Chapter 145: First Batch of Sister Chengzi Phone Users—2 Million Units Sold in the First Month

The dinner party ended, on the way back.

Chen Yansen chatted with Gao Weilin about Zhou Shouzhi, and Gao Weilin, who knew people well, immediately understood—the boss wanted to poach him.

"Boss, how about next time, under the pretext of discussing cooperation, I sound him out for you?"

Gao Weilin asked with an understanding smile.

"No need! Him staying at dst is more beneficial for Sister Chengzi Tech's development."

Chen Yansen waved his hand, rejecting Old Gao's suggestion.

An elite man like Zhou Shouzhi appears mild on the surface, but is actually proud and arrogant.

Let alone an invitation from Sister Chengzi Tech—even if Lei Yijun invited him personally, he'd still sit on the fence for two or three years, waiting until Xiaomi's valuation exceeded 200 billion before agreeing to serve as Xiaomi's CFO.

After Xiaomi went public, he immediately jumped ship to ByteDance.

In this kind of person's eyes, whether Xiaomi or ByteDance, they're all just stepping stones.

Business, after all, is mutual exploitation.

"President Li wants to hold the Xiaomi phone special event on August 28th—should the resources still be allocated according to the previous plan?"

Song Yuncheng nudged Chen Yansen with her elbow and asked softly.

"Fox Tao's mobile app has launched, hasn't it? I remember it has 300,000 daily active users. Give Xiaomi a boot-up screen too—consider it a gift to President Lei."

Chen Yansen leaned back in the car seat and said quietly.

"Huh!?" Song Yuncheng froze for a moment. She had originally wanted to ask whether to allocate fewer resource slots, since after all Xiaomi and Sister Chengzi Tech were competitors.

She hadn't expected Chen Yansen to not only not cut back, but to actively increase Xiaomi's traffic.

"Think bigger! They paid 10 million in ad fees half a year ago—no need for petty tricks. If I'm afraid of even Xiaomi, how will I compete against giants like Apple and Samsung in the future?"

Chen Yansen made a fist and knocked it lightly on Song Yuncheng's head.

"Oh, got it. Then I'll coordinate with the event team and get the event proposal to Li Wanqiang as soon as possible."

Song Yuncheng, feeling the sting, pouted and glared fiercely at Chen Yansen.

Gao Weilin, sitting in the passenger seat, was like an invisible man, not uttering a sound.

The next morning, the sky flushed a pale fish-belly white.

Chen Yansen opened his eyes, picked up his phone to check the time—only 4:50. His sleep had shortened again.

He sighed, got out of bed, walked to the desk, picked up a copy of *Electromagnetics*, sat down, and began reading.

Behind him, Song Yuncheng lay on her side under the covers, a flash of snowy white half-exposed, sleeping sweetly.

It wasn't until nine o'clock that the three of them—Chen Yansen included—walked out of the hotel and headed for the 798 Art District.

Lei Yijun had been scrambling around the internet for years, his connections solid and broad. The Shencheng Ma and Hangcheng Ma both came, along with Zhou Hongyi of 360, Zhang Chaoyang of Sohu, Wang Zhidong of Sina, and Ding Lei of NetEase, among others. Practically all the top-tier bigwigs in the circle had accepted the invitation.

After all, when Lei Yijun was general manager at Jin Shan, Ma Liyun was still teaching English in Hangcheng, Little Ma had just graduated, and the first line of QQ's code hadn't even been written yet.

And when Lei Yijun became CEO of Jin Shan, Zhang Chaoyang had just returned to China to found Sohu.

In terms of seniority, Lei Yijun could absolutely be counted as a first-generation internet entrepreneur.

Li Wanqiang, as general manager of Xiaomi's marketing department, naturally stood at the entrance of the conference hall, responsible for greeting arrivals and seeing off departures.

"President Chen, let me show you to your seat." Li Wanqiang spotted Chen Yansen from afar and hurried over to greet him.

"Much appreciated."

Chen Yansen smiled and followed Li Wanqiang into the hall.

Xiaomi's launch venue was more lavish than Sister Chengzi Tech's, and the space was much larger too. Quite a few members of the media and fan groups had shown up.

The moment the entrepreneurs entered, camera flashes went off "click-click" nonstop.

The instant Chen Yansen walked in, the media section immediately erupted in a commotion.

In terms of fame, Chen Yansen was far better known than Wang Zhidong, Ding Lei, and the rest.

These days the route of the internet-celebrity entrepreneur wasn't yet in vogue. Jumei's Chen Ou did have ideas in that direction, but Chen Yansen had beaten him to it.

At this point, Chen Yansen's Weibo follower count was just over 10 million. The account was run by colleagues from the marketing department—previously posting daily life photos and Super Return previews, now it had become Sister Chengzi Phone, which greatly boosted his online buzz.

Plenty of college students took him as their role model for striving!

Li Wanqiang led Chen Yansen to the front row and sat him down—Zhou Hongyi on his left, Ma Wenteng on his right.

Damn!

Who the hell arranged these seats? Chen Yansen muttered to himself.

"President Chen, good to see you again. I haven't even had the chance to thank you—from the angel round to the A round, you've let Penguin make quite a profit."

Ma Wenteng glanced at Zhou Hongyi, ignored him, and took the initiative to chat with Chen Yansen.

Penguin had invested a total of 150 million in Fox Tao. Calculated at a valuation of 16 billion, this investment had earned nearly 1.5 billion.

Even for someone of Ma Wenteng's current wealth, he wouldn't dare call a potential gain of 1.5 billion mere pocket change.

The more Ma Wenteng looked at Chen Yansen, the more he liked him.

"Then I should thank President Ma first. Without Penguin's support, Fox Tao wouldn't have developed so quickly."

Chen Yansen smiled and replied calmly.

Fox Tao's zero-yuan bargain-cutting links—if Ma Wenteng hadn't given the nod, they'd have been banned long ago. How could they be like now, pulling in over 300,000 new customers every day?

Apart from a few directors from Yanjing, the front row held only a dozen or so entrepreneurs. Lei Yijun's seating him here wasn't an attempt to push him into the spotlight to destroy him.

Rather, the guests in the second row, in terms of wealth and influence, all fell far short of him.

"The investment circle is buzzing that you want to sell off Fox Tao as a package. Are you that bullish on phone manufacturing? Throwing away even your first company?"

Ma Wenteng teased with a smile.

"Sold the first one, there's still the second. Lotte and Augusta are both interested. Don't worry, I'll definitely sell at a high price and let Penguin make a killing."

Chen Yansen said, entirely unconcerned.

"You really are different from other young people." Ma Wenteng nodded slightly and offered his assessment directly.

As an investor, he had seen plenty of entrepreneurs—some treated their company like a child, others clung to equity as if it were their life, with no understanding of the strategic value of financing.

Chen Yansen was the complete opposite: no attachment at all to the company he had founded, only profit in his eyes. Investing in someone like that usually yielded a higher return.

The two had not chatted long before Lei Yijun took the stage.

It was Chen Yansen's first time attending a Xiaomi launch in person. More than a decade later, Lei Yijun's classic remarks at the launch would be edited by netizens into ghost-animal videos and spread all over the internet.

Among them, "Competitors are idiots" and "Are you OK?" were the most iconic.

But today, Lei Yijun on stage was under enormous pressure—until Xiaomi phone sales figures came out, no one knew whether users and the market would accept it.

Especially with Sister Chengzi's phone having launched first, putting considerable pressure on Lei Jiaozhu.

Before speaking, Lei Yijun glanced at Chen Yansen and began his opening remarks.

After the greetings, a wave of applause rose from the audience.

Chen Yansen watched Lei Jun and clapped lightly. The man's Mandarin was not standard, but in a setting like a launch event, it felt especially warm and became his strength.

As if the man on stage were a relative, a teacher, or a friend right beside you, carrying a strong sense of closeness.

The opposite was Ma Liyun—Old Ma's Mandarin was standard, his English fluent, yet there was an extra layer of distance between him and the users.

Chen Yansen already knew Xiaomi's pricing—still 1,999 yuan—but purchasing through Fox Tao would yield a rebate of 20 to 100 yuan.

In principle, that was 20 yuan cheaper than Sister Chengzi's channel price.

It was easy to predict that neither Xiaomi's nor Sister Chengzi's phone sales would be bad; now it was just a matter of who had enough capacity to lock in users first and grab more market share.

Meanwhile, far away in Shencheng, the Sister Chengzi phone factory was working overtime around the clock.

The first batch of over 600 employees finally got to experience the joy of overtime pay maxed out.

The daily cap on base pay plus overtime was 180 yuan;

the weekend overtime cap was 240 yuan.

Take Zhu-ge—last week he worked seven days, pre-tax wages of 1,380 yuan.

At his old factory, a week would earn him at most eight or nine hundred, and he'd have to put in two extra hours a day.

"Damn, that's awesome! Next month there's Mid-Autumn Festival—one day of overtime pays 360 bucks, one day equals four days at the old job!"

Zhu-ge said, grinning.

"Zhu-ge, that Xiao Meng who ran off with his bucket last month—yesterday he failed his interview, he's regretting it to death."

A coworker beside him joked during a lull.

"That's just him being stupid! Sister Chengzi's factory is this good, and he quit to go work 14 hours a day for less than 150 yuan—anyone who'd finished junior high wouldn't be that dumb."

Zhu-ge deftly placed the tested, qualified phones into packaging boxes, along with manuals, chargers, earphones, and other accessories, saying smugly as he worked.

"Sister Chengzi's phone is great, but the daily cap on overtime hours really sucks—I could screw in bolts for 16 hours, but they make me stop after 12 and go rest."

A young worker beside him grumbled indignantly.

A young man of eighteen or nineteen like him feared staying up late the least—let alone 16 hours, he'd once worked 30 hours straight.

After the second round of hiring, the Sister Chengzi factory's headcount reached 1,200, contributing over 1,000 strands of Human-Path Salary Fire to Chen Yansen each month.

At the same time.

The logistics department, following the order information sent back from Sister Ancheng's mall, wrapped the phones in anti-collision foam, packed them into cardboard boxes, sealed them up, and affixed courier waybills.

SF Express's courier vans came twice a day, morning and evening, hauling the packed parcels to sorting centers and shipping them across the country and overseas.

By the time Chen Yansen was attending the Xiaomi launch in Yanjing, thirty or forty thousand buyers had already received their Sister Chengzi phones one after another.

1,999 yuan for a flagship configuration worth 3,999 yuan—big screen, high-performance processor, smooth AuroraOS system—almost zero negative reviews.

Of course, some users complained about battery life, having to charge every day.

No way around it—the Snapdragon MSM8260 1.5GHz dual-core processor plus the 4.5-inch big screen really did drain power, but it really was fun to use.

Whether gaming or watching videos, the experience was full.

Chen Yansen shipped like crazy, beating Apple's and the domestic first- and second-tier phone makers' Autumn new arrivals to the punch.

At the same price point, Huawei, ZTE, Ku Sect, and Lenovo had zero competitiveness—basically all low- and mid-end chips, small screens, laggy low-end junk.

Users who had been tormented for ages by Shanzhai phones and overpriced, low-quality smartphones finally got to taste something good.

By the time Chen Yansen returned to Xucheng, Sister Chengzi's mall pre-orders had reached 1.3 million units.

The industry was busy predicting whether Sister Chengzi's phone could break 2 million units in its launch month.

That was almost four months of total capacity for the Sister Chengzi phone factory.

"Boss, the Brand Department Director starts today—should I call her over?"

Chen Yansen was sitting in his fifth-floor office when HR knocked and asked.

"Tell her to come straight over."

Chen Yansen was reading and didn't even look up, giving the order offhandedly.

"Clip-clop-clip-clop—!"

Before long, Ye Qiuping stepped out of the elevator, walking slowly in her high heels.

She wore a beige short-sleeved blouse on top and cotton-linen cropped pants on the bottom; her skin was Bai Xi, her figure full and rounded, the blouse buttons pulled taut.

At 27, Ye Qiuping exuded a fully ripened fragrance.

Unlike her look last time they met in Yanjing, she had switched to a new style.

Ye Qiuping stopped at the office door. Though it was open, she still raised her hand and knocked twice, her gaze sweeping quickly over Chen Yansen.

The man had his head lowered, a book in his hands, flipping through pages at great speed.

He wore a white shirt, tall and upright, his side profile sharply defined, with a clean short-cropped cut—seen from a distance, he looked more like a scholarly college student, at odds with his identity as a boss worth tens of billions.

His long, strong fingers traced across the pages, producing a soft rustling sound. Seeing this, Ye Qiuping swallowed reflexively.

For some reason, she always felt that compared to their last meeting, Chen Yansen had undergone some indescribable change.

"Come in."

Chen Yansen didn't even look up, and said flatly.

(End of chapter)