My Lord, you need to stand up!

Chapter 13: Mistakes upon Mistakes

Yes, no.

Rare metals like titanium are not a commodity circulated on the market at all.

Rang Weidong is not that smart and has no experience, but he is not stupid. In those days, those who could finish high school had a pretty good IQ.

Looking through those contact information, it is true that many of them can make money.

Fabrics, building materials, electrical appliances, all kinds of goods can make money as long as you can find the manufacturer and sales channels and make a profit by taking the price difference.

But the profit is not as high as bacon.

Weidong discovered this problem when he was using the silk quilt.

This is also the reason why he hesitated about whether to follow You Qili, the richest man, to explore the world.

You risk going to jail, and in an environment full of pickpockets, robberies, and frauds, how can you make five or six times the profit that I do?
In essence, it is still the mentality of being content with a small fortune, and this mentality began to emerge again after I had 7,000 yuan in my pocket.

Seven thousand! At this time, a person with an income of ten thousand yuan can already go on the stage to be interviewed. If such a person appears in a province, the whole province will be surrounded by onlookers.

Who would have thought that this dirty "porter" sitting in the corner had saved 7,000 yuan by selling bacon.

So Weidong looked around and found that only titanium alloy seemed high-end and could have high profits.

Choose to call and ask.

The phone bill costs several dollars, which can feed a family for two days.

But what they want is titanium alloy, and what Weidong said seems to be pure titanium. The latter has already involved military products, and there are only a few secret factories under the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry in the country that produce it!

It is said that there is one in the southwest region, but even the emerging private processing plants in Jiangsu and Zhejiang do not know where it is hidden.

The salesperson just came over and looked around, and left a message in You Qili's address book.

So it's not a big problem to get it. They have the connections to find a place to smelt the alloy, and pure titanium can skip the middleman who adds a price markup.

Better control the sources of scarce materials.

Now I am very interested in hearing the clue: "Can you give me the manufacturer's address and contact information?"

How is this possible? What Weidong learned outside of Wanshang Trading Company is that doing business these days is all about information asymmetry: "How much do you want? What's the acceptable market price?"

The other end immediately turned his back on the layman. "How much do you want? The country produces hundreds of tons of pure titanium ingots a year, and the market price is $700 per ton. We'll take whatever you have, from a kilogram to several tons. But that's the price at the time of delivery. Imported Australian rutile is only $ a ton right now. Talk to us when we have the stock!"

He hung up the phone angrily.

I guess he still wants to be arrogant and urge the other party to bow their heads before making the call.

Unexpectedly, the person who brought paper and pen asked Weidong to write down carefully, including all the information mentioned just now.

Then he took a river boat to the provincial capital on Sunday and showed up at the gate of the non-ferrous metal processing plant early the next morning.

Without observation, Weidong had the impression that Shi Linyan had been a very simple woman for decades. She was busy with activities on Sundays and never went out at night except for reading and studying.

I kept a close eye on her during the day just to find out if there were any traces of the wolf. The danger only appeared after the evening classes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

So we seized this opportunity and asked Weidong to come and pick up his father.

I also took the opportunity to inquire about the titanium plates and ingots.

The woman knitting behind the glass counter had bought bacon before, but she didn't think her product was anything special. "I don't know the price. I've never sold it before. The higher-ups always come to take it away. Earlier this year, they suddenly told us to find a market ourselves. You country girl, do you know where to sell it?"

Her skilled hands never stopped sewing, and she was not in a hurry. State-owned enterprises provide stable jobs, and the country will not let everyone starve to death.

The complete layman kept a secret in mind and didn't mention the market price in Jiangsu and Zhejiang: "My classmates are in college, and I heard from students in coastal areas that their families make this. The current import price of Australian rutile is $700 a ton. Is this needed to make titanium alloys?"

The woman was only interested in the amount: "What is rutile? Seven hundred dollars a ton? How much is that in RMB?"

It is difficult for people in the Internet age to imagine how blocked information was in those days. If you didn’t know, there was absolutely no channel to learn about it.

It's like under the structure of unified purchase and sale, manufacturers really don't know where their products are sold or how much they sell for. It's not like clothes or fabrics that have a basic market measurement. They are all hidden in the deep corners of the mountains, quietly mining, refining and manufacturing, and then handing them over to the state, which provides funding for their survival.

This is called a planned economy, which does not involve transactions in the market economy.

As for foreign exchange rates, except for people in Shanghai, perhaps no one in the country cares about them, and there is no place to see them.

If he found out the RMB wasn't worth as much as the US dollar, he'd feel inferior. Weidong scratched his head and thought, as if he remembered the short videos often talking about the US-China exchange rate breaking 7 or 8. "One to seven? That would mean 4,000 to 5,000 yuan?"

"You little brat! Seventy-seven forty-nine equals five thousand. You're still trying to play dumb. Okay, I'll report this to the boss first." The woman knitting quickly pulled out her needle without even looking up.

Weidong, with the mentality of giving it a try, asked for a phone number that required manual transfer and went to pick up his father.

I wonder if the whole factory held a meeting immediately after hearing the news!
Because titanium can theoretically be extracted from rutile or ilmenite. The former has higher purity, but my country's mineral resources and refining technology determine that it is the latter.

Even the former's refining technology and the ratio of pure titanium to rutile are unknown.

This information was like a fatal blow to the factory working hard in the mountains.

The rumor about rutile was definitely not groundless. The factory leaders asked the higher authorities for their opinions on the price, and the technical department calculated the cost overnight. Rutile was already 5,000 yuan per ton, so they wanted to see what price we could sell it at to avoid losing money.

In fact, the exchange rate of the US dollar is 1 to 2 right now, I didn’t even know that.

Wei Dong didn't realize that his two light words had caused everyone to be in a mess.

He was just busy bringing his father back.

Lao Rang, who had just had his full body splint removed, was trembling, but this was not a problem with his bones or spine. It was just that the muscles in his entire leg had atrophied after being immobilized for nearly a hundred days.

But he insisted on going alone.

Under the guidance of the hospital, he is now able to stand up by holding on to the wall.

I could only sigh that the doctor found out that he had stopped smoking and cut off his cigarettes. He said that he couldn’t smoke for the next six months. It was so uncomfortable!

Weidong was so happy that he kept surrounding his father and asking him how his waist felt, whether it was painful, and whether the fracture was healing well.

In the end, he carried it to the dock and boarded the boat himself.

It’s a pity that my mother has only paid half of the third month’s rent, which is several dollars.

Let Weidong let her lock the door and leave: "It doesn't matter. We can continue to rent it next time we come. Every time we come to sell bacon, we need a place to stay and sleep. But we need to think about this business carefully."

Sitting across the street these days, he must have been thinking, "There are still three or four months until the Spring Festival. This year, we can collect a few more pigs to slaughter for the New Year, and buy some piglets for the villagers to raise so that we can slaughter more and smoke more bacon next year. Slowly, this business will take off."

After watching their son go back and forth more than ten times to do business, the couple working in the city were more accepting than the country people: "Then you still have to be careful not to get your tail cut off."

Mom was concerned about Goudan's gossip: "I heard Erfeng is also helping you collect the bacon. Did you give all the money to your wife?"

It seems that this detail made my mother a little hurt. Before she even got married, she had already taken away the financial power of the family.

Weidong immediately denied it: "It's nothing. If my father becomes paralyzed and can't stand up, and I get my tail cut off while selling things, her father will definitely not recognize this casually mentioned in-law. We won't pursue this marriage. I just want to work and make money now. She helps me collect the bacon, so I must pay her and divide it clearly."

His mother must feel embarrassed among the neighbors.

Instead, it was Lao Rang, who had been a soldier, who said, "Let's go back and settle down and slowly talk to Lao Li about this. If you have the ambition, you should go out and see the world. There are many people in the army who could have been promoted, but their marriages were ruined."

That is the only way for rural people to move to the city, except for going to college.

Of course, they fought to the point of bloodshed.

Weidong was delighted with his father's openness: "I'll live in Shangzhou for a while first, and then continue my rehabilitation in the city. When I start my bacon business, I'll have a place to store goods in the countryside, the city, and the provincial capital."

On Tuesday morning, the family happily moved into the rental house. On the way, they passed by the sealed Wanshang Trading Company, which made Weidong look at it deeply.

Because the boy selling newspapers at the dock was already shouting:

"Selling newspapers, selling newspapers! Shangzhou self-employed business owner You Qili, using the signs of a department store and hardware retailer, has employed various illegal means, colluding with both domestic and foreign forces, to purchase large quantities of state-monetized supplies, short-selling, and speculating, profiteering. The police have shut down this business and are detaining eight key members of the store for investigation!"

A lot of people bought newspapers.

In fact, based on what Weidong saw in the provincial capital, the manufacturers he contacted by phone, and even the train timetable he bought, there was a thick stack of advertisements for various products from all over the country at the back.

The pace of reform has been very obvious, but this remote mountain city still sticks to the old rules.

You really have to be careful when doing this business.

But no matter what, with his father and mother living in a rental house after receiving discharge documents, Weidong can finally free up his hands to fully complete the job of "carrying his husband".

(End of this chapter)