Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 170 The World's No. High-Tech Company
On the morning of the 27th local time, Xu Shenxue, together with a group of senior executives from Zhiyun Technology, officially rang the bell for listing on Nasdaq.

Zhiyun Technology was officially listed under the code 'ZHIY'.

The issue price was US$103, the total number of shares was 2.1 billion, and the total listing value was US$216.3 billion. This time, a total of 18% of the shares were publicly issued, raising US$38.9 billion in funds.

Zhiyun Technology will use the funds raised from the IPO to invest in new products around the comprehensive ecosystem hardware and software Internet, including mobile phone business, notebook business and the newly launched tablet computer business, smart watches/bracelets, smart TVs and other types of smart terminal businesses.

At the same time, we invest in semiconductor design and manufacturing, and increase strategic investment in the industrial chain.

Pioneering the research, development and construction of various new technologies, such as 4G and 5G communication technologies, cloud computing, big data models, including the establishment of data centers around the world.

In addition, some technology research and development with a sci-fi flavor will be carried out, such as research in cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence, brain-computer interface, robotics, virtual reality, and unmanned driving.

It basically covers the enhancement and expansion of existing businesses, the research and development and construction of the next stage of technology, forward-looking research on future technologies, etc.

As a multinational high-tech giant, you basically have to have a little bit of everything, otherwise investors will not be optimistic about your future...

After the listing, Xu Shenxue's market value instantly exceeded 120 billion US dollars, firmly establishing himself as the world's richest man.

Not only him, but a group of senior executives of Zhiyun Technology, including Ji Chenghe, Xie Jianyong, Bai Qiwen (Vice President of Zhiyun Technology, as the representative of Zhiyun Technology, serving as General Manager of Wecoo Electronics), Song Changhai, Gu Zhiming and other senior technical personnel instantly became worth over 100 million yuan, and some even had a net worth of over 1 billion yuan.

For example, Ji Chenghe obtained three options according to his work contract. After these options were listed, the total value exceeded 1.5 billion.

Definitely get rich overnight!
In fact, there are relatively few billionaires. After all, Zhiyun Technology was founded relatively recently, and many executives came later and did not get too many options. Even if some executives who came later could get options, the exercise price was not cheap.

However, there are quite a lot of millionaires worth tens of millions. When the first and second batches of options were granted, a large number of middle and senior management and middle and senior technical personnel received a certain number of options. These options were not too valuable at the time, but after the listing, the value increased by dozens of times, and many of them are worth tens of millions.

There are probably about two to three hundred people in this group.

Finally, there are millionaires, and there are even more of them, at least over a thousand people... Many ordinary R&D personnel of Zhiyun Technology received options in the early days, which are now worth over a million after increasing by dozens of times.

This time, the listing of Zhiyun Technology is a carnival of capital!

Of course, the options received by these senior management teams and technical personnel are only a very small part of this capital feast. The one who really makes the big money is Xu Shenxue himself.

After the A round, strategic investment before listing, and two relatively special large-scale domestic financings, it also went through two rounds of analysis of shares injected into the option pool, and finally went public and issued public shares.

Before the official listing, Xu Shenxue once again reached a cash-out agreement with various investors, transferred a small number of shares, and cashed out more than 6 billion US dollars.

Xu Shenxue plans to use this part of the funds in the fields of electric vehicles, rockets, and drones.

Before the official listing, Xu Shenxue's personal Liuhe Investment acquired strategic investment shares in Xiaojiang from Zhiyun Technology, and acquired most of Xiaojiang's shares, finally achieving strategic control over Xiaojiang.

This is actually a kind of industrial transfer. While drones are not yet popular and people are not paying much attention to them, you can take them back and play with them slowly... Because this thing is quite special and involves some special fields, it is not suitable to be mixed with Zhiyun Technology, which is apparently a multinational company in the field of smart mobile terminals.

Xu Shenxue doesn't want to see the drones produced by Zhiyun Technology appear on the battlefield... This will easily cause a series of unnecessary troubles, and in turn affect the international market for ordinary civilian consumer products such as mobile phones, PC notebooks, and tablets.

After a series of previous financing, strategic investment, share transfer and cashing out, option pool injection, etc., Xu Shenxue's Liuhe Holdings controlled by Xu's family and two offshore investment companies wholly owned by Xu Shenxue personally hold a total of 48% of Zhiyun Technology's shares. In addition, Xu Shenxue personally holds another 8 percentage points.

Together, they hold 20% of the shares, which are B shares with % voting rights, and they control the company's operations in an absolute manner... In fact, even if Xu Shenxue's shares continue to be split, with only a few percentage points of B shares left, he can still rely on voting rights to control the company's operations.

This 56% stake has brought Xu Shenxue a market value of approximately 120 billion US dollars... This is just his net worth at the issue price. In fact, after the stock is listed, most of it will see a significant increase. As the stock price rises, Xu Shenxue's net worth will continue to rise, and it will be an increase of tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of US dollars.

In this IPO, in addition to Xu Shenxue being the biggest winner, a circle of investors also made a lot of money, especially the more than ten investment institutions that invested in the A round. Because their investment was small, their investment increased by dozens of times.

The most interesting one among them is Blue Mountain Investments... They never thought that they could achieve a surge in investment by going public, their original intention was to provide support.

A smartphone company emerged in their own territory, so they had to give it a hand... So they carried out a special round of investment at that time, but they did not expect Zhiyun Technology to explode so fiercely.

By the time the strategic investment was made, the market value had soared to 150 billion yuan. Blue Mountain Investment, which held more than 4% of the shares at the time, made a decisive move and also made a partial follow-up investment during the strategic investment. After the listing and stock issuance, Blue Mountain Investment still held 3.2% of Zhiyun Technology's shares.

Today, the shares are worth more than 6 billion US dollars.

The original intention was to support their own enterprises and gain some employment and tax benefits, but the result was that they made billions of dollars, which was truly a pleasant surprise.

And this is just the market value at the time of listing!
As the stock market officially opened, countless people were watching the stock code ZHIY. Less than half an hour after the opening, the share price of Zhiyun Technology, which had an issue price of US$103, rose to US$110.

But this is not the end. As time goes by, Zhiyun Technology's stock price continues to rise.

With the listing of Zhiyun Technology, the domestic market is also following the news... After all, this is the largest IPO plan in the history of the country, and it is not only being paid attention to by industry insiders, but also by ordinary people.

On Weibo, a new media platform that was popular only last year and has been gaining momentum this year, there is a constant stream of topics about Zhiyun, which has a stronger traffic-generating effect than any celebrities. Zhiyun Technology has never hired any celebrities to endorse its products. Given the high-end attributes of Zhiyun phones, there are no celebrities on this planet who can match their reputation.

If there really is a celebrity endorsement, then it’s not the celebrities that are driving traffic to Zhiyun, but Zhiyun that is driving traffic to the celebrities…

This shows how popular Zhiyun is on the Internet.

As Nasdaq closed that day, China also entered daytime. People woke up from their sleep and received various news about Zhiyun Technology's first day of listing through television, mobile phones and computers.

It was still Tencent's portal website that launched a series of special reports early in the morning.

"Zhiyun Technology's IPO price was US$103, and the closing price on the day was US$127. Zhiyun Technology's latest market value has reached US$266.7 billion, surpassing Apple's US$252.3 billion, becoming the current high-tech company with the highest market value, and the second highest market value company in the world, second only to petrochemical giant ExxonMobil."

The opening of the report gave people a huge shock! Apple has the second highest market value in the world, surpassing Apple and even a large number of well-known high-tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

At the same time, it also killed a large number of traditional large companies, such as those in the oil, banking, automobile and other industries.

While this brought great shock to people, it also seemed to announce to people the arrival of the mobile Internet era!

Because people who pay attention will find that in addition to the exaggerated growth of the smart cloud market, the market value of fruits has also increased extremely exaggeratedly in the past year. Last year, the market value was only more than 100 billion yuan, but this year it is more than 250 billion yuan, and the growth rate has not slowed down much.

Fruit is also very profitable.

Among the top three companies in the world by market value, two are high-tech companies engaged in smart mobile terminals. If this isn’t a new era, what is?
Of course, a large number of traditional mobile phone companies may have different opinions... We also make smartphones, but why is our market value so low?
Just as domestic public opinion was in turmoil, Xu Shenxue held a thank-you and celebration banquet in Manhattan, inviting many investors and cooperative enterprises.

At the celebration banquet, Xu Shenxue said that the success of Zhiyun Technology is the success of all mankind. It is precisely because of the joint efforts of people all over the world and the support of the global industrial chain that various smart terminals represented by Zhiyun mobile phones have become successful.

Zhiyun Technology will continue to maintain technological innovation for all mankind, continue to carry out product research and development, and continue to work hard to bring a better life to mankind.

After a lot of empty talk, the next day Xu Shenxue and his group returned to China on two business jets owned by the company's airlines.

Like many large companies, Zhiyun Technology also has its own business jet, and not just one, but two.

Because Zhiyun Technology's business is spread all over the world and it also has R&D centers in major regions, Zhiyun Technology has a large number of branches in various places, and the company's suppliers and partners are also spread all over the world.

Company executives often need to fly around the world to handle various business matters.

In order to facilitate travel for company executives and improve work efficiency, Zhiyun Technology initially rented business jets. Later, when it found that short-term leases had turned into long-term leases, in order to save costs, it simply acquired a small domestic airline and changed its name to Zhiyun Airlines, which operates two Gulfstream business jets.

Then they also purchased several second-hand cargo planes... These cargo planes are specially designed for Zhiyun Technology's own supply chain services. They airlift various spare parts from supply chain companies in various overseas countries to China, and then airlift mobile phones, notebooks and other finished products from China to markets around the world for sale.

It is also common to export high-value electronic products such as mobile phones and laptops by air. Compared with the slight air freight cost, the saved supply chain cost and inventory cost are greater.

We can't use sea transportation, which will take months to reach the destination... the inventory cost will be huge... millions of mobile phones floating on the sea means tens of billions of dollars floating on the sea.

This means that tens of billions of funds will be needed to increase inventory.

Furthermore, the timeliness of components for consumer electronic products is relatively strong, and the prices of spare parts will fluctuate greatly after several months of sea transportation... When the chips were shipped from the port a few months ago, they were still first-rate chips, but when the chips arrive at their destination several months after crossing the ocean, they may have become second-rate chips.

At least that’s the case at the moment… The spare parts in the current smartphone industry chain are being rapidly replaced at the rate of one generation per year.

When a new product is launched, it has one price, and after a few months it has another price.

In order to meet the transportation needs of the supply chain, Zhiyun previously looked for professional airlines for import and export transportation, but coordinating transportation capacity was also troublesome.

When a new product is launched and goods and various spare parts need to be transported urgently, the airline may not be able to dispatch a cargo plane for emergency transportation. Therefore, it is better to directly get a few cargo planes to fly around the world.

Anyway, the quantity of various types of cargo transported by our company is large enough

When there is no need to transport your own goods, you can rent it out so it won’t be left idle and wasted.

As for business jets, when Xu Shenxue was on roadshows, he basically took his own company's business jet when flying around the country, but more often it was used by the company's senior executives, especially Gu Zhiming who was in charge of the supply chain. He flew around the world every few days. One of the Gulfstream G550 business jets was almost becoming his private jet, and his flying time was more than that of other company executives.

For multinational corporations, business jets are a basic part of their business...and although business jets may seem expensive, they can actually save you money when used.

This is because the time of company executives and important customers is very valuable, each of them earns an annual salary of tens of millions, and the business they handle is worth tens or hundreds of billions.

It can effectively enhance the work efficiency of these senior management teams, and the small operating cost of a business jet is nothing.

(End of this chapter)