The Best Entertainment Era

In Cupertino, California, in the south of the San Francisco Bay, a large number of high-tech expensive companies gather, among which is the famous Apple Computer Company.

Apple Computer has had poor performance since the mid-1990s. In the few years since Steve Jobs, it has stopped its downward trend. However, it has suffered successive stock market crises and social and economic turmoil in the middle, and its development has not been very satisfactory. Even Since October last year, the Washington authorities have strongly intervened in the market economy, and Apple has also launched a new generation of music players, but the stock has only slowly recovered.

Seeing that the investment is not profitable, some investors can only choose to withdraw under the pressure of time cost and interest cost.

Pietro Wolf is such a person. He hasn’t seen any returns on his investment in Apple for a long time. On the contrary, the real estate market that he had worked on before was stimulated by various favorable policies of the authorities. Time waits for no one, and Apple's stock price rises every day, which is not enough interest.

It was his decision to abandon Apple and switch to the real estate market.

But it is not so easy to find a buyer for the transfer of the shares in hand, and the investment market is not particularly confident in Apple.

Fortunately, he heard the news that there was a foundation in Los Angeles that was interested in buying Apple shares. With the help of a middleman, he quickly negotiated the transaction with Scott Swift, the head of the foundation.

Today, the two parties signed a formal contract in the conference room of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco.

Mr. Anderson. Pietro Wolf shook hands with the young billionaire from Hollywood opposite him: Our deal is done.

Ronan said with a smile: This is a pleasant cooperation.

Pietro Wolfe, who has long wanted to get rid of Apple and embrace the real estate industry, echoed: It is true.

This young man really can't bear to think about going to Apple's troubled waters instead of investing in the good film industry.

Lawyer Dinah Upton came over at this moment and whispered in Ronan's ear, No problem.

Ronan nodded slightly: I will leave the follow-up matters to you.

Signing the agreement is only a part, and there is still a lot of work to be done later, and Apple also needs to say hello and do the filing again.

Don't worry. Lawyer Dinah Upton whispered, I need three days.

Ronan shook hands with Pietro Wolff again, and said, Mr. Wolff, once all the procedures are completed, I will pay the remaining amount in one lump sum.

The bank of America was used as the account guarantee for this transaction, and Pietro Wolff was not worried about Ronan's default on the transaction payment. He said with a smile, Mr. Anderson is young and promising, and I hope we still have the opportunity to cooperate.

Ronan said very politely: There will be.

Pietro Wolfe didn't stay long, and quickly took his leave. Ronan gave Scott Swift a few more instructions, asking him to cooperate with Lawyer Dinah to handle various subsequent matters.

In this transaction, in addition to his personal funds, Ronan legally transferred 30 million US dollars from Relativity Entertainment as dividends, and easily raised enough funds.

According to the need to avoid risks, the shares of other companies held by Ronan's personal foundation will not directly intersect with Relativity Entertainment.

To put it bluntly, this is also Ronan's backhand and retreat.

Even if there is a serious accident during the development of Relativity Entertainment, Ronan can guarantee that he will not be finished.

After several rounds of investment and acquisitions, plus this share transaction, Ronan already holds 1.3% of Apple's shares.

The rest will be left to time.

There is also Amazon. The foundation has acquired nearly 1.5% of Amazon shares, and Ronan is also investing in it one after another.

This is almost in tandem with the development of Relativity Entertainment.

After signing the agreement, Ronan took the opportunity to visit Netflix while he was in San Francisco.

After receiving the capital injection and share expansion from Relativity Entertainment and the support of the entire platform, Netflix has developed rapidly in the past few months. In order to adapt to the development, it rented out the entire small building of a bank branch before. The expansion of personnel is one aspect. DVDs that require more space for up to 20,000 titles are another.

With an average of 30 DVD discs per movie, a huge warehouse space is required just to accommodate these 60 DVDs.

And the library capacity of DVD is still expanding.

A steady stream of ultra-low-cost DVDs from across the Pacific are arriving in San Francisco.

Correspondingly, in addition to continuing to expand the online rental business, Netflix is ​​also expanding the scale of online sales.

Disc sales are similar to the same business that Amazon does, but Netflix has more rental business as a support. If customers want to keep the rental DVD discs, they only need to pay an extra $6.

Thanks to the low cost of discs, as well as the increase in the number of customers and the continuous exploration and improvement of the warehousing and freight model process, Netflix's costs have dropped rapidly.

The average cost per unit shipped has dropped to $2.20, and weekly shipments have risen from less than 20,000 to over 200,000.

This directly brought a benefit. Through the analysis of Netflix's freight data, FedEx concluded that Netflix's business volume will increase significantly every month, and opened up a freight channel for Netflix, which troubled Netflix before. The problem of sorting goods is also easily solved.

FedEx and Netflix have reached a long-term cooperation agreement. When Netflix's weekly shipments reach 300,000 pieces, the cost will inevitably be reduced to less than $2.

The various publicity methods promoted by Relativity Entertainment for Netflix have allowed Netflix to appear in front of more audiences. The most direct effect is the surge in the number of registered users. Although not every registered user can evolve into a paying user, Netflix’s rental The sales model can undoubtedly cater to the needs of a group of people.

Moreover, the bloated Blockbuster and conservative Hollywood videos have not left a good impression on customers.

Netflix even shouted the slogan in the advertisement: Everyone doesn't like late rental fees, and Netflix never charges late rental fees.

At the same time, Ronan also got another extremely powerful data for Netflix: the number of households with DVD players in the United States soared to 25 million in April 2002!

At the same time, sales prices for DVD players fell below $200.

Far cheaper than video tape players, DVD players are becoming popular at an incredible speed.

Now that the optical drive is not standard for computers, Netflix cannot expect users to use computers to watch movies. DVD players are the foundation of Netflix's business growth.

Felipe McNealy, a senior analyst from Gartner Consulting, focused on Netflix in his latest industry analysis report, believing that Netflix is ​​a fast-growing niche company.

The outside world is recognizing Netflix.

In view of the good development situation, Netflix also quietly adjusted its goal for 2002, changing the already completed development of 1 million registered users to 1 million paying users.

Everyone, including Ronan and Mark Randolph, is confident that Netflix will accomplish this goal.

The Internet is far from reaching the extreme that it can bear and display.

No one knows better than Ronan how crazy the Internet will be in the future.

Netflix is ​​only the first step into the Internet, and it is also the basis for subsequent plans.

Ronan also needs Netflix to turn losses into profits, so as to get rid of the unfavorable situation of needing blood transfusions from the head office.

Mark Randolph has made a certain future outlook based on various current data, and believes that as long as Relativity Entertainment can develop at the current speed, it will provide Netflix with certain group platform support. Calculated by the development of the Internet industry and the DVD industry, By 2005, Netflix was able to achieve an annual profit of $50 million.

Of course, this is just a prospect. In the process of development, a company cannot always develop according to the plan, and may encounter unexpected situations of one kind or another.

However, the promotion of Relativity Entertainment's movie platform has benefited Netflix a lot.

The promotion in other aspects is the same as the general advertising promotion. It is not bad to have an effective rate of more than 10%. However, Relativity Entertainment’s promotion based on movies is precisely received by movie fans from all over North America. This part of people is the movie online Under the largest consumer groups, the effective promotion rate is extremely high.

The DVD of Resident Evil is already on the market, and the Netflix advertisement embedded in the DVD set has attracted many movie fans to become registered users of Netflix.

Although most people will not pay to rent movies, but after taking the first step, it is possible to take the second step.

Films such as Reaper 2 and Bourne Shadow released in the summer are suitable for advertising placement, among which Netflix's placement advertising will appear directly.

As for the Internet trolls disseminating all kinds of news about Netflix on major film and television forums, they have never stopped since January.

In addition, Netflix continues to optimize the website and shipping process, so that customers can enjoy the best treatment.

According to Reed Hastings and Mark Randolph, they had the idea of ​​​​creating Netflix precisely because they couldn't stand the poor service of Blockbuster, and they must not make the same mistake of Blockbuster again.

Having said that, Blockbuster was also raised by a stepmother in Viacom. Summer Redstone bought Blockbuster back then because of its stable cash flow.

For Blockbuster's business and transformation, Viacom didn't care much.

After staying at Netflix for a few days, Lawyer Dinah Upton informed Ronan that various procedures have been completed, but Ronan needs to go to Apple in person to complete some procedures for Apple's internal equity changes.

Ronan chose a Monday to come to Cupertino in the southern San Francisco Bay area. At this time, Apple's spaceship headquarters and the Jobs Theater were all gone.

In Apple's old office building, Ronan had completed various formalities, and when he was about to leave, someone suddenly came to him.

Excuse me, are you Mr. Anderson? A woman in her thirties came over: Mr. Jobs wants to talk to you.

Ronan was a little surprised. He planned to wait for the complete civil strife in Disney before starting to attack Gangzhu Qiao, but he didn't expect that Gangzhu Qiao took the initiative to find him.