Chapter 718 - 301: Scalp Tingling
Jiang Baichuan attended a meeting, and after it ended, he was invited over by someone.
When he arrived, the other person was browsing the internet on their phone. Upon seeing him enter, they smiled and said, "Old Jiang, this Li Yang is something else. It’s one thing to be great at business, but to reach this level in gaming—I can’t imagine an esports player having this kind of influence."
"What’s up with Li Yang?"
"He won a world championship, and now the whole internet is buzzing about it."
Jiang Baichuan sat down, asking with some surprise, "How did you start paying attention to this?"
The other person smiled and said, "I saw a bunch of young people in my social circle posting about it, got curious, and looked it up."
"The young people in your circle are quite something, huh? They even like gaming?"
"Who knows? It’s the first time I’ve seen so many young people posting the same thing, which means this is something out of the ordinary."
"Li Yang and Jiang Banxia, those two are really something," Jiang Baichuan said with some experience.
Recently, he had contacted Jiang Banxia privately several times and found that Jiang Banxia had been led astray by Li Yang. Every conversation started and ended with benefits, and without benefits, she wasn’t interested in talking further.
Completely different from the Jiang Banxia he first met.
The other person asked, "Old Jiang, how long do you think they’ll last?"
"Last for what?"
With a helpless expression, the other person said, "I mean how long the companies under their names can last. I’ve got the data here. Extreme Shadow Cars has over thirty thousand employees, with an average salary of eighteen thousand. The cost per employee is twenty-two thousand a month. Green Water Group has twenty-nine thousand employees, with an average salary of seven thousand six hundred, and a cost of ten thousand per month. Kuai Pai has nearly twenty thousand employees, with salaries ranging from eleven thousand to fourteen thousand. Wanliu Capital has eight hundred employees, with salaries of twenty-six thousand to thirty-two thousand. I’m not even mentioning the others for now..."
Jiang Baichuan asked, "Is there a problem with this?"
"Yes, there’s a huge problem! Their annual labor cost is nearly fifteen billion. How many years can they afford that?"
Jiang Baichuan was puzzled, "What’s that got to do with us?"
"If it had nothing to do with us, I wouldn’t have asked you to come over. I know you have a good relationship with those two. Strictly speaking, they are kind of your people. I just hope you can advise them to take it easy, go slow and steady, and aim to build century-long enterprises instead of squandering all the money."
Jiang Baichuan laughed, "I think you’re scared! Scared they’ll get too big."
The other person didn’t argue but said, "It’s too early to talk about being scared. I’m just worried about potential problems; they’re disrupting the industry."
Jiang Baichuan countered, "Shouldn’t they disrupt it?"
"They should! But not now! What we need most now is stability to withstand any potential future issues. Once things become unstable, they might become a venting point..."
"Haha, you make failure sound so nice. You’ve got quite the thick skin."
The other person didn’t get angry but asked, "Old Jiang, can you guarantee that the two of them will always hold up? Right now, handling eighty to ninety thousand people is nothing. Could they expand to eight to nine hundred thousand? If they can, then I’ll admit to being overly cautious. But if they can’t?"
"What if they can’t?"
"If they can’t, they’re just big fish stirring up the pond, muddying the waters without taking responsibility. And then there’s Ye Bingcheng, that lunatic, always waving the flag. Trouble is bound to happen eventually, you know that?"
Jiang Baichuan disagreed, "At least for now, what they’re doing is right. Who can say about the future?"
The other person questioned, "Doing right? If every company worldwide followed their lead, they’d be losing their shirts. If everyone did that, who would still want to start a business? Who would still want to run a company? If Li Yang could manage all the companies in the country well, that would be one thing, but the problem is he only manages one or two. Do you know how tough it is right now for companies in the new energy vehicle sector? They keep complaining that Extreme Shadow Cars are messing around, leaving no space for them to survive."
"Messing around? All costs at Extreme Shadow Cars are crystal clear. Though they haven’t released financial reports yet, they’re not far from profitability. How can a company on the verge of profitability be said to be messing around? These so-called new force companies should be addressing their own issues, shouldn’t they? How did Extreme Shadow Cars spend hundreds of billions to achieve this in just a few years? They keep raising tens of billions of US Dollars from this or that investment group—where did all that money go?"
Several new energy vehicle companies in the country have basically raised several tens of billions of US Dollars, whether from domestic or international capital, all increasing their bets.
But their products have no competitiveness, and the market has been nearly entirely taken over by Extreme Shadow Cars, making it difficult to sell even a thousand cars a year.
The reason is simple: when these companies calculate costs, a single car’s cost is absurdly high.
The lower-end models are several grades below those of Extreme Shadow Cars in every aspect, and without sufficiently advanced intelligent systems, the cost is over four hundred thousand.
The higher-end models come with a certain level of intelligent systems, lagging behind Extreme Shadow Cars by two or three generations, and their costs reach over six hundred thousand.
With such high costs, the selling price is predictably above six hundred thousand.
How could such products compete with Extreme Shadow Cars?
The root of the problem is failing to manage costs, and being unable to manage them.
Firstly, the bosses of those companies find ways to pocket some money, followed by internal factions and the powerful veteran management, who are all scrambling to eat up money.
Allegedly, over ten billion US Dollars is spent on a project, but how much money is actually spent on researchers and developers?