Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 367: The Mall with Billion Revenue
The October evening breeze blew gently, bringing a rare coolness to the southern city.
Song Ningyuan used her hand to smooth her hair that was messed up by the evening breeze, and then turned her gaze back to Xu Shenxue, who was sitting on the side and reading a report on a tablet.

The evening breeze on the balcony is also comfortable, and she also likes this comfortable scene.

Although this is somewhat different from the future life she imagined when she was young, it is also pretty good.

When she was young, she fantasized about finding someone she loved and who also loved her, and then living a happy and warm life together... The two of them would snuggle on the sofa and be sweet and affectionate with each other, the two of them would walk together in the sunset, and the two of them would grow old together.

But as she grew older, her thoughts changed as her experience grew.

Especially after learning that all the family assets would be left to his brother and he could only get a tiny portion of the family assets.

“Can you understand the company’s financial statements?”

This was what her mother asked her when she asked her mother, with a hint of reluctance and doubt, why she wanted to transfer all the shares of the family company to her brother.

But she knew that this was just an excuse.

Who the hell needs their children to understand the company’s financial statements when dividing the family property?
Do you really think I'm stupid?
Besides, her brother who hangs out in bars and picks up girls every day is not much better than her.

He said he went abroad to study, but he was not as good as me. Although I majored in art, my academic scores were very good back then. I was admitted to a 211 university based on my artistic expertise.

Her brother couldn't even get into college, so he had to go to North America to get a degree... After returning from studying abroad for several years, he couldn't even speak English fluently.

However, her opinion was ineffective. Before she graduated, her family's core asset, shares in an aluminum company worth hundreds of millions, was transferred to her brother.

Although her parents left her a house and some cash assets, the total amount was only a few million, which was insignificant compared to the huge family business.

Moreover, before she even graduated, her family was already planning to arrange a blind date for her, and the blind date turned out to be the ugly son of a major client company... To put it nicely, it was a marriage of arrangement, but to put it bluntly, it was selling a daughter.

I don't agree. I don't even have those millions of assets...

So when her cousin Lin Yaxian found her, although she hesitated, she still agreed to join the secretariat of Liuhe Investment.

She remembered very clearly that when her parents found out that she was going to study with Xu Shenxue, their attitude changed 180 degrees, and they even said that some other assets in the family could be used as a dowry.

But no one asked her why she wanted to be someone's personal secretary...even if that person was the richest man in the world!
They were just imagining how much benefits their daughter would get after she climbed onto Xu Shenxue's super thick legs.

In fact... there are no advantages, but a lot of disadvantages.

At the beginning of the year, several major customers of my family's aluminum company suddenly cancelled their cooperation and cheated the company, causing the capital chain to break, which directly forced the aluminum company into a desperate situation and forced it to carry out asset restructuring.

During the restructuring of the aluminum company, an investment company purchased most of the company's shares at a low price, and from then on the family's aluminum company changed its owner.

The new boss’s surname is still Song...Song Ningyuan!

All this happened just because she acted coquettishly in front of Xu Shenxue and shed a few tears. As a result, the big customer who had been planning for over a year increased the order, induced the company to increase investment, and increased loans to expand the scale... but suddenly withdrew the order, resulting in investment failure and even insolvency.

That useless brother thought that pie had fallen from the sky and even secretly mortgaged the family villa.

As it turned out, to own an aluminum company worth hundreds of millions, one did not need to understand the company's financial statements. The new management team that Xu Shenxue helped her set up managed the company very well after the bankruptcy reorganization, with revenue and profits increasing.

Now, her parents who have lost most of their assets and her loser brother can only rely on her charity to barely maintain their previous standard of living.

What a great attitude!
However, Song Ningyuan suddenly felt bored afterwards, and she no longer felt the joy of successful revenge when she saw her humble parents and brother.

So during these few months, she was actually not happy, and felt a sense of confusion that her life had lost its meaning.

It was not until last month when she found out she was pregnant that she felt her life had new meaning.

Song Ningyuan stroked her abdomen with her hand, where a new life was brewing, a life that could bring new color to her life.

Then he looked up at Xu Shenxue who was reading a document on the side, and a smile appeared on his face!
Although this kind of life is not what I imagined when I was young, it doesn't seem bad.

At least Xu Shenxue is a nice person. The Xu Shenxue in daily life and the Xu Shenxue in the eyes of the public are very different.

Xu Shenxue outside is very serious, even frightened by many people.

But in daily life, especially when facing his family, Xu Shenxue is still very kind and gentle and considerate to women like them.

The only problem might be that there are too many women.

But if there weren't many women, Song Ningyuan wouldn't have much to do.

Thinking of this, she leaned towards Xu Shenxue and rested her head on his shoulder.

Xu Shenxue glanced at her sideways, then reached out and held her. This woman had been in a mood swing for the past month after she became pregnant, and was often inexplicably sad, so in the past month or so, Xu Shenxue had often come to Secretary Song to accompany her.

Although there are more women around him, he still hopes that they can live a happier life and will try his best to accompany them.

It's just that I'm busy with work and can't spare much time to spend with them on weekdays.

In addition, there are more women, so many women have less time to allocate.

It was similar for Song Ningyuan. Before she became pregnant, Xu Shenxue actually spent very limited time with her. It was only after she became pregnant that Xu Shenxue noticed that she was in a bad mood, so he spent more time with her.

Song Ningyuan leaned gently on Xu Shenxue's shoulder and closed her eyes slightly.

No words, just leaning against me gently.

Xu Shenxue turned his head to look again, then turned his gaze back to the tablet.

On the tablet is a report from the Internet and Software business units.

In the early years, the Internet and software businesses of Zhiyun Group have always existed as auxiliary businesses. Their main task is not to generate revenue through the Internet and software businesses, but to provide ecological content for the smart terminal business. For example, the Zhiyun Mall business is the core business of the ecological content of the three major smart terminals of Zhiyun: mobile phones, tablets, and smart watches.

Only with Zhiyun Mall, the world's largest ecological content pool, can we provide Zhiyun's smart terminals with sufficient and excellent content ecology, thereby increasing the market competitiveness of Zhiyun phones and other smart terminals.

In addition to the mall business, Zhiyun Group's Internet and software businesses also include cloud computing, software services, content services, after-sales insurance services and many other types of businesses.

Its business types are actually very wide.

In the past two years, the revenue from the Internet and software business has continued to grow significantly and has gradually become one of the main sources of revenue for the group.

Xu Shenxue also gradually began to pay more attention to this part of the business.

Therefore, he read the report carefully and compared it carefully with the situation of the Internet and software business last year.

After comparison, he found that among the many businesses this year, cloud computing business and shopping mall business had a relatively fast growth rate.

In the mall business, with the continuous development of mobile Internet, mainly the global rollout of 4G, the continuous reduction of data traffic charges, the further popularization of WIFI, and the continuous improvement of mobile phone performance, support for mobile games has been further enhanced.

These have greatly stimulated users to make various consumptions on their mobile phones!
Of course, Zhiyun Mall does not charge channel fees for all users when they make purchases on their mobile phones. For example, the mall does not charge channel fees for various advertisements or purchases of physical products.

The channel fees charged by the mall are mainly payments for virtual products.

For example, games, service software, etc.

This year, the subsidiary Zhiyun Mall reported an estimated revenue of US$13 billion. It is worth noting that this US$13 billion is not just the revenue earned by the entire mall. In fact, if all revenue is counted, the total revenue would be around US$52 billion.

However, most of this money actually belongs to the developers. Zhiyun Mall can only get a part of it, ranging from 15% to 50%. On average, the total proportion is about 30%, which is actually similar to the 30% that fruit companies get.

The above-mentioned channel fee income of Zhiyun Mall is not all its own, because Zhiyun Mall operates three system malls, including Zhiyun APP Mall, Xiaolan APP Mall, and Weiku APP Mall. Therefore, there are still about US$4 billion in channel fee income that needs to be shared with Weiku Electronics.

However, the remaining revenue of approximately US$9 billion is also a very good figure, especially since Zhiyun Mall is relatively restrained in charging channel fees in the content ecosystem and has implemented measures to reduce or exempt channel fees for a large number of service software.

For many software charges that are in strong demand among users, Zhiyun Mall often gives relatively large reductions, and the commission rate can even be as low as 15%. For a large number of non-game works, the commission rate through the Zhiyun Mall channel is actually lower.

For game apps or other app projects that have no core competitiveness and can only rely solely on mall traffic support, the share ratio will be relatively higher.

The general profit share of games is around 50%, but for some top mobile games that bring their own traffic, the channel fee can be negotiated to 30%.

The specific proportion of the profit sharing depends mainly on the manufacturer's own choice... Anyway, the channel fees for game apps range from 30% to 50%.

If you want greater traffic support, more server resources and other support, you will have to pay more channel fees.

Zhiyun Mall does not do a one-size-fits-all business, and gives customers ample room to choose... Anyway, the traffic is sold at a clearly marked price, and manufacturers can choose the level of channel fee ratio by themselves.

Generally speaking, Zhiyun Mall will not intervene too much… If you have the ability, you can choose a 30% channel fee level, and then there will only be the most basic traffic support. Whether the subsequent games can be mixed depends on the strength of your own work and your own marketing capabilities.

If you are a small manufacturer that does not have much traffic-generating capacity and wants to save time and effort, you can directly choose the highest channel fee ratio of 50% to obtain some additional traffic resources.

In the past, Zhiyun Mall actually charged a 90% channel fee ratio... but was later accused of being too greedy, and even led to antitrust lawsuits in many countries.

Finally, under tremendous pressure, Zhiyun Mall changed its operating model, with the profit sharing ratio of non-game categories up to 30% and game categories up to 50%!

However, this actually has little impact on the operation of the entire mall, because those game works that choose more than 50% or even 90% of the channels are basically very poor works that cannot be supported by traffic.

More often than not, the system mall supports works with good strength that can take off with traffic.

So although it seems that the proportion of channel fees has decreased, the revenue of Zhiyun Mall has not decreased, but has continued to increase. It is expected that the channel fees collected this year will exceed 10 billion US dollars.

The $10 billion in channel fee income is easy money. Apart from paying for some server resources and recommendation positions, Zhiyun has no additional costs.

Therefore, the gross profit margin is very high, and no matter how much you earn, it is pure profit.

The rapid growth of this part of the business also attracted Xu Shenxue's attention.

After all, this is a business that doesn’t cost much!

In addition to the mall, Zhiyun Group's cloud computing business is also growing very rapidly.

Although Zhiyun Group's cloud computing business entered the market relatively late, thanks to its huge size, especially the fact that it is engaged in servers and various server software, it is able to control computing power costs at a relatively low level, thereby increasing its market competitiveness.

Due to the performance gap and ecological gap, Zhiyun Group's own X86 server chips and SPO server chips actually have little third-party market.

It has to be said that in the field of server chips, Intel is very strong, and has long dominated more than 75% of the market share.

However, it is necessary to do it even if there is no third-party market. In order to develop chips, Zhiyun Group simply sells computing power through Zhiyun Computing.

It doesn’t matter if customers don’t use my chips, but I will make the chips into servers and then sell computing power directly to customers...and the price is cheap, so customers are naturally willing to accept it.

By making servers and selling computing power, we can also meet the server needs within the group and some special institutions and enterprises.

This supports the production capacity of server chips under Zhiyun Group, so that the unit price is not too expensive due to low sales and low production capacity, resulting in the embarrassment of losing money on every chip made.

So in terms of computing power business, Zhiyun Group has done quite well... Mainly relying on its own chips and selling computing power at a low price.

Except for cloud computing and shopping mall APP, the revenue of other Internet and software businesses is not so good.

Although these businesses are not very profitable, they are indispensable.

Because these are all part of the Zhiyun ecosystem!

(End of this chapter)