I can become stronger by paying salaries. I have one billion employees!

Chapter 125: Valuation of 160 billion, a sucker (asking for monthly tickets)
The next morning, as soon as Chen Yansen arrived at the Entrepreneurship Park, he called Lin Chenfeng from Penguin Investment Department, Zhang Suyang from IDG Venture Capital Fund, and Zhang Jiancheng from Siwei Capital.

Chen Yansen’s meaning was very straightforward: he wanted to sell 5% of FoxTao’s equity.

"Mr. Chen, I will communicate with Martin first and contact you when I have news." Lin Chenfeng implied that he would go to Liu Zhiping to ask for instructions on whether to accept the 5% equity.

Zhang Suyang and Zhang Jiancheng gave similar responses. They were both quite interested in the 5% stake, but they had to re-evaluate the current business scale of FoxTao before determining the purchase price.

Chen Yansen didn't take it seriously. He was just going through the process to inform them. The news had to be released eventually.

At noon that day, some domestic venture capital institutions that are fond of the e-commerce track received rumors one after another.

The founder of FoxTao plans to sell 5% of his shares. As soon as the news came out, it immediately attracted a lot of attention.

In the field of shopping guide e-commerce, FoxTao is far ahead.

It has left Meilishuo, Mogujie and What’s Worth Buying far behind, and the latter can only pick up leftovers.

In the first quarter, it achieved sales of 15 billion (actual sales were 12.9 billion), and set a sales target of 100 billion for the whole year. Once achieved, its sales and profit levels will be second only to Ali and Yidong in China, and even exceed No.1 Store and Dangdang.com.

Therefore, interested venture capital institutions have made offers one after another.

According to the user value valuation method, FoxTao currently has 300 million daily active users, and it is estimated that each active user can bring in 500-1000 yuan in profits, with a valuation range of between 15 billion and 30 billion yuan.

However, FoxTao's valuation reached 28 billion during its Series A financing round, so Chen Yansen directly hung up on those venture capital firms that offered valuations below 30 billion.

After all, these people made their offers without thinking, and Chen Yansen didn't expect them to offer more sincere conditions.

If the price-to-sales ratio valuation method is used, based on the current daily sales of 3000 million, the annual sales are expected to be 100 billion. Based on the average price-to-sales ratio of 1.5-2 times in the e-commerce industry, the valuation is between 150 billion and 200 billion.

However, there is still a difference between shopping guide e-commerce and a truly comprehensive e-commerce platform.

Although most venture capitalists are optimistic about the development of FoxTao, they also feel that the ceiling is not high.

The highest valuation offer is 100 billion!
The more stingy venture capital firms used the traditional industry discounted cash flow method to give a valuation of 72 billion.

Chen Yansen wanted to use the price-to-earnings ratio valuation method, take an average of 20, and based on an annual profit of 6 million, a valuation of 120 billion given by venture capital would be reasonable.

But no matter which calculation logic and valuation model is used, the valuation exceeds 60 billion, which shows that FoxTao already has the corporate strength of a unicorn.

Chen Yansen and venture capitalists are testing each other.

A week later, the venture capital firms that were truly interested gradually surfaced, namely Sequoia, IDG Ventures and Augusta Capital.

Among them, Augusta showed the greatest interest and offered the most sincere offer!
They were originally investigating the business model of Ebates (the originator of the rebate business) and were preparing to invest when they learned that a shopping guide e-commerce platform with even faster growth had emerged in the Asian market.

Less than a year after its establishment, its annual sales are estimated to exceed US$15 billion.

This instantly piqued their interest!
So, after investing 4000 million US dollars in Ebates, the people from Augusta rushed to Hui'an without stopping, took the high-speed rail, and went straight to Xuyuan.

After receiving the news, Chen Yansen smiled faintly and thought: It seems that the investment institutions in Dengguang Country are still generous.

Perhaps they have come into contact with Ebates and are more familiar with and trust this business.

Chen Yansen knew that unless he could get Fox Tao listed on the Nasdaq within two years, no matter who invested, it would be a losing deal.

After weighing the pros and cons, Penguin felt that FoxTao's valuation was too high and that continuing to invest would not yield high returns, so it gave up first.

The situation of Siwei Capital is similar. They are small in scale and prefer to make a small investment with a big return. They gave up the purchase right because they felt it was not cost-effective.

Ma Liyun of Ali was very interested, but he had no money to use to buy back Yahoo's 40% stake, so he gave up.

November 5th, 9:1.

Chen Yansen met Augusta's investment team on the first floor of the Entrepreneurship Park. Except for a Chinese translator, most of the team members were from Lighthouse. It can be seen that Augusta Capital has not set up an office in Asia.

The reason why they are willing to invest money is probably because they are extremely optimistic about the future development of the shopping guide model.

But Chen Yansen knows clearly that the shopping guide model has no future!
"Mr. Chen, this is Augusta's investment manager, Jody. He was responsible for Ebates' $4000 million financing."

The translator pointed to the middle-aged white man next to him and introduced him politely.

“Hello, Mr. Chen, I’m Jody. It’s really hard to imagine that the founder of Fox Tao is so young.”

Jody, with his Mediterranean hairstyle and wearing a high-end royal blue suit, enthusiastically extended his right hand to greet.

The translator was just about to translate Jodie's words and tell them to Chen Yansen.

Chen Yansen walked straight forward, shook Jody's hand, looked the "sucker" up and down, then greeted him in fluent English and invited him to go upstairs for a visit.

The translator was stunned for a moment, then secretly happy. After all, these foreigners had already paid the money, and he could get the money for free without doing any work. It was really cool.

Jody was very surprised. He didn't expect Chen Yansen's English to be so good. His pronunciation was pure American and he had no accent at all.

Chen Yansen led Qiao Di and the others upstairs. The first person to be confused was Wang Zihao. He knew Chen Yansen all too well. He had scored 80 points in English on the college entrance exam, making him the most patriotic student in Class 8 of Senior 3. He had to guess all the words and rely on guessing in the listening section.

Is the person in front of me who is chatting with foreigners really Chen Yansen?
Wang Zihao was full of questions.

He did often see Chen Yansen reading books and watching movies with original soundtracks, but this progress was too exaggerated.

Augusta's entourage includes investment analysts, industry experts, and financial and legal advisors.

After everyone sat down, Jody went straight to Chen Yansen and asked for the balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, as well as user and sales data.

Seeing that the other party was eager to discuss cooperation, Chen Yansen didn't care and asked Hu Yun to distribute the information prepared in advance to the staff of Augusta.

Afterwards, Hu Yun connected the screen projection and opened the data report.

Then Hu Yun looked at the translator and motioned him to help introduce the data. The data was mainly in Arabic numerals and perspective charts, which these foreigners could understand, but the fields and headers were in Chinese and needed translation assistance.

The translator nodded and helped Hu Yun introduce the current development status of FoxTao.

300 million daily active users!
Single-day sales of 3000 million!
The number of new customers increases by nearly one million every day!
The annual sales volume is expected to be 100 billion, and the net profit is 6-7 million!
To be honest, FoxTao's development is no worse than Ebates.

Considering that China has a population of 14 billion and huge potential for e-commerce, Jody instantly confirmed his intention to invest.

Before coming to China, Jody's team analyzed the shopping guide market size, growth rate, share and competitors, and FoxTao firmly ranked first in the industry.

During the conversation, Chen Yansen also proposed the idea of ​​a rebate card. In the future, FoxTao users will be able to get rebates regardless of whether they shop in offline supermarkets or online B2C platforms.

Credit cards are combined with a rebate model, extending from online to offline.

Chen Yansen was good at making promises, which made the bald foreigner's eyes light up. He suddenly felt that China's shopping guide e-commerce track had great potential.

The idea of ​​combining credit cards with supermarket rebates alone has a market worth tens of billions of dollars if brought back to China.

Chen Yansen smiled secretly. He didn't expect that the other party would take his casual remark so seriously.

In fact, these small methods of expanding the market will be tried by others in the future, but they will not be successful because of the small scale.

For example, if you go to a supermarket to buy a certain brand of shampoo, you can get advertising rebates from the brand by uploading the receipt. This is troublesome and easy to forge, so it cannot be implemented at all.

Chen Yansen is just fooling people. He had no intention of implementing these immature business plans. He just casually drew up a pie in the sky when describing the prospects of FoxTao.

Jody's team stayed in the Entrepreneurship Park until 6 p.m. before leaving. Before leaving, they took away a stack of data files.

"Brother Sen, when did your English become so good?" Wang Zihao came over and asked curiously.

"I found time to learn it." Chen Yansen said perfunctorily with a smile.

Now it depends on whether Sequoia and IDG can offer a higher bid.

Zuo Hongyu helped him find a factory in Shenzhen. Xu Dan even made a recruitment plan and was waiting for the funds to arrive.

Three days later, after comprehensive evaluation, Chen Yansen gave up Sequoia and IDG and chose to cooperate with Augusta.

The other party gave too much!
With a valuation of 160 billion, Chen Yansen can get 8 million for this 5% stake!

If Chen Yansen, as the major shareholder, had not given IDG, Penguin and Siwei Capital the authority to transfer shares, Siwei would probably have been the first to jump out and sell all its shares to Augusta.

After all, you can make hundreds of millions by buying and selling.

When the news came out, it caused a huge stir in the circle. No one expected that the dog tycoon from the Lighthouse Country would be willing to offer such a high price.

With a net worth of hundreds of billions, Chen Yansen has become the top of the list of the richest people born in the 90s. Some fans believe that those who have a net worth of tens of billions are not even qualified to be Chen Yansen's stools.

Someone simply made a list of the world's richest people born after 90, and ranked Chen Yansen and Facebook's Zuckerberg together. This list is so wild, but there are still many people who believe it.

Some even questioned that Zuckerberg was not qualified to be on the list because he was not born in the 90s.

Chen Yansen was at a loss whether to laugh or cry after finding out, but as he watched his Weibo followers skyrocket and rush towards tens of millions, he kept quiet and quietly posted handsome photos and brand group previews.

This blocked Chen Ou's "road". He had just received 1000 million US dollars in financing, but in terms of appearance and ability, he was no match for Chen Yansen. If he really took the route of an internet celebrity entrepreneur, he would most likely be ridiculed.

By mid-May, under the promotion of Chen Yansen, the development progress of the Aurora system was more than half completed.

At the same time, Xu Dan began to recruit hardware design and industrial design engineers, and gradually transferred the employee contracts of the Aurora R&D team to the newly established Orange Technology Company.

On the other hand, Yidong received the largest venture capital since its establishment. Liu Qiangdong's heavy asset model was still favored by DST, Tiger Fund and Sequoia Capital, and received 15 billion US dollars.

This allowed Liu Qiangdong to launch his first attack on Ali's e-commerce dominance.

(End of this chapter)