Chapter 542: Do I need a reason to dislike you?
Seeing that George Soros was beginning to be interested, Joe Burt immediately assured him with a solemn oath: "I swear with my most devout faith that this news is absolutely true. With this news, we can directly short the Fun Facts Company!"
Joe Burt wanted to short the Fun Company on Wall Street, but he was definitely not strong enough on his own, so he had to persuade George Soros. As long as Soros got involved, relying on Soros's strong connections and funds, shorting Fun Company would be a sure thing.
Seeing that Joe Bert actually swore on his own beliefs, George Soros immediately showed a grim smile. Lu Yiming had cheated him when he was in Hong Kong, and he had always remembered this grudge .
This time, of course he would seize the opportunity and fight back.
After hanging up the phone with Joe Burt, George Soros called Cliff Asness and James Chanos and invited them to short the stock of Fun Facts.
Cliff Asness and James Chanos were also very interested in being able to cause some trouble for Lu Yiming. Moreover, if this matter was handled well, they might be able to make some money.
Therefore, the two readily agreed to Soros' proposal.
Zhonghai, No. 699 Yuyuan Road.
Although several days had passed since the fire broke out, Bill Gates did not seem to have any intention of leaving. Instead of returning to America, he found an excuse and moved directly into the Lu Family Garden.
Fortunately, the Lu family garden is big enough and has enough rooms. Even if Bill Gates lives in it with his bodyguards and entourage, it still seems very spacious.
But Lu Yiming was very unhappy.
In the yard, two people were lying on rattan chairs drinking coffee and basking in the sun. Lu Yiming complained, "Because of you, my door is almost being trampled down by people now."
In the past few days, business elites and political bigwigs have come to visit Bill Gates in waves, making Lu Yiming very annoyed.
However, Bill Gates did not have the slightest awareness of being a guest. Instead, he smiled and said, "Didn't I tell you when I came here? I want to take this opportunity to have a good vacation. You are my friend, you won't be unwilling to receive me, right?"
Lu Yiming had no way to deal with this old rogue. The two were chatting when Bill Gates received a call. He winked at Lu Yiming and said, "Someone in America seems to want to short the news. Are you up to something again?"
Lu Yiming took a deep breath and couldn't help but exclaimed: "Wow, there are still people shorting interesting news? Where did this idiot come from?"
Bill Gates was confident about the future of interesting things, so he was not panicked at all when he received the news. He still had a smile on his face and said in a relaxed tone: "I don't know, but who cares? It's a fat sheep that comes to my door, so I'd rather kill it."
Lu Yiming deeply agreed with this.
Although cheating a fool seems to be an immoral thing, the other party has offered himself to him. If Lu Yiming does not help him, wouldn't he be wasting this gift from nature?
Now that the revision of Quwen has been completed and the coordination with the operator has entered the final stage, the subscription service will be launched soon. It does require a bit of imagination to short Quwen at this point.
June 30, 2000, Nasdaq Stock Exchange, USA.
Ding Sanshi led a group of NetEase executives and performed the bell-ringing ceremony with a small hammer. He was very excited at the moment.
Once the company goes public, you will become a rich man!
Recalling the time when he was so poor that he had to eat pig's trotter rice every day when he started his business, Ding Sanshi now feels that his future is bright.
The company's executives hugged each other excitedly. From now on, they were all millionaires, or even tens of millions of dollars!
Ding Sanshi, who holds 48% of NetEase's shares, has a net worth of over 200 million US dollars based on the issue price of US$15.3, making him a billionaire!
As an Internet company, the number of shares held by the entrepreneur Ding Sanshi is simply incredible.
Just look at Ding's peers and you will know. Pony Ma, the founder of Penguin, holds less than 9% of the shares; Jack Ma of Alibaba holds 7% of the shares; Dong Ge, who became famous after 2009, holds 15% of the shares; and Leo DiCaprio of Baidu holds 16% of the shares.
This shows how vigilant and cautious Ding Pangzi, as an entrepreneur, is when facing capital. Especially after Wang Zhidong was kicked out of Zhalang by Lu Yiming and several other directors, he felt even more concerned and did not dare to relax his control over the controlling rights at all.
After the bell ringing ceremony, representatives from Merrill Lynch Far East Ltd. and Deutsche Bank, the stock underwriters, also came to congratulate.
"Mr. Ding, congratulations."
"According to the saying in my hometown, you have been a daughter-in-law for many years and finally become a mother-in-law."
"It should be the result of many hardships, haha."
For NetEase to go public, the support of securities firms is indispensable, so Ding Sanshi was very polite to the two men.
"Haha, congratulations to you all. You guys have also made an invaluable contribution to the company's successful listing."
For the next few days, Ding Sanshi stayed in the United States. Seeing NetEase's market value break through 465 million US dollars after its listing, he couldn't help but feel proud and thought that there was great potential in the future.
However, his happiness did not last long. NetEase's stock price soon fell below the issue price, and the decline even exceeded 30% at one point!
What kind of scene has Ding Sanshi boasted that he has not seen?
But he had never seen such a scene before!
He quickly called over his senior executives and asked, "What's going on? Why did the stock price drop so much all of a sudden? I haven't heard of any negative news about the company. Is someone shorting us?"
"I'll call and ask if there's a problem in the country."
The senior executives were also frightened by the drop in price . Now that Ding Sanshi asked about it, he dared not neglect it and quickly called domestic and foreign branches to find out the situation.
After several phone calls, the executive finally understood the reason and reported to Ding Sanshi: "Boss Ding, the company has neither been exposed to any scandal nor been shorted maliciously. It is because the number of visitors to our NetEase portal website has dropped sharply in the past few days, which has directly reflected on the stock price, and investors have begun to become pessimistic about our business potential."
Ding Sanshi was shocked. The most important thing for Internet companies now is various data indicators. For example, for portal websites, click-through rate is very important. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is the lifeline.
After all, most Internet companies are losing money to gain publicity, and what they are selling is the "future", but the future cannot be illusory, let alone empty talk, otherwise how can they fool investors into investing money?
Therefore, the only thing that can be boasted about is how many users the website has and how many people use it, in order to prove its future business potential.
But now the website's click rate has plummeted, which is really a fatal blow.
“Why did this happen all of a sudden? Is it a technical issue, like our website is overloaded with traffic and crashed?”
The executive said truthfully: "I hope that's the problem, but..."
Ding Sanshi said angrily: "But you, sir, why are you trying to play tricks on me? Tell me now!"
The executive said, "According to feedback from the company, the website's traffic has dropped because users have been diverted away by interesting stories."
Ding Sanshi frowned and asked, "What is anecdote?"
But he immediately realized that his old rival Zhalang had changed its name to Quwen after Lu Yiming acquired a large number of shares. He had been busy with NetEase's IPO recently, so he forgot about this for a while.
Both OnePlus and OnePlus are in the information business. It can be said that apart from the different names, they are similar in every other way, and the business overlap is almost 100%.
"How come Quwen snatched away our users out of nowhere? Did they use some tricks to attract new users? But there is no conflict between visiting Quwen and visiting NetEase. Why do netizens only look for Quwen and not visit NetEase?"
Ding Sanshi was puzzled, so he immediately turned on the computer and entered the URL of the interesting story.
As a colleague, Ding Sanshi knows a lot about interesting news. As soon as he opened the website, the homepage that popped up had a uniform color scheme and was obviously specially designed. In the large and small squares, there were not only texts but also pictures. The stories were arranged according to their popularity, and the levels were clear. It can be said that with just one glance, it is clear which news is the focus.
Ding Sanshi suddenly felt very unfamiliar.
He suddenly thought of the NetEase homepage with all kinds of dense text, hyperlinks and advertisements.
He himself couldn't bear to look at it.
It’s okay if there is no comparison, after all, everyone was equally bad before.
But now someone in the same industry has taken the lead in making changes, which immediately gives people a sense of standing out from the crowd.
Ding Sanshi was very unhappy because NetEase became a weakling among a crowd of chickens!
No wonder traffic can be snatched away by interesting stories.
As for this page, even Ding Sanshi had to admit that he would definitely go to the interesting news page to read the news!
Ding Sanshi clicked on a piece of news at random.
The title is centered and bolded to highlight the key points. A line of small-print summary is placed below to give the reader a first impression, and the main text below is neat and tidy.
It can be said that reading the news here is simply a pleasure.
This is much better than searching for the main text among the advertisements on NetEase News and extracting the main idea yourself!
The best part is that after reading the news, there is actually a comment section below where registered users can leave messages to express their opinions and interact with other netizens.
Ding Sanshi realized that this function was the ultimate killer!
Ding Sanshi glanced at the news comment section and almost saw high blood pressure.
"The anecdotes are really awesome, and the layout design is amazing."
"After browsing so many portal websites, Fun News is definitely a breath of fresh air in the industry. I don't see any advertisements here."
"They specifically criticized NetEase and Sohu. When I clicked on them, they were all ads. I was clearly looking for news, but ended up being covered in ads."
"From now on I will be a die-hard fan of interesting news. To hell with NetEase and Sohu."
All these remarks made Ding Sanshi frightened.
As an Internet person, he knows very well what is going on.
When everyone is doing a bad job, users have no choice, so they just muddle through.
But once one company carries out reform and innovation, if other peers do not keep up, they will inevitably be trampled to death by the innovator!
Other industries are fine, but Internet companies are fundamentally different.
For Internet companies, the number of users is the absolute criterion. If you have no users, you are doomed.
Users are the cornerstone of wealth creation for Internet companies.
Physical enterprises can still sell assets to tide over difficulties if they lose users, but once Internet enterprises lose users, they will be completely dead and have no chance of recovery. This is because the so-called Internet assets are worthless after losing users.
Countless Internet companies want to be the fathers of their users, and think that they should be grateful because they create functions for you to use.
As a result, once the users ran away, they were dumbfounded. The things they were so proud of and could be used to PUA users were actually not worth a penny.
It is not so easy to get back what you have lost, let alone put in many times the effort. The cruelest result is that no matter how hard you try, the lost things can never be returned.
Ding Sanshi became more and more angry and scared the more he watched. He called his men over and yelled, "Are you all blind? Why didn't you report to me when Quwen did so many big things?"
Not only Ding Sanshi, but also the senior executives of NetEase also realized the seriousness of the problem. Seeing Ding Sanshi's rage, they all kept silent.
Ding Sanshi was even more furious when he saw this. If NetEase was to fail like this, he would not be able to close his eyes until he died. He immediately shouted angrily, "Speak up! Are you not only deaf but also dumb?"
An executive gritted his teeth and explained: "This website was only launched in the last few days, and we only discovered the problem when we saw the abnormal data."
Another executive immediately said loudly: "The anecdote is too much. They deliberately chose to release the new website when we went public. Isn't this deliberately messing with us?"
Others said: "Quwen is digging its own grave by doing this. How can a portal make money without advertising? If there is no profit, what's the point of having many users? Won't they still be left starving in the future? If they kill us, won't they also die?"
Ding Sanshi was even more upset when he saw that these executives were still shirking responsibility at this time. He slammed the table and shouted, "I don't know whether Quwen will have to starve in the future, but I tell you, if we don't find a way to turn the situation around, we will have to go to the rooftop and starve first!"
At this moment, Ding Sanshi's cell phone rang. He pressed the answer button and immediately heard Holvey's roar from the other side: "Ding Sanshi, what is going on? I hope to get a perfect explanation! Do you know how much we have lost because of the plummeting share price of NetEase?"
Although it is impossible for them to make losses as a securities firm, after all, NetEase has paid them a lot of "protection money".
But earning less is a "loss" in the eyes of capitalists. Merrill Lynch Far East Limited and Deutsche Bank also have a lot of NetEase shares, and they were all obtained from Ding Sanshi at the "internal group purchase price". But now the stock price has plummeted, which is still absolutely unacceptable to them.
Ding Sanshi dared to scold his executives, but he didn't dare to scold the brokerage firm. He could only try his best to please them, saying, "Mr. Holvey, don't panic. This is just a temporary technical adjustment. The problem will be resolved soon. There will be absolutely no problem with NetEase!"
After finally calming the broker down, Ding Sanshi held his forehead, his head almost numb. He couldn't understand why Lu Yiming wanted to target him for no reason.
Another person who had a headache about this was Zhang Chaoyang. He was in the United States and had just stepped off the plane. Before he had time to appreciate the sweet air here, he received a call from his subordinates in China. He was completely stunned.
Because Sohu is also seeking to go public and has entered the final roadshow stage. In another week or two, it will be listed on the Nasdaq.
But at this critical juncture, the number of visits to Sohu's portal homepage plummeted.
It feels like you are making a layup and the ball is almost released, but then a block comes from the front and knocks the ball right out of your hand.
Zhang Chaoyang's anger instantly filled up, and he shouted to his men, "What on earth is going on?"
After checking, his subordinates could only give a depressed answer: "It's interesting news. Interesting news has taken away all our users."
China Overseas.
Fu Ri University.
Lu Yiming had just finished class and was walking out humming a little tune when he suddenly received a call from Li Yiwen.
"Someone asked me to ask if Ding Sanshi of NetEase and Zhang Chaoyang of Sohu have ever offended you?"
Lu Yiming's thoughts suddenly went back to the days when he spent a lot of money playing the expensive Zhuchang game and was subjected to crazy PUA by Zhang Chaoyang who only slept four hours a day. He wanted to say that he had offended them, but then he thought that this was all before his rebirth. Now that he has a new life, he should not be so petty, so he said: " No, although I don't like them, they really haven't offended me. What's wrong?"
Li Yiwen was speechless: "They haven't offended you, why do you dislike them?"
Lu Yiming said confidently: "Do you need a reason to dislike them?"
Li Yiwen didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and asked, "So you did that to them on purpose?"
When Lu Yiming heard this, he immediately became unhappy and said, "Hey, even though we are familiar with each other, I will still sue you for defamation if you say anything nonsense. Although I don't like them, I didn't do anything to them."
Li Yiwen was puzzled: "NetEase and Sohu have been hit hard by the new homepage of Fun News and are facing a precarious situation. They all said it was you who did it."
Lu Yiming seemed to understand what Li Yiwen was talking about all of a sudden, because he had been paying attention to the feedback from users of interesting news in the past two days and accidentally learned about some situations of NetEase and Sohu.
"This is just a coincidence. I can't just stop running my website because they're going public, right? And the subsequent SMS news package business must be paired with our homepage to give users a complete experience. They're unlucky on their own, so what does it have to do with me?"
"You, you, forget it, let's just leave it at that."
This was not the first time that Lu Yiming had offended someone. Anyway, he was not the one who suffered the loss, so Li Yiwen did not take it to heart.
