America's Road to Fame

Chapter 409 The Development of Kakao

In the end, Fan Bingbing still preferred to go to France, and William Chen agreed. Anyway, it would be nice to go there after thinking about it, and it would be convenient for him to visit.

And maybe I will go to Europe soon, and I will take her there with me to settle down.

Although Chen William had already arrived in South Korea, he was not in a hurry to go to the Hynix headquarters in Jingji Road to participate in the acquisition negotiations, but went to Kakao Company in his spare time to meet with Jin Xiufan.

"I was surprised and honored that Mr. William came here first."

When Jin Xiufan saw William Chen, his expression was respectful, and the first sentence made William Chen very interesting.

"how to say?"

"I thought you came to South Korea this time to buy Hynix."

"Yes, and no, Hynix is ​​not that important to me. After all, this one is not the only one I can choose."

It’s not surprising that he thought so. After all, William Chen’s acquisition of Hynix, which was designed to cost tens of billions of dollars, shocked the entire South Korea, and even the entire semiconductor chip industry. It was a very eye-catching event. .

However, William Chen didn't talk to him too much about Hynix, and soon turned the topic to the development of Kakao.

Jin Xiufan was very proud to talk about a set of data to William Chen: KaKao APP currently sends 2.5 times the total number of text messages sent by the three major operators in South Korea; among the 40% market penetration rate of South Korean smartphones , 95% are KaKao users, which means that among smartphone users, kakao APP users account for more than 95%.

So far, the number of registered users of kakao APP has exceeded 5000 million, of which more than 85% of users are local users in South Korea. The number of daily active users has reached 2000 million, and the number of daily sent messages is 30 billion.

However, the development of kakao talk now also relies on the overall number of smartphone users, which has reached a certain bottleneck. Therefore, before, kakao company relied on their user advantages in the mobile social field to continuously acquire and expand its business scope. Owns games, music, e-commerce and other businesses.

Among them, the game business has now become an important profit point for their company. Kakao Game is the agent of LOL in South Korea, and is one of the organizers of LCK, the LOL South Korea Champions League.

The current LOL league in the S1 season is also held in full swing in South Korea because of the high prize money of Riot Games, and many good players have emerged.

Jin Xiufan is a person who can take the initiative to lower his profile. In Chen William's previous life, kakao was launched before Penguin's WeChat, but later he was able to take the initiative to visit and learn from Penguin, learn from their business model, and accept Penguin. It can be seen from the capital injection and shareholding.

It's the same now. He has also carefully studied the operations of related companies in the United States and China. After seeing the development of Twitter and Weibo, Kakao also launched their own related products in South Korea.

When William Chen came to South Korea last time, he helped kakao complete the capital injection into SNN.In the following time, Kakao continued to invest in two other entertainment companies——YG Entertainment and JYP Entertainment. Completed the shareholding of the three major entertainment companies in South Korea.

Moreover, there is no need for kakao to hold too many shares in them. The current shareholding is only to better cooperate with these companies, so that kakao can have more resources in the entertainment business.

Originally, kakao company was going to do payment, but Chen William already had PayPal, which is not as dependent on the mainland as other businesses, and South Korea, as the United States... er, be more civilized, it is said to be intimate As an ally, the connection with Wall Street is already very close in terms of finance, so in the field of payment, PayPal and kakao can directly cooperate to form a joint venture company, and kakao can bind and promote PayPal in South Korea.

In this way, kakao pay, which was originally planned, was stillborn.

Just like Jin Xiufan's initial doubts, William Chen's acquisition of Hynix this time has attracted great attention in South Korea. Regarding his arrival in South Korea, including Hynix, everyone had great expectations for this. , hoping to complete this acquisition as soon as possible. With William Chen making the decision, the final purchase price will be easily reached.

However, after he came to South Korea, he was not eager to participate in this acquisition, which also made all parties a little confused.

However, these doubts quickly turned into shock and apprehension.

On the fifth day after William Chen arrived in South Korea, that is, on October 10, news came from the European and American stock markets that Southern Cross Holdings sent news to the New York Stock Exchange, Euronext Paris and Milan Stock Exchange. The three exchanges reported with placards, announcing that their holdings of STMicroelectronics shares had reached the critical line of 10%, and indicated their intention to hold shares, intending to continue to absorb shares in order to complete the acquisition of this company.

After the news came out, the global financial and semiconductor industries shook!

Founded in 1987, STMicroelectronics is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world.

The reason why its Chinese name is STMicroelectronics is that this company is a new enterprise after the merger of SGS Semiconductors of Italy and Thomson Semiconductors of France. The merger was originally called SGS-THOMSON Microelectronics. It is the original acronym - ST Microelectronics, and the Chinese name is STMicroelectronics.

STMicroelectronics completed its first public offering on December 1994, 12. It is currently listed on three stock exchanges, namely the New York Stock Exchange, the Pan-European Paris Stock Exchange and the Milan Stock Exchange in Italy.

STMicroelectronics' current shareholding structure, 71.1% of the shares are tradable shares publicly traded on various stock exchanges, another 27.5% of the shares are held by the Italian and French governments, and the remaining 1.4% of the shares are managed by the company. Layer equity incentive pool.

This kind of shareholding structure also provides feasibility for the way of purchasing stocks directly from the public offering of stocks to complete its holding.

Therefore, when everyone found out that Southern Cross Holdings, which has just announced its holding of 5% of STMicroelectronics and intends to further complete the acquisition of STMicroelectronics, is owned by Chen William, a company wholly owned by this company, and Mirae Group, which mainly faces the Asian market, and when Southern Cross Holdings was negotiating with South Korea to acquire Hynix, it can be said that it was beyond shock. It seems that a powerful company has broken into the semiconductor industry. Martial Law.

At first, many people were puzzled by Chen William, whose main business was the Internet and entertainment industry, suddenly decided to enter the semiconductor industry.However, after a media investigation, it was found that the companies he invests in and holds shares include mobile phone companies Xiaomi, Apple - the fund of Meta Investment Company is the institution with the highest shareholding of this well-known company, Tesla, AMD, Nvidia - whatever Whether it is Tianshu Fund or Caitlin Fund, they are both among the top ten shareholders of these two companies.

Since he has invested in so many downstream companies of semiconductor chips, it seems that he can find some context for William Chen's aggressive acquisition of semiconductor chip companies at this time.

(End of this chapter)