America's Road to Fame

Chapter 453 Want to Buy?
Regarding Shiseido, Sun Zhengyi only mentioned it. Originally, he was helping to spread the word, so no matter how William Chen finally decided, whether he agreed to cooperate or not had little to do with him.

But next, what Sun Zhengyi said was his own business.

He told William Chen that SoftBank Group is preparing for a big move to acquire Sprint Nextel, and he hopes to get William Chen's help in this process. Even if the other party is interested, he welcomes William Chen to join this acquisition and become an acquisition team. one of the.

Sprint Nextel is currently the third largest telecommunications operator in the United States, with a market capitalization of more than US$150 billion at this time. The most important thing is that the telecommunications sector has always been subject to regulation in various countries, and there are many barriers to entry of foreign capital.

Hearing his proposal, William Chen was a little surprised, but it was reasonable. After all, it can be said that Sun Zhengyi had achieved great success in the acquisition of Vodafone's Japanese business.

In 2001, the global Internet bubble occurred, which caused Sun Zhengyi, who mainly invested in it, to suffer heavy losses, and the market value of SoftBank Group also fell to the bottom.

At this time, he needs a victory to recover from the defeat and regroup.

Sun Zhengyi is targeting the broadband business.

So in June 2001, Sun Zhengyi opened the broadband installation appointment application to users through the Yahoo Japan website. Users in Tokyo can enjoy the trial service in June, and the service for the whole of Japan will start in August. This service is named as "Yahoo Japan Broad Band", referred to as Yahoo BB.

It's just that although this business has won the enthusiastic participation of users, it has encountered many difficulties in the process of implementation.

The first difficulty is brought by NTT.

NTT is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Co., Ltd., the largest telecommunications service provider in Japan. If it wants to start broadband business in Japan, it needs to rent equipment in central computer rooms in various regions and their optical fibers from NTT.

Softbank's network is composed of computer rooms connected by these optical fibers. If Softbank's network wants to cover more areas, it needs more NTT computer rooms in different areas, as well as enough optical fibers, and it is guaranteed that there are already optical fibers between these computer rooms. connect.

It is very likely that there is no optical fiber laid between the central computer rooms in certain areas, and the computer rooms that have been connected by optical fiber may not have idle optical fiber for rent.

The staff of Yahoo BB had to confirm whether there was an optical fiber between the computer rooms they needed, and they would not start laying network cables until they got an affirmative answer.

The engineers of Yahoo BB fumbled in various computer rooms of NTT. If they encountered the situation of "this road is blocked", they needed to modify the previous network laying lines.

This is not the most frustrating thing, what makes people even more irritated is the problem that there is no free optical fiber in the computer room for rent.

This problem is not entirely caused by NTT, it is also related to the large number of applicants for Yahoo BB's broadband business.

Because Yahoo BB's business is too popular with users because of its low price - since the announcement of the appointment application on June 6, more than 20 people have submitted applications by the end of July.

According to the project progress of Yahoo BB at that time, there was no way to provide services to these customers, so Sun Zhengyi could only postpone the official service time to September 9st.

But by September 9, Yahoo BB had received more than 3 million broadband applications in total, but the optical fiber equipment leased by the company was only enough to activate services for 100 users.

More than 96 people were waiting for the service, and the Yahoo BB project seemed hopeless, so countless calls were made to Softbank, but they were unable to answer them. Later, the department in charge of the software business had to be arranged to answer calls from users complaining.

However, these people have no concept of broadband services at all, and have nothing to do except apologize, which further increases the dissatisfaction of users.

Seeing that it could no longer be delayed, applying for optical fiber through normal channels would only make the project far away, so Sun Zhengyi finally went directly to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications to negotiate with officials.

Said it was a negotiation, but in fact, Sun Zhengyi's behavior at that time was more like "coercion". It is said that Sun Zhengyi slapped the official's table and said loudly:

"Give me the lighter, if I don't have fiber optics, I might as well pour gasoline here and set myself on fire!"

At that time, Softbank was already the third largest mobile operator in Japan. Although there was still a big gap compared with the traditional and established company NTT, "the founder and CEO of a listed company set himself on fire" was definitely not a public opinion incident that the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications could bear.

For the broadband business, Sun Zhengyi was going all out. Although the method was extreme, the goal was finally achieved.

After solving the optical fiber, Sun Zhengyi's next trouble is that some users do not meet the installation conditions of ADSL broadband.

For example, users' line user names are inconsistent with their telephone line user names, and large customers who originally used the ISDN network cannot use ADSL services due to inappropriate lines.

Therefore, whether users can smoothly enjoy Yahoo BB's ADSL service sometimes depends on their own information and their installation conditions.

However, Sun Zhengyi promised the user: Yahoo BB will install the broadband into the home within 10 days from the time of submitting the application.

Issuing such a declaration is to motivate myself and my employees to do my best to improve the service level and try my best to improve the service quality. At the same time, it is also conveying the belief to users that Softbank and Yahoo BB have been working hard to improve their business level.

Of course, when making this promise, Sun Zhengyi did not forget to remind users: the service installed at home on the 10th is only applicable to the following users: users with the same user name on the line, non-ISDN users, and users whose residential telephone lines are not occupied by other devices .In this way, users will also confirm whether they have the conditions for installation before installation, so as to avoid a waste of time.

All in all, after the initial chaos and crisis, Yahoo BB reached 2005 million users in December 12.The broadband speed also exceeds that of South Korea, reaching 500 megabits per second, becoming the world's number one.

It can be said that Sun Zhengyi has always appeared in the Japanese business world as a subversive, as if he directly changed the stubborn status quo of this industry after he entered the broadband business.

The most fundamental reason why broadband is so popular in Japan is that Sun Zhengyi has launched the lowest-priced broadband service in history. The monthly Internet service fee is only 990 yen, plus other additional service fees such as routing, a total of 2830 yen.Compared with the tens of thousands of yen per month for other companies, this is a drop in the bucket.

To implement low prices, Sun Zhengyi must find a way to reduce costs. In fact, he has already made preparations, and he has won a lower price for the purchase of routers.

The reason why he was able to get the low price was because he purchased in large quantities and ordered 100 million units in one go-this figure also shows Sun Zhengyi's courage.

Just this, Sun Zhengyi is still not satisfied, he directly aimed at the telecommunications giant - Vodafone.

(End of this chapter)