Chapter 29: Moving into the New Office
Chapter 29: Moving into the New Office
Today is the first day that Zhiyun Technology moves into its new office. As the company's boss, Xu Shenxue naturally leads the team and a group of management to move in personally.
When the elevator reaches the 28th floor, you can see the elevator hall area in front of you. On the right side is the office of Zhiyun Technology. Because the office was previously used by a company, there were not many changes to it. They just purchased some office supplies and decorated it.
This half-floor office building is approximately 1,100 square meters, which is naturally relatively large for a startup company, as it can be enough to accommodate two to three hundred people if it is economical.
However, Zhiyun Technology is not a startup in the traditional sense. Its smartphone R&D team was established last year, and it has the full support of its parent company Liuhe Investment, so it does not have to worry about funding in the short term.
In addition, Zhiyun Technology has a relatively large number of employees. There are more than 160 employees who were previously separated from Wecoo Electronics, and large-scale recruitment will be carried out in the near future. It is expected that the total number of employees will exceed 300 in the short term.
More than two hundred of them are in the R&D team, the rest are mainly supply chain and marketing personnel, and there are very few other administrative staff.
After all, Zhiyun Technology doesn’t have any business at the moment, and is purely invested in research and development. In addition, it is also doing some supply chain preparation, brand building preparation, channel preparation, and contacting various software manufacturers.
If everything goes smoothly, Xu Shenxue estimates that the number of employees will increase rapidly, and more offices may need to be rented.
Now the half floor next door is also vacant... Due to the impact of last year's economic crisis, the economy was not very good last year and even at the beginning of this year, which affected the leasing of office buildings and the rental prices even fell.
Taking into account the future expansion needs, Xu Shenxue met with the owner of the half-floor office building next door some time ago and has already rented this half-floor. The construction team is now entering the site to carry out renovation work, which is expected to take another seven or eight days to complete.
The rent is not too expensive anyway... In order to develop smart phones, Xu Shenxue hired a large number of R&D personnel with an annual salary of more than 100,000 yuan, and he continues to hire more.
Compared with the expensive salaries of these R&D staff, the rent of a mere office is nothing. Xu Shenxue said that it is just a small amount of money...
Today, his Weiku Electronics' Weiku and Xiaolan brands of low-end feature phones can earn several million per month, so the office rent is not a problem for them.
In addition, he also contacted the property management company of the Insurance Building and asked them to keep the vacant offices on the 27th floor downstairs for the time being, and if there were clients, try to get them to rent other floors.
Anyway, the vacancy rate in this insurance building is very high, reaching over 50%, and there are a lot of vacant floors...Customers can go to other floors to choose first.
The developer's property management company naturally agreed very readily, and said that if your company grows and needs an office building, they will fully cooperate. Not only the 27th floor, but also the 29th and 30th floors above this building are still vacant, and they will be reserved for you first.
If your company needs it later, they can give you a discount on the rent.
The economy has been bad in the past one or two years, and the office market has not been very good. Although this insurance building is quite good, it is a new building, the rent is quite expensive, and it is not easy to find tenants. Large clients who can rent several floors at once are even rarer.
Since Xu Shenxue has expressed his intention, regardless of whether it will succeed in the future, their property company will try its best to make friends with him. After all, he is a potential big customer.
In terms of office space, even if the number of staff expands to one or two thousand people in the next year, it will not be a big problem, at least until there are major changes in the office leasing market.
However, such drastic changes may not be likely in the short term...because the current real estate market is still very sluggish. There was a panic drop last year, and even now in January this year, the market is still sluggish, both the residential and office markets are not doing well.
In Hong'an Mansion where Xu Shenjia works, it is said that an investor pulled the leverage very high and bought several houses in Hong'an Mansion at one time hoping to wait for appreciation. As a result, the value fell instead of rising last year. Then the investor pulled the leverage too high, and his capital chain broke accidentally. He wanted to sell the house to stop the loss in time, but he couldn't sell it for a while... In the end, he could only buy the house at a loss by a large discount. It is said that he lost everything.
Xu's mother had received calls from agents promoting these houses, but she never chose high-end properties for investment, but rather low-end properties that were easy to rent out. She preferred two-bedroom apartments or even studio apartments, and at the very least, small three-bedroom apartments, so she ignored them. She just told Xu Shenxue about this as a joke, and told him to pay attention to leverage when investing in the future!
Having said that, he added in a slightly cautious tone that it is possible to develop smart phones, after all, there are great prospects if they are developed well, but one must not get too carried away, as this will put too much pressure on the company's cash flow.
Xu's mother started from scratch with Mr. Xu. In her early years, she worked in finance at Wecoo Electronics for a long time. Later, for the sake of Xu Shenxue's siblings' studies and family, she resigned and took care of the family.
But she is still not idle. From time to time, she works on her own business. She has opened a coffee shop, a high-end restaurant, and now a beauty salon.
So Xu's mother is not a housewife who knows nothing... Precisely because she knows a little, when she learned that Xu Shenxue had mortgaged a lot of the company's fixed assets and drawn on cash flow to raise a large amount of funds to invest in smart phones, she had to carefully remind Xu Shenxue.
It’s okay if you lose the money you invest now, after all, the company is still there and you can accumulate more slowly in the future.
But you can't get carried away and put the entire company at the service without any consideration. If you fail in the end, the entire company will be ruined.
Xu Shenxue understood Xu's mother's concerns and explained a few words at the time, saying that when he withdrew the funds, he ensured that the company maintained healthy operations and that the failure of the smartphone business would not affect the operations of Wecoo Electronics and Wecoo Industrial.
Only then did Xu's mother feel relieved.
As long as the company is not bankrupt and the capital is still there, it is acceptable to take out the tens of millions earned in the past few years to bet on smartphones.
Investing always involves risks, but as long as you control the risks and the benefits are big enough, you can take a gamble!
In the eyes of Xu's mother, Xu Shenxue's smartphone business was just a gamble...After 08, smartphones became much more popular in China, and their broad market prospects were continuously reported by the media. Even an ordinary person knew about them, and Xu's mother naturally heard about them as well.
Under this general environment, Xu Shenxue made a decisive bet in November last year and seized the opportunity. With his vision and market acumen, Xu's mother felt that her son was much better than her deceased husband.
Although the deceased husband was capable in business, he was rather conservative and liked to follow trends, doing whatever was popular.
The key is to chase after market hotspots... It was like this before when we were making mobile phones, it was like this when we were making MP3 players, and before that it was like this when we were making CD players and tape recorders. We just follow whatever is hot.
Although you can make money this way, it is difficult to make huge profits. After all, by the time you discover a hot market trend, those who took the lead have already made a lot of money, and you who follow behind can only eat leftovers.
As for the smartphone that my son developed early, I cannot say that he has gotten ahead of a group of domestic manufacturers. After all, no one has developed it yet and they are all still working hard on research and development, so it is not certain who will be ahead.
But even if it lags behind by a few steps, Zhiyun Technology is at least in the first echelon of smart phones. If it does well, it may be able to get some fat meat!
Mother Xu was very pleased with her son's business talent...
But she didn't know that Xu Shenxue's sensitivity to the market and his talent for business were actually not that good. The reason why he started to develop smart phones so early was purely because he had a soul from the future.
(End of this chapter)