increasing the average order value and product valuation.

As for OrangePay, that's just a side note.

He was certain that Liu Qiangdong would agree, because the other party had already realized just how foolish Liu Qiangdong's cash-on-delivery method was.

Orange Pay can save JD.com a lot of transaction fees and avoid the frustration of using Zhifubao.

“Okay, I’ll pass it on to Liu Qiangdong.” Zhang Lei readily agreed and hung up the phone without lingering.

Chen Yansen put down his phone, walked to the sofa by the window and sat down, thinking: It seems that 2011 was an extremely difficult year for JD.com and the capital behind it.

Before December, JD Logistics had already lost over a billion yuan, and profitability seemed a distant prospect.

Liu Qiangdong wants to become China's Bezos, but it's not that simple.
the other side.

Liu Qiangdong was sitting in his office when he received a call from Zhang Lei.

"Chen Yansen's idea is to treat JD.com as a flagship store and have it join the Pinbei Mall, but require JD.com to promote Orange Pay for it."

Zhang Lei briefly recounted the key points of their communication and handed the decision-making power over to Liu Qiangdong.

Liu Qiangdong's heart skipped a beat, realizing that Chen Yansen had seen through his thoughts, but he had still achieved his goal.

As for Orange Payment, he agreed without much hesitation, since JD.com's own payment tool was still far from being established.

It's normal to pay a price if you want to ride on Pinduoduo's traffic.

“Mr. Zhang, I have no problem.” Liu Qiangdong replied immediately.

“Okay, I’ll push this through. You send someone to the virtual city to sign the contract and get it launched as soon as possible.”

Zhang Lei nodded and said.

As Chen Yansen predicted, Liu Qiangdong agreed to the cooperation without much consideration.

This type of cooperation model might have been novel in 2011, but more than a decade later, it is no longer surprising.

Ali's partnership with Suning, JD.com's partnership with Yihaodian are all similar in their approaches.

After receiving Zhang Lei's reply, Chen Yansen handed over the collaboration to Gao Weilin and Song Yuncheng to follow up together.

"Boss, cooperating with JD.com may have a negative impact on merchants in the digital and home appliance category of Pinduoduo, which is not conducive to cultivating our own merchants."

After listening to Chen Yansen's arrangement, Song Yuncheng frowned slightly and directly voiced his objection.

"We're a platform, so what exclusive merchant resources do we have? We just let the algorithm process things based on parameters like sales volume and gross profit. Whoever sells well gets the traffic."

Chen Yansen knew very well that merchants had little loyalty; they would go wherever the money was.

If JD.com's digital home appliances can generate tens or hundreds of millions of yuan in sales on Pinduoduo, those brands hiding behind the scenes will take the initiative to step forward and bypass JD.com to establish cooperation with Pinduoduo.

"Okay, I understand." Song Yuncheng stood there and pondered for a while before nodding in agreement.

"Old Gao, how's the Kuaipao project going?"

Chen Yansen hummed in agreement and looked at Gao Weilin.

"They're still busy renting office space and hiring people, but Pei Yi has poached about 20 former employees from bankrupt group-buying websites. These people have a lot of catering resources and are very familiar with expanding their business offline. Once the preliminary preparations are completed, their future development will not be slow."

Gao Weilin replied with a smile.

As his first actual investment project, Gao Weilin naturally paid more attention to it.

"Okay, keep a close eye on the technical integration for me, make sure nothing goes wrong."

Chen Yansen nodded slightly and then gave Song Yuncheng some more instructions.

With the rapid growth of Orange Technology and Pinbei's business volume, Orange Pay urgently needs operation and maintenance engineers, security experts, and risk management experts.

Wang Xueting, Xiong Li, and Zhang Junjie have been frantically recruiting people lately, and to save time, they've been focusing on Zhifubao.

Headhunters would wait outside the headquarters of Zhifubao every day, and when they saw employees coming out after get off work, they would go up to them and ask, "Sir, do you have any plans to change jobs?"

This situation became so unbearable that Ma Liyun called to warn Chen Yansen to tone it down.

Chen Yansen verbally agreed, but secretly continued to do as he pleased.

After Song Yuncheng and Gao Weilin left the office, Chen Yansen picked up the Pinbei business weekly report and casually flipped through it.

With 4000 million registered users, 1000 million daily active users, over 400 million daily orders, and nearly 3 million daily sales, the company boasts a remarkable user base.

Of course, Orange Mobile's sales accounted for 60% of this.

In terms of actual strength, Pinduoduo's size is about one-fifth of JD.com's and one-twentieth of Taobao's.

This is also the main reason why Chen Yansen agreed to cooperate with Dong.

He didn't want to be as extreme as Pinduoduo, which capped the platform's growth potential.

So from the beginning, he planned to attract traffic with low-priced products and improve the platform's image with high-priced goods, so as not to leave users with a bad impression of low price and low quality.

Regarding the quality of goods, the platform has a deposit mechanism. If a merchant uses inferior goods, Chen Yansen will punish them severely.

Before leaving get off work that day, Liu Zhicheng from the marketing department of Dioscorea.com called to discuss cooperation.

Chen Yansen did not refuse and handed it over to Song Yuncheng to handle.

Chen Yansen is happy to cooperate with platforms like JD.com, Dioscore.com, Suning, and Gome.

The other party wanted to leverage Pinduoduo's traffic and high conversion rate to increase sales, and he also wanted to use these platforms to transform Pinduoduo into a comprehensive e-commerce platform.

He walked out of the lobby and got into his car when Cao Dahua sent him a message: Orange F1 is almost sold out!

(End of this chapter)