Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 308 Crazy Delisting and Listing

It is the eighth day of the first lunar month after the Spring Festival, and many media companies have just returned to work for a few days, or have just started work today.

The result was extremely shocking news.

Xu Shenxue personally convened a press conference to officially announce Zhiyun's delisting plan to the outside world, and simultaneously launched the Hong Kong stock listing plan.

At the same time, a detailed share repurchase and exchange plan was released. Investors holding Zhiyun shares in the secondary market can choose to redeem or exchange shares on their own.

As soon as the news came out, it quickly topped the headlines of online media around the world within five minutes.

The online version of the Wall Street Journal reported this breaking news directly on the front page: the largest delisting and listing plan in human history!
At the same time, the focus of the Wall Street Journal is: Why Zhiyun chose to delist from the US stock market.

This is no secret to a small group of top people in the global village. The Zhiyun Group headed by Xu Shenxue has been fighting with those Midea Groups. Under such circumstances, it is natural for them to go their separate ways.

Some people who are qualified to know about these things also know that this matter involves too many things and is not a purely financial operation.

However, these things are unknown to ordinary people, even the powerful and wealthy people don’t know about them, so they are all shocked.

Especially some wealthy people who have some information sources and can know some fragments of information, after asking around and learning about the huge amount of funds needed for Zhiyun's delisting plan, their eyes widened...

In order to ensure Zhiyun's smooth delisting, a banking consortium consisting of multiple financial institutions will provide Zhiyun Group with a credit line of up to US$200 billion.

When many wealthy people learned of this number, their first reaction was: WTK...

Is this the amount of money a business can get?
Even if you sold most of the country, you still couldn't raise that much money!

This is still the level of ordinary wealthy people, such as the few words that those on the rich list can know!

As for ordinary people, they don’t know a single word!

They can only get some information from public channels, and this information is also publicly disclosed by both parties and has no practical value.

The Wall Street Journal's analysis report is already quite in-depth and is the limit of what ordinary people can know: they mainly start with the competition between Zhiyun and Midea in electronic consumer products and the semiconductor industry, and then analyze Zhiyun's revenue, profits, and investments in the past two years.

We can further analyze whether Zhiyun’s stock price is really undervalued. Is the $500 billion market value given to Zhiyun by U.S. stock investors too low or too high?

Zhiyun has changed its position and will be able to obtain a higher valuation after its subsequent listing on the Hong Kong stock market.

In these analyses, they reviewed a large number of financial reports and operating disclosure documents released by Zhiyun, and then pointed out that among Zhiyun Group's many businesses, the smart terminal business is indeed far ahead and has no rivals in the world, even the fruit industry has to admit defeat.

But the high profits of smart terminal business are just appearance!
The price that Zhiyun Group needs to pay to maintain its leading performance in smart terminal products is far higher than that of asset-light companies such as Fruit.

Based on the information disclosed by Zhiyun Group, they pointed out that Zhiyun Group wanted to obtain the advanced performance S series chips.

In the past two years alone, more than $40 billion has been invested in the semiconductor business, including design and manufacturing, and future investments will be even more exaggerated.

Zhiyun Group seems to have the world's most profitable smart terminal business, but it also has the world's most expensive and loss-making semiconductor and supply chain businesses.

At the same time, in order to maintain its leading position in the smart terminal business, Zhiyun Group must maintain huge investments in semiconductors and other consumer electronics supply chains, from chips to screens, to batteries and other spare parts.

Behind the high gross profit of Zhiyun Group's smart terminal business is the low gross profit or even loss of other businesses of Zhiyun Group.

Everyone knows that Zhiyun’s S series of mobile phones make money, but everyone also knows that Zhiyun’s semiconductors lose money!
Finally, the Wall Street Journal concluded: "Zhiyun's stock price has been depressed for a long time because they are trying to fight the world alone."

"All dictators who try to fight the whole world on their own never have a good ending, and Zhiyun will be no exception!"

The Wall Street Journal, of course, will not have anything good to say about Zhiyun Group's delisting... The delisting of the world's top high-tech company from the US stock market will actually lead to a series of reactions, and people will ask: Why?
Why can't the US stock market accommodate Zhiyun, one of the world's top high-tech companies? Is it because of insufficient funds? Is it because the stock price is deliberately underestimated? Or is there a conflict of interest behind it?

Can the US stock market continue to prosper? Can it still attract high-quality companies from around the world to list and attract global funds to trade?

These question marks are what Wall Street does not want to see!

Therefore, it became natural to belittle Zhiyun.

However, this is just Wall Street's view, and the view elsewhere may be different.

The largest newspaper in Paris, Europe, published the news about Zhiyun's delisting after daybreak. They are not only concerned about Zhiyun's delisting from the US stock market or listing on the Hong Kong stock market, but they are more concerned about the fact that many large European companies and financial institutions will participate in the next round of strategic investment in Zhiyun.

According to the information currently released by Zhiyun, some European companies have acknowledged that after Zhiyun completes its delisting from the US stock market, it will conduct a targeted share issuance to some European high-tech companies and financial institutions. Although the detailed amount has not yet been disclosed, it is conservatively estimated to be more than 20 billion euros.

At the same time, it was revealed that Zhiyun will soon launch a new round of large-scale investment in Europe, including the establishment of the long-awaited Zhiyun Paris Second R&D Center. According to the information released by the Mayor's Office, once the R&D center is completed, it will be able to provide more than 2,500 high-tech jobs.

Together with the Paris First R&D Center and the Paris Second R&D Center, Zhiyun Paris R&D Center will become the largest Zhiyun R&D center in Europe.
The local newspaper described the strategic cooperation between European enterprises and Zhiyun Group as follows: "We are about to board the Zhiyun high-tech train and rush into the future high-tech field!"

"Since the decline of Nouya, we in Europe have already produced a second high-tech company, and even the semiconductor field has been declining again and again."

"Overnight, we in Europe seem to have fallen behind in this high-tech wave!"

"But now, we have a brand new opportunity to join Zhiyun, a world-class high-tech giant, the world's top high-tech company."

"We'll get our ticket to the future!"

“An invaluable ticket!”

In Germany, local media also focused on reporting news about Zhiyun. Of course, the focus of their reports was also on the strategic cooperation between Zhiyun and some local companies, including that Zhiyun will increase its investment in local semiconductors and build a 12-inch wafer factory to manufacture advanced memory.

Japan is no exception, and is also reporting and analyzing the impact of Zhiyun's delisting from the U.S. stock market and the introduction of new strategic investors on Japan's high-tech industry.

According to local TV reports, the list of new strategic investors announced by Zhiyun includes a series of Japanese high-tech companies such as SoftBank and Mitsubishi. This move will further promote the integration of Japan's electronic consumer industry supply chain and semiconductor supply chain into the Zhiyun supply chain, and export more high-tech equipment and consumables.

Japan's high-tech companies are expected to increase their share of the entire smart cloud supply chain from 7% to 10%, creating more jobs for Japan.

When the media from various overseas countries were reporting crazily.

Not to mention the domestic media industry, Zhiyun dominates almost all news platforms. On various search platforms, the search volume for Zhiyun and Zhiyun-related words has increased more than twenty times compared to the past.

In almost all media platforms’ online hot searches, news related to Zhiyun occupies at least half of the top ten spots, and on some media platforms, news related to Zhiyun dominates the top ten spots.

If you are not a Chinese person of this era, it is almost impossible to understand the huge influence of Zhiyun!
From the elderly in rural areas to the children in kindergartens, most people have heard of Zhiyun... Even if you don’t know the situation of Zhiyun Group, you must have heard of and seen Zhiyun mobile phones!

There are all kinds of news, many of which analyze why Zhiyun was delisted from the US stock market, which then aroused the indignation of a group of people who felt that Zhiyun was wronged and forced to delist by the Americans.

If this argument were to be spread to the overseas Internet, people from the American consortium would be silent after reading it... It was clearly Xu Shenxue who was worried about the stock market in my hands and wanted to delist and run away, so how come you guys are saying that we drove Zhiyun away?

I also want to keep Zhiyun's shares. Not to mention waiting for appreciation and dividends, it would be nice to get a few seats on the board of directors to contain Xu Shenxue.

The problem is that lunatic Xu Shenxue won't let me stay...

That lunatic has put a bazooka at my head and forced me to withdraw my shares. What can I do? I am helpless too!

People always feel that their own children are the ones who suffer the loss!
Some people think that Zhiyun has been wronged outside. At the same time, many people, especially some financial institutions and investors with some money, are concerned about another issue, that is, if Zhiyun is listed on the Hong Kong stock market in the future, how to buy Zhiyun’s shares?
Zhiyun was previously listed on the U.S. stock market, but for domestic investors, it is not easy to buy stocks on the U.S. stock market.

After Zhiyun was transferred to the Hong Kong stock market, although there are still considerable troubles and restrictions in transferring mainland funds to the Hong Kong stock market to purchase Zhiyun shares, it is generally much more convenient.

It is not easy for ordinary individual investors to do it, but it is relatively easy for specialized financial investment institutions.

Many investment institutions are already gearing up to wait for Zhiyun to be listed on the Hong Kong stock market and then purchase its shares.

As for the new round of introduction of strategic investors and targeted share issuance before listing, ordinary investment institutions should not count on it.

In the subsequent private placement of shares, only a handful of the top financial institutions in the global village will be able to participate.

Zhiyun Group's domestic private placement of shares will only be made to a number of top financial institutions, and its total value is estimated to exceed US$50 billion.

Ordinary financial institutions don’t even know where the door is.

As for overseas ones, the participants are powerful financial groups from all over the country, and ordinary financial institutions or enterprises have nothing to do with them.

Zhiyun Group's acquisition of shares from the American consortium and then private placement is a process of redistribution of benefits... Without some strong capabilities, you can't even get the news, let alone participate.

Amidst the heated discussions outside!
Zhiyun officially signed a share repurchase agreement with several US investment companies, buying back 15.63% of its shares at a price of US$86 billion.

After the agreement was signed, the lawyers of both parties confirmed that everything was correct. The other party began to transfer the shares, while the person in charge of the bank group on Zhiyun's side transferred the cash on the spot...

You can see that the person in charge's hands were shaking when he was transferring money...

Eighty-six billion US dollars...such a huge amount of money was transferred out with just a flick of the finger.

Although, in fact, this is just a superficial operation. In fact, such a large amount of fund transfer requires multiple banks on both sides to carry out offline operations.

However, the pressure on the person in charge to carry out surface operations is also very great.

After confirming that the funds had been received, the other trading team boarded a special plane and left. After all, no one kept them for dinner...

Subsequently, because Zhiyun initiated the delisting procedure, it began to carry out stock redemption or stock exchange operations for ordinary investors in the secondary market.

Because most investors chose to redeem, this was another huge capital expenditure of US$53 billion.

After such a huge investment, the people in the banking group were all nervous...for fear that the funds would come back.

Of course, this is just unnecessary worry. Zhiyun borrowed money to delist, not because it is really short of money. Currently, Zhiyun Group's own cash flow alone is 150 billion US dollars.

It’s just that the cash flow cannot be used to redeem shares, which will cause Zhiyun Group’s operations to fall into trouble and will be seriously damaged. For such a large group to operate, the daily cash flow demand is very huge.

But can Zhiyun Group fall into operational difficulties due to lack of cash flow?

Anyone with a reasonable amount of common sense knows that this is not possible!
Therefore, Zhiyun Group cannot touch the money and can only borrow money temporarily from the banking group.

And then a series of new strategic investors will be introduced, and once the strategic investors' money arrives, the bank group's loan will be repaid.

After completing the delisting, Xu Shenxue quickly finalized the subsequent plan of introducing strategic investors.

On March 6, Zhiyun Group officially announced that it had introduced a number of domestic strategic investors and obtained a strategic investment of US$50 billion through a targeted share issuance.

Three days later, Zhiyun Group, together with several strategic investors in Europe, issued an announcement in London, introducing more than a dozen strategic investors in Europe and obtaining a total of US$30 billion in strategic investment.

Subsequently, it announced the introduction of strategic investors from Japan, South Korea, Singapore, ASEAN, and even South America, India and other regions, and successively obtained a total of US$50 billion in strategic investment... Even South Korea's four major companies and LG were involved.

The strategic investors introduced above have raised more than 130 billion US dollars for Zhiyun Group. These new strategic investments will mainly be used to repay the huge debts of the banking group.

It didn't take long before Zhiyun Group drew out another $10 billion in cash flow on its own, and added the funds from these strategic financings to make up a total of $140 billion to repay the bank group.

The large group of people in the banking group who had been restless for half a month finally felt relieved... and could finally sleep peacefully.

This 140 billion US dollars, just thinking about it makes me feel overwhelmed!

Now, the money is finally returned!
After finalizing the strategic investors and repaying the bank consortium’s money, the next step was to deal with the new listing plan.

There are currently about 40 billion US dollars worth of Zhiyun shares deposited in the brokerage firm designated by Zhiyun, waiting to be exchanged for Hong Kong stocks.

This time, all preparations for listing on the Hong Kong stock market have been completed. We just have to wait for Zhiyun to complete its delisting plan and issue additional shares before starting the Hong Kong stock market listing.

Of course, various new listing roadshows are still needed. Zhiyun’s roadshow team will travel around the world for a new round of roadshows to attract more investors to buy Zhiyun’s stocks.

Xu Shenxue did not participate much in these matters.

After parting ways with the Hemei Group, Xu Shenxue felt refreshed and his mood improved a lot.

I also had the mood to pay attention to the spring conference.

In order to inject a shot in the arm to the new round of Hong Kong stock listings.

Zhiyun Group also held its spring press conference in late March!

Ji Chenghe, senior vice president of Zhiyun Group, presided over the launch of several products of Zhiyun Group at the press conference.

Including a new tablet computer equipped with a new generation of 504-nanometer process chip, namely the S chip.

It also released the small-screen flagship S14X, which uses the S13 chip that was on the flagship S403 from the previous year.

What is surprising is that Zhiyun Group also released a new C series mobile phone, which is the new generation of C8 mobile phone, at this year's spring conference.

In the past, Zhiyun Group has concentrated its mobile phone product releases in the second half of the year. Such frequent releases of new products are likely to distract market attention and cause internal friction.

At the same time, the lack of mobile phone product launches in the first half of the year resulted in low mobile phone sales and revenue.

It will also lead to large fluctuations in production capacity: products are concentrated on the market in the second half of the year, production capacity is very tight, and there is a global shortage, but capacity utilization is insufficient in the first half of the year.

Finally, if the release of the C series products is delayed by half a year, the cost of spare parts can be further reduced, thereby obtaining larger and more sufficient production capacity.

In order to solve these problems, Zhiyun Group considered many aspects and decided to move the release of the C series mobile phones to the first half of the year.

The C series mobile phones are positioned as mid-range to high-priced mobile phones, with a main price range of 3,000 yuan, and the parts they use are mainly parts that are one generation behind.

This year's C8 mobile phone uses the S407 chip, which is actually a slightly castrated version of the Zhiyun flagship chip S403 from the previous year.

The S7 used in last year's C406 is also a castrated version of the S403, but the degree of castration is even greater than this year's S407.

The reason why they all use the castrated version of S403 is that it is impossible for Zhiyun to design a new chip specifically for the C series mobile phones.

The cost is too high and it is unnecessary.

But it is impossible to break the chip positioning and price system of its own mobile phones, so it is impossible to install the S403 chip into the C series mobile phones as it is...

To put it simply, the S13 phone will definitely not use the same chip as the C7 or C8 phone... This is not a question of cost, but a question of brand positioning.

The S series mobile phones must be unique and must have performance advantages. Even if it is just the previous generation S13 mobile phone, it must be better than the current C8 mobile phone!
所以智云宁愿把满血S403芯片进行锁频，然后又弄个新编号S407用在C8手机上，也不愿意让C8手机直接使用S403芯片。

However, even after being slightly frequency-locked, the S407's performance is still very good at the moment. It is one of the most powerful chips in the market and is sufficient for use in mid-range phones like the C8.

Zhiyun released a new generation of C series mobile phones half a year later, and announced that it would release C series mobile phones in spring in the future. This also allowed the outside world to guess some adjustments to Zhiyun's smart terminal business.

At this year's spring conference, Zhiyun released a new generation of tablet computers, the S14X inventory-clearing mobile phone, and a new generation of mid-range mobile phone C8.

In addition, several PC products were also released, mainly all-in-one computers and mini hosts using WZ4000 chips, making Zhiyun's PC products on sale fully use self-developed Weizhi X86 chips, and they are all high-end WZ4000 series chips.

As for the entry-level WZ2000 series chips, they are not used in Zhiyun’s own terminal products and are only sold externally.

The launch of multiple products has made this year's Zhiyun Spring Conference more valuable and attracted greater market attention.

In particular, the C series mid-range mobile phones and SX small-screen mobile phones have been moved from the previous autumn release to this year's spring release, which has also made many mobile phone manufacturers feel some pressure.

You should know that the above two mobile phones, although not very good in Zhiyun's mobile phone product line, are overshadowed by the S series mobile phones.

But it does not mean that these two mobile phones have little market competitiveness!

The C series of mobile phones have always been the dominant force in the domestic mid-range market, with sales far exceeding that of other mid-range mobile phones... The Little Blue MAX series under Weiku Electronics is also priced at around three thousand yuan. This phone model has been working hard for several years, but its annual sales are actually only about 10 to 20 million units, and it is still a long way from reaching 30 million sales!

However, the C series mobile phones have a stable sales volume of 50 to 60 million units per year.

This is the third best-selling mobile phone series in the world, except for Zhiyun’s own S series and Fruit flagship series!

A best-selling model that has consistently occupied the top five sales markets in many countries!

If we say that the competitor of the Apple flagship and the four-star Galaxy is the Zhiyun S series.

Even the main competitor of a large number of mobile phone manufacturers' mid-to-high-end mobile phones is the Zhiyun C series.

Many mobile phone manufacturers’ new models are aimed directly at competing with the Zhiyun C series. To this end, they rack their brains to engage in various differentiated competitions in an attempt to offset the huge brand advantages of the Zhiyun C series mobile phones brought by the Zhiyun brand.

That’s right, the reason why the Zhiyun C series sells so well is that its brand advantage is a key factor... They don’t need to do any publicity and marketing, nor do they need to talk about cost-effectiveness, or do some messy things. They just need to put the word "Zhiyun" on it, and a lot of consumers will buy it!
This makes many mobile phone manufacturers particularly helpless!
Especially the sister manufacturer Weiku Electronics... They worked so hard and put so much thought into the Blueplus MAX that they even came up with the so-called Blueplus MAX6 with a rear fingerprint and full screen last year. However, its sales volume was less than a quarter of that of the C7 phone.

It’s really irritating to see people compare to each other!
The C7 phone and the newly launched C8 phone are still quite ordinary, with nothing special about them. The only thing worth mentioning is that they use a metal body with more colors.

But consumers are obsessed with the word Zhiyun and buy the C series when they can’t afford the S series. What can you do?
Zhiyun has moved the release of such a heavyweight product to the first half of the year, which will definitely have a certain impact on the market.

Because many mobile phone manufacturers previously believed that the first half of the year was a relatively safe period, during which they could release their own new products and seize a wave of market share before Zhiyun released its mobile phones in the second half of the year.

Now there is one more C series mobile phone, which means that market competition in the first half of the year will be more intense.

After Zhiyun's 15 Spring Conference, various newly released products were launched on the market one after another, which also brought considerable benefits to Zhiyun's ongoing roadshow for listing on the Hong Kong stock market.

There is no better roadshow advertisement than letting investors see with their own eyes that Zhiyun’s new products are launched and sell well!
A C8 mobile phone shifted to the buying frenzy caused by its spring release, which made countless investors determined to buy Zhiyun stocks.

As more and more investors agree, Zhiyun's stock price will be further pushed up.

Before delisting from the U.S. stock market, Zhiyun's share price was maintained at US$510 billion. When the outstanding shares were redeemed, there was a premium, so the share price was approximately US$550 billion.

As for strategic investment, this is a premium investment. Different consortiums have different strategic investment valuations, ranging from US$550 billion to US$600 billion.

This time, the company is listed on the Hong Kong stock market with an initial estimated market value of US$600 billion. It is expected to issue 10% of its outstanding shares to the public, with a value of approximately US$60 billion.

In fact, a considerable portion of the issued circulating shares will be used to directly replace the exchange shares previously retained by US stock investors, which is not a share issuance in the conventional sense.

The value of this part of the exchange shares alone is around 40 billion US dollars.

The actual outstanding shares issued to new investors are worth approximately US$20 billion.

The main purpose of Zhiyun’s listing on the Hong Kong stock market this time is not to raise funds, but to change the place of listing.

In addition to listing on the Hong Kong stock market, Zhiyun was also exploring the feasibility of listing in China, but ultimately rejected the idea.

The main reason is that the A-share market is too deep, and the rise or fall is too magical. Even the investment department full of elites within Zhiyun is frightened and dare not go.

On the other hand, the A-share market is not suitable for listing a large-scale enterprise like Zhiyun that is open to global investors...

So in the end, we only decided to list on the Hong Kong stock market.

After various matters were finalized, the group did not keep the outside world waiting too long and soon officially announced its listing on the Hong Kong stock market in April!

After Zhiyun was re-listed, many people are paying close attention to the stock price of Zhiyun. Whether it can regain its market value of US$600 billion has become the focus of many people's attention!

(End of this chapter)