Top of the Great Era

Chapter 1917 Transaction with EA

In Zhou Buqi's opinion, Steam is much more valuable than Friends Studio.

But there is no way, the United States is a financial empire, and the logic behind these transactions is not the physical attributes of the business, but the financial attributes.Whoever has higher financial attributes and who is more capable of hype and hype will be highly recognized by the capital market.

Behind Steam is the small company Valve, which is really not worth mentioning.

Friends Studio is different. The main social game is the hottest and most attractive general direction of the game industry at present, which leads to a change in attributes.

A game company has become a financial product!
Then you can sell it for a sky-high price.

Ziweixing acquired Steam for only US$1.6 million.

EA wanted to buy Friends Studio from Ziweixing, but the basic asking price reached 18.7 billion US dollars!Moreover, this is not the final offer, but the preliminary negotiation result between Mattrick and EA.

Boss Zhou is going to show up next.

EA always has to increase the quotation appropriately to show respect, right?

It's such a joy to do this kind of business!

Because Ziweixing International’s assets have not been fully recognized by the capital market, Zhou Buqi has not launched the company’s IPO plan for a long time, and has been trying to find ways to make money for independent development.

After this wave of operations, Ziweixing International will no longer need to go public within 2-3 years, and can develop in silence.

Selling a friend's studio is just the first step.

The second step is to sell the core part of the game business unit to Changyou, and the price will be even higher. If there is no 50 billion or 80 billion US dollars, it will not be able to come down.

There are even more powerful ones.

The third step is to sell Twitter to Google.

The deal with Google cannot simply use Twitter’s current valuation to measure the company’s value. It must be an unimaginable premium, just like Google bought YouTube at a premium of 10 times.

After these three transactions, Ziweixing International has the opportunity to continue to develop steadily and silently.

delayed gratification.

A wave of listing can blind the eyes of the whole world.

The road has to be walked step by step. On this day, Zhou Buqi, accompanied by Lu Qi, Shen Xiangyang, Xu Liangjie, Mattrick, Alex Jones, Bing Gordon and others, met with EA's top board of directors. meet.

Determine the final transaction plan for the friend's studio.

The preliminary work went very smoothly.

Finally, a cutscene was made, and it was basically done.

Zhou Buqi shared a car with Shen Xiangyang and Xu Liangjie, and it was a meeting of old friends.

Speaking of artificial intelligence.

Aster's latest mobile phone Aster4 series has been officially released, the price of the basic version reached 569 US dollars, and the Pro version reached 629 US dollars.

Not cheap at all.

But after the debut of this series, it really caused a lot of trouble in the mobile phone industry, and there was a kind of influence that shouted that the wolf is coming.

It is mainly two major innovations that have caused the market to go crazy, and it feels that it is not worse than the iPhone!
One, fingerprint unlocking.

Second, the intelligent voice assistant Rokid.

And behind this voice assistant is the artificial intelligence team led by Shen Xiangyang.

Shen Xiangyang was more modest, saying that speech intelligence depends on the latest deep learning and neural network algorithms, which is not mature enough, and there are still many areas for improvement.

At the same time, he also showed a confident side.

In this field, he has the most powerful team in the world.

Rokid must be the world's best smart voice assistant in this field, far better than Apple's Siri.In other words, Astar can't brag too much in terms of mobile phone marketing, and it has the guarantee of strength.

"If there is an opponent, it can only be Google." Shen Xiangyang smiled, "I heard that Google's artificial intelligence team is also very strong, and it has gone very far in this field."

Xu Liangjie said with a smile: "Google has been very busy recently, and held a big press conference."

"Google+?"

"Yes, it's Google+."

A few months after taking office as Google CEO, Larry Page made successive moves, acquired several companies, closed a bunch of business lines... and finally launched a heavyweight social product "Google+" at the beginning of this month .

This caused an earthquake in the social market.

It can be said that Google has poured all its resources into it, with a kind of desperate madness.

Xu Liangjie went on to say: "Google is going crazy this time, and it wants to do social networking at all costs. In order to attract Google users to Google+, Page has used unconventional means."

"is it?"

Zhou Buqi is really not very clear, he has never used the Google+ product at all.

Xu Liangjie said: "Google's most popular C-end product is YouTube. This time they also used YouTube's resources and played a forced bundling. YouTube users must log in to Google+ if they want to leave a message. "

"what?"

Zhou Buqi was stunned.

This kind of bad operation without a bottom line can even happen to Google.Larry Page is really crazy and desperate.

Xu Liangjie said: "The effect is quite obvious. It has only been online for a few days, and the number of users of Google+ has exceeded 6000 million. It is developing very fast. Doesn't the friend studio also want to cooperate with Google+ and operate on Google+ It's a social game."

Zhou Buqi waved his hand, "Then it doesn't matter, sell this studio to EA, and do whatever you like in the future, let's stop playing!"

"You don't like social games so much?"

"Not good."

"This idea is not mainstream at all." Xu Liangjie shook his head and said with a smile, "Facebook's main betting direction is H5."

Zhou Buqi snorted and said, "That's all nonsense. The direction of H5 is useless. The future must be the era of independent apps. This time Google is coming aggressively. I think Facebook will have to drink a pot."

"I heard they're going to make a big move."

"It's not surprising that Google is very aggressive this time."

……

After spending two full days, Zhou Buqi finally reached an agreement with EA's board of directors, and completed the transaction to the friend's studio at a price of 19.2 billion US dollars.

The market has picked up, and the transaction price has also increased.

In the previous life, during this critical period, EA chose to spend huge sums of money to acquire Baokai Studio to adapt to the next era of social games and casual games.

However, Baokai studio was acquired by Ziweixing early on, and became the most important game asset of the game business department.

It is impossible for EA to buy Baokai, and it is not bad to buy a friend's studio.

The price of 19.2 billion US dollars is a bit high.

Although EA has been preparing for several months, it is difficult to raise such a large amount of cash, so it can only complete the transaction by means of stock replacement.

That's the disagreement over which the talks spent two days largely centered.

In general M&A transactions, there will be a long lock-up period for the replaced stocks, sometimes as long as 24 months or 36 months, in this way to protect the stability of stock prices and prevent large-scale sell-offs.

But Ziweixing can't do it.

What's the point of wanting EA stock?
In the future, Changyou and EA will be the main competitors. How can there be any reason to hold a large number of competitors' stocks?

The lock-up period should be shortened, and Ziweixing should sell EA's stock as soon as possible.

In the end, a compromise was reached, and the deal was completed in the form of US$7.5 million + US$11.7 billion in EA stock, for a total transaction value of US$19.2 billion.

The lock-up period is 3 months.

In other words, after 3 months, Ziweixing can find a way to sell the EA stock.

It is mainly the judgment of both parties on the market environment.

The wind direction of the capital market is turning for the better.

Entering July, the stock market has already changed, and it has begun to recover lost ground and continue to rise.The economic situation is improving, and EA's stock price is also recovering.

Zhou Buqi doesn't care so much, no matter what the future trend of EA's stock is, he has already thought about it, as soon as the lock-up period comes, he will quickly find a way to sell the stock!
It is meaningless to hoard EA stock in your hands, and it is not a super potential stock like Google and Apple. It is safest to sell it quickly and exchange it for cash.

Now the stock price of EA is 23.87 US dollars, Ziweixing has got a total of 4900 million EA shares, the sooner you sell it, the better!

(End of this chapter)