The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide.

Chapter 173 Newman Concept Stocks

The print media are discussing why Newman can always create products that are completely different from other Internet companies.

Internet companies pay more attention to this issue. For the media, Newman's creative secrets are just a gimmick to attract readers, but for Internet companies, it is the key to their life and death.

Everyone is facing a serious crisis, and Riot Games is the first to get out of the crisis with only one game.

This is full of attraction for Internet companies.

"Under the current situation, Time Warner needs a CEO who can lead Time Warner out of the current predicament, not a CEO like Gerald Wright who has no innovative spirit and ability to innovate.

If it is 1995, Gerrard can maintain Time Warner's status, and even lead Time Warner to a further step by relying on his skilled operation of the capital market.But now it is 2000, and the capital market has lost patience with the Internet, and has also lost interest in mergers and acquisitions among Internet companies.

The mergers and acquisitions of Yahoo and eBay were stopped, and the stock prices of Microsoft and Cisco could not escape the fate of a sharp drop. The past capital operation stories can no longer attract investors to pay. The only investor who has not lost interest is Newman. The capital market uses money for Newman vote.

The only Internet companies that can attract investors is Newman. Originally, we thought that after Time Warner acquired Quora, Newman would lose his previous aura and remove the most outstanding product managers.

In the face of the crisis, Newman put back the crown taken from the acquisition, which was even more dazzling than before. Investors once again realized that Quora was able to maintain its stability because Newman designed all the core links for it. operate.

Newman's loss to Quora is far worse than Quora's loss of Newman, so I think we need a new CEO to lead Time Warner out of the current predicament.

Time Warner needs innovation, and only an innovation story told by Newman himself can attract investors.So I think we need to show our sincerity and invite Newman to run Time Warner. "

At the internal board meeting of Time Warner, everyone reached a consensus that Gerald Wright should be dismissed. His ability is not enough to control the precarious Time Warner.

The appointment of Newman as chairman of Time Warner, all the directors also agree, think it is definitely a good thing.No matter how high the cost of hiring Newman to run Time Warner was, the stimulus to the capital market easily earned the money back.

Newman's return to the helm of Time Warner is equivalent to giving Time Warner a shot in the arm in the capital market.

The problem is that it can't be done, it's too difficult, because Zhou Xin is not short of money, and he can't open a bargaining chip that can make Zhou Xin's heart beat.

"I also want to invite Newman to run Time Warner, but the problem is that it can't be done. After the CEO of Yahoo resigned, they also want to find Newman to run Yahoo. I heard that Yahoo offered a sky-high annual salary of [-] million US dollars, but Newman was still unmoved.

It was almost impossible for Time Warner to convince Newman. "

Zhou Xin really looked down on the 1000 million US dollars, not to mention that the [-] million US dollars is mainly based on equity incentives, and the cash is only [-] million US dollars.

Even if it is [-] million US dollars in cash, it is not worth it to Zhou Xin now.

Because the essence is that Yahoo uses his reputation to boost its stock price, and it is the shareholders behind Yahoo who profit after the stock price rises. They paid a small price to borrow Zhou Xin's reputation.

In a year, or even less, it is almost impossible to completely reverse Yahoo's decline.Yahoo made too many wrong decisions in the past Internet bubble period, and a lot of money was used in wrong acquisition projects.

In fact, Zhou Xin only needs one trick to help Yahoo reverse its decline, and that is to acquire Google.But the problem is that the acquisition of Google will take at least three years to see results, and Yahoo paid a price of [-] million US dollars and gained [-] billion US dollars in benefits.

There is absolutely no need for this.

"Newman, congratulations, Riot Games has achieved success again. In the future, even if free video games reach 50% of paid video games, Riot Games will become an existence that is as valuable as Quora.

When Goldman Sachs provided listing services for Riot Games, it did not subscribe for more shares of Riot Games. We did not have a good understanding of the market value of Riot Games at the time.

In other words, we don’t know you well enough, and other founders would not be able to bring Riot Games to where it is today. "Henry Paulson, a powerful figure in Goldman Sachs, a senior member of the executive committee.

In other words, Goldman Sachs' current mechanism is formed by him alone. In 2006, he will go to the government through the government-enterprise revolving door to serve as the Minister of Finance, and he will single-handedly lead the acquisition of Quora by Time Warner.

With Zhou Xin's status, Goldman Sachs Vice President Jerry, who is in charge of Riot Games' listing, Zhou Xin can ignore him, but Henry, Zhou Xin must take it seriously.

Just because the other party will serve as the Minister of Finance in the future, Zhou Xin also needs to build a good relationship with the other party.

In Zhou Xin's memory, during the financial crisis in 08, Henry made many wrong decisions. He may not be able to make Henry go further on the wrong decision-making path.

"Even if there are no free games, Riot Games has a very high value. It relies entirely on video games. The high growth of video games in the past ten years, coupled with the continuous expansion of the share of online distribution of video games.

The ecological construction of the video game community of Riot Games is also becoming more and more perfect. From one game to ten games to thousands of games now, you can find corresponding evaluations from the scoring system of Riot Games.

The accumulation of data, the development of the video game industry, and the encroachment of online and offline channels, the three determine that Riot Games has an extremely broad future.

It’s just that it’s hard for people to see this. They will only focus on the particularly prominent points, just like the Internet bubble, and they will think that all Internet companies have bubbles.

Even if the financial situation of Fist Games is very good, investors will not carefully analyze the financial situation of Fist Games because it is in good financial condition, but will subconsciously think that its financial situation is worrying because it is an Internet company.

What I am doing is to let investors re-understand Riot Games through the direct benefits brought by free games.In fact, the potential future revenue of free games does not have such a big appeal, which can help the stock price of fist games rise by 40%. " Zhou Xin said very frankly.

Riot Games did not rely on investors' money to make a big splash after its establishment like other Internet companies. Instead, it almost relied on players' tap water and a head-to-head confrontation with Yahoo Games to attract a lot of attention.

After forming a positive cycle, Riot Games has been relying on its excellent community ecology to continuously attract customers, and it has always had revenue, so Riot Games has achieved a break-even very early.

And as more and more video games are released through Riot Games, profits have maintained a high growth trend.

After many Internet companies' financial reports are thunderous, and there are phenomena of concealing and modifying data, the financial reports of Riot Games can also stand the test.

Henry thought for a while, and knew that he should speak directly to Zhou Xin, and he couldn't beat around the bush: "Newman, reading the financial report is the basic skill of an investor. The previous decline in the market value of Riot Games was not because its financial report was not good, nor was it because it suspected that it had a cash flow crisis. .

The fundamental reason is that investors doubt whether Internet companies will be able to find a profit model sooner or later after expanding their scale as advertised.

To put it simply, investors did not care about the revenue and profits of Internet companies before, and the valuation system also revolved around users. However, whether users can really create enough value in the future has been thoroughly proved around the turn of the millennium. fake.

No matter how large the user base is, it may not be really valuable. Quora only has hundreds of thousands of official users, while many Internet companies have millions of members. Is it true that these Internet companies behind them will be able to create more users than Quora users in the future? Out of equal value?

The reconstruction of the valuation system is the root cause of the plummeting market value of all Internet companies. Everyone no longer believes that users are the key, and no longer believes that winning users is the most important thing for Internet companies.

Quora played a key role in this. The success of Quora made Wall Street realize that the value of users is different from user to user, and the value that users can dig out is also different.

The bursting of the Nasdaq bubble this time is just a further clarification of this understanding, and the financial situation is nothing but the rhetoric of the media looking for reasons for the results.

If Internet companies can find a clear path to prove that they can rely on users to achieve profitability in the future, they will be able to maintain cash flow from investors.

Recently, there has been a new saying on Wall Street that Newman's company needs to adopt a different valuation system from other Internet companies.

Newman's business never has to worry about not being able to find a profit model. Newman can find more than one profit model for his business. "

This is not only Henry boasting about Zhou Xin, but many Wall Street investors have proposed this concept and it has been publicly reported in the financial media.

The financial media have coined a new term: Newman concept stocks, which means Internet companies led by Newman behind them, and they can enjoy a different valuation system.

Riot Games is a masterpiece, and Time Warner has also enjoyed this dividend, but because Time Warner has other businesses besides Quora, Time Warner has fallen even more fiercely.

Zhou Xin thought that he was still a financial person who could speak, and he was very proud of the words first suppressed and then raised. Even though these ideas did not come from him, but from future wisdom, he was still very happy to be flattered.

Internet companies in Huaguo are more involved than foreign Internet companies. Foreign Internet companies have very poor user experience, and after occupying a monopoly advantage, they seldom optimize user experience.

Taking Twitter and Weibo as examples, starting from the user experience alone, the user experience of Weibo can surpass that of Twitter.

"It seems that I should invest more in Internet companies, so that other Internet companies can also enjoy the dividends brought by Newman." Zhou Xin joked.

Henry nodded: "Yes, maybe after you invest a lot in Internet companies, the Nasdaq index will rise instead of falling.

Those investors on Wall Street who are about to jump off the building because of buying a large number of Internet company stocks must thank you very much. "

Henry went on to say: "Newman, there are actually two main things that I need to discuss with you this time.

The first thing is that Time Warner entrusted me to be a lobbyist. They want to invite you to be the CEO of Time Warner and give you an annual salary of US$10 billion. Of course, there are requirements for this US$10 billion.

At the end of the year, Time Warner's market value determines how much annual salary you can get, with a minimum of $1 million and a maximum of $10 billion.

Among them, 80% of option incentives and 20% of cash, you can think about it.

If it were someone else, I would definitely tell him that this is a rare opportunity, and a billion-dollar job opportunity doesn't happen all the time.

But if it's you, I think it's just a very ordinary opportunity. You have too many companies to manage under your name.

It is also very easy to list an Internet company. After you list an Internet company, the income it will bring you will not be less than US$10 billion.

The richer it is, the easier it is for people to make money. "

After Zhou Xin listened to it, he thought to himself, Time Warner is worthy of being a big dog, and the chips offered are unmatched by other Internet companies.

Yahoo can only offer $[-] million in chips, while Time Warner can offer $[-] billion.

Of course Time Warner's billion dollars has performance appraisal requirements, and Yahoo does not.

Zhou Xin shook his head: "As you said, I don't have the time, nor the energy.

Most of my energy is put on the matrix mobile phone. We were supposed to launch an epoch-making mobile phone product this year with a lot of innovations. I built many different functions for the matrix to meet the needs of mobile phone users.

This also made the development very difficult, far exceeding my expectations, so I don't have time to take care of Time Warner.

Unlike Riot Games and NewPay, these two companies were founded by me, and I have a very good grasp of them. I also interviewed the executive teams of these two companies one by one, and I don’t need to re-familiarize them.

Time Warner is different. Time Warner’s executives in charge of Quora have all changed. It took me a lot of energy just to re-acquaint myself with Quora, and then to think about development strategies. "

Jimmy Wells and Larry Sanger, who participated in the Quora startup at the beginning, were quickly dismissed after Zhou Xin sold Quora. After being dismissed, they proposed to resign, and then sold part of Time Warner's shares to restart the development of the electronic encyclopedia. start a business.

With the experience of Quora, Jimmy and Larry know better how to make an excellent electronic encyclopedia, how to balance professionalism and universality.

Henry: "Newman, I can totally understand your decision that the position at Time Warner is really not worth mentioning to you.

I just heard you finished, I am very interested in matrix, still short of money?Goldman Sachs can invest in this project. We lack everything else, but we don't lack money.

Especially at the moment, Goldman Sachs lacks good investment. "

　4K update tonight, and another chapter tomorrow morning.Slowly get back to the codeword state

　　
　
(End of this chapter)