Chapter 546 Preparations Before Departure (Part 1) (Patreon)

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As Sun Cheng, the administrator, made a rare appearance in the chat room and provided unified responses to many members' questions in the Xia Country Technology Exchange Room 1, the atmosphere in the chat room immediately became more lively.

However, his unified responses only resolved the issues of the majority of people.

There were still quite a few individuals who, after Sun Cheng lifted the chat room's mute, continued to ask questions or send him private messages.

Seeing that these questions were more complex than before and many of them hit the mark, Sun Cheng didn't refuse this time. He straightforwardly took some time to answer the questions of the chat room members one by one.

However, he wasn't as polite when it came to casual conversations or purely polite phrases.

For these private messages or statements, Sun Cheng simply ignored them.

After spending about ten minutes resolving the accumulated issues in Room 1, Sun Cheng used his administrator privileges to begin inviting new members once again.

Revenge had been tasked with various responsibilities at home. Apart from ensuring Villa's security and protecting Ye Qi, it also had other daily tasks. For instance, after Safeguard was dispatched to Nubra Island by Sun Cheng to develop Base Three, Revenge was responsible for remote control at Base One.

Additionally, it had to serve as the server for the "Magic House" and frequently write software enhancements for Sun Cheng.

Now, the list of invited members for the "Magic House" chat software was also compiled by Revenge, as it infiltrated the network, sifted through vast amounts of talent information, and finally selected the candidates.

The list of invitations continued to grow with Revenge's daily work.

Following the usual procedure, Sun Cheng first excluded those working in state-owned enterprises and government research institutions from the list when he retrieved the list of names within Xia Country's borders. Although he knew that the exposure of the "Magic House" was only a matter of time, he hadn't planned to use it for any malicious purposes.

But if it was discovered too early, all the members of the Xia Country chat room might be seen as state-planted infiltrators. Then the country would realize that it could directly exchange various items here.

Undoubtedly, Sun Cheng's importance and status in the eyes of the country would decrease significantly.

As with the previous two times, Sun Cheng had Revenge use the phone numbers or email addresses of the invited targets obtained from various sources to send SMS or email invitations to a thousand prospective members.

These messages or emails included some simple explanations and provided a download link for the "Magic House" software, along with a chat room invitation code.

If the invitee's code remained unactivated, these invitation messages and emails would continue to be sent at an hourly rate for seven days. Blocking or blacklisting couldn't stop the messages and emails from being sent.

Sun Cheng didn't intend to turn a good thing into a bad one. For those who hadn't activated their invitation codes after seven days, Revenge would stop bombarding them with messages and emails and transfer them to another list specifically for tracking how many people had rejected the invitation.

Among these one thousand people, Sun Cheng increased the ratio of technical professionals and highly educated individuals.

However, he didn't have high expectations. Based on his previous experiences, if one-tenth of the people accepted the invitation in the end, that would already be quite good.

Without staying in the two chat rooms for too long, Sun Cheng closed the "Magic House."

He instructed Revenge to open his own email and searched for the document about investing in Laurel Network that Assistant Lin Meng had mentioned earlier.

Because it concerned Ye Qi, Sun Cheng spent a few minutes carefully reviewing the entire document.

"...7.49 billion Xia Yuan reached an agreement with Laurel Network, a subsidiary of Corporation WaveTech, to acquire 22.7% of Laurel Network's shares, a board seat, and a vice president position..."

Laurel Network wasn't the only live streaming platform in the country. In recent years, with the introduction of foreign live streaming platforms into the country, domestic platforms had also emerged like mushrooms, with over two hundred of varying sizes.

However, the live streaming industry was not easy to excel in. Currently, foreign live streaming platforms were doing relatively well. After years of competition, several giants like YouTubers, Twitch, and others had monopolized the market.

Subscribing to streamers on foreign platforms often required payment, and streamers could make money by selling edited highlights of their streams, running ads, endorsements, appearing on television shows, and more. There were multiple avenues for profit.

In contrast, domestic live streaming platforms had lower profitability. They couldn't compete with television stations, video websites, and more professional modeling corporations in terms of advertising and endorsements. Over ninety percent of streamers relied on platform buyout fees and viewer donations to make a living, with only a very small number securing advertising endorsements.

Furthermore, due to the influx of numerous companies and capital into the domestic live streaming industry, domestic platforms were still in the stage of burning money to capture market share. Naturally, they didn't dare to introduce paid live streaming like their foreign counterparts.

Laurel Network, founded in 2014, was considered one of the older live streaming platforms in the country. While it wasn't the largest, it was still among the top five in terms of scale and had cultivated a dedicated user base.

Its parent company, WaveTech Corporation, was also an established internet company in the country. It had started as a portal website and owned various industries, including search engines, input methods, cloud storage, chat software, games, and more. Currently, its scale was even larger than Cybertron Group.

However, having too many products and businesses under one company wasn't necessarily a good thing. While WaveTech had been considering shutting down the cloud storage and selling Laurel Network, the negotiations between the two companies hadn't progressed much in terms of funding.

The 7.49 billion Xia Yuan investment in Laurel Network was certainly a loss.

Since Sun Cheng didn't have much interest in the live streaming industry and didn't plan to delve into it further, this investment was made personally by him.

However, for Cybertron Group, this investment was undoubtedly valuable.

Sun Cheng had assigned Wang Lu, the Group's president, to handle the negotiations, and he had worked hard to secure favorable terms for both Sun Cheng and the Group.

In the end, not all of the 7.49 billion Xia Yuan acquisition cost was paid in cash. Three billion of it would be offset with storage devices and enterprise cloud storage services.

In essence, Sun Cheng provided 7.49 billion Xia Yuan, paid 4.49 billion in cash to WaveTech, and then used three billion to purchase storage equipment and enterprise cloud storage services from Cybertron Group. He then gifted these to WaveTech.

Sun Cheng believed that once WaveTech began using and getting accustomed to their products, Cybertron Group would eventually gain a major client.

[Read at www.patreon.com/shanefreak, without ads and support the work.]

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Next Chapter >>Chapter 547: Preparations Before Leaving (Part 1)