Chapter 488: Takeoff (Part 1)

Even if they were unwilling to fail to acquire a stake in 【Cybertron Technology】, the agreement that had already been negotiated still needed to be fulfilled.

The people from Panda arrived on the morning of the second day, led personally by the group president Wang Zilong, and everyone who was supposed to come from Panda Weiyun and Panda Security was present.

"Chairman Sun, President Wang, this is the agreement we have drafted. Your company may examine it, and if there are no issues, let us sign the contract today!"

"Very well, please wait a moment!"

Sun Cheng and Wang Lu each took a copy, and the newly formed legal department of 【Cybertron Technology】 also dispatched four people to assist them at their sides; they needed to use their extensive legal knowledge to assist in checking and ensuring that no unfair terms or traps were hidden in the contract.

It took nearly an hour to finish checking the contract brought over by the Panda side.

After finding no traps hidden by the other party or any tampering with the previously reached verbal agreement, both sides signed the contract under the witness of the notary personnel hired by 【Cybertron Technology】.

The agreement officially took effect!

Wang Zilong shook hands with Sun Cheng, his words cordial, but his face a bit sour: "Congratulations, Chairman Sun; from today on, we can be considered one family."

"That is only natural; there will be plenty of opportunities for us to cooperate in the future!"

Sun Cheng pretended not to understand; he naturally knew that Wang Zilong still had designs on the shares of 【Cybertron Technology】.

However, not to mention that he was not short of money at all—the gold and gems he had obtained in the 【Transformers Great Universe】 and stored within the Spherical Space alone would be an astronomical figure once sold—he also did not intend to easily let go of 【Cybertron Technology】 shares.

At the very least, the 3 billion USD for a 30% stake offered by the Panda Group was, in Sun Cheng's view, pure wishful thinking.

Last year, the three major storage giants—Western Digital, Seagate, and Micron—invested approximately 1.74 billion USD in R&D for next-generation storage technology. Among them, Seagate, which gained the most, only announced results that lowered the Logic Bad Sector rate of their new generation DRAM products by 7.1% and increased system stability by 11.3%; everything else was just minor improvements.

So far, not a single storage giant has developed revolutionary next-generation storage technology or innovated their production processes.

By this analogy, even if his 【Cybertron Technology】 was not eye-catching right now, the revolutionary technology he held in his hands was worth far more than tens of billions of dollars, and even inflating it by several times would not be an exaggeration.

Although Wang Zilong was the president of the Panda Communications Group, to put it bluntly, he was just a high-level employee. Before coming, he had received authorization from the board of directors and shareholders, and the upper limit only reached 3 billion USD.

Now that 【Cybertron Technology】 was not buying it and was not at all moved by this financing, which they considered a huge sum, he could only report back to the group first, and the follow-up would depend on the thoughts of the board of directors and those major shareholders.

There was one thing Sun Cheng said that was very true: there would be plenty of opportunities for cooperation in the future.

Wang Lu was going to be busy for a while!

According to the cooperation agreement between 【Cybertron Technology】 and Panda Communications Group, the two companies would jointly establish a joint venture, 【Uimi Technology】, to jointly operate the 【UIMI Mobile Operating System】 born from Google Android, and conduct deep localization, optimization, and functional development.

The headquarters of 【Uimi Technology】 would be set in Nandu, with Panda Security dispatching an executive to serve as CEO, while 【Cybertron Technology】 would provide technical support and dispatch an executive to serve as CTO; the former would hold 70% of 【Uimi Technology】 shares, while the latter would only hold 30%.

Regarding 【Uimi Technology】, Sun Cheng did not argue with the Panda Group over shares and management issues.

It was not that he did not value 【Uimi Technology】; looking at the trajectory of technological development in the real world, the prospects and importance of mobile operating systems would only increase with each passing day.

However, the 【UIMI Mobile Operating System】 he brought out was a deeply localized and optimized version based on Google Android. Although Android was an open-source system, wanting to perform deep customization, optimization, and re-development on it still required purchasing a license from Google.

Although the funds required for this license were not much, after all, the patent for the entire operating system was in their hands. Who knows if Google might decide to charge for the Android operating system or terminate the license in the future? There were always risks.

Perhaps when it came to haggling with a world IT giant like Google, Panda was undoubtedly more suitable than 【Cybertron Technology】, though of course, this was only one of the reasons.

The 【UIMI】 born based on the Google Android operating system inherently lacked the ability to monetize. Sun Cheng did not care for that little bit of income, and he estimated that Panda would not care too much about the income issue either. Releasing it was just to let domestic mobile phone developers use it for free to grab market share in mobile operating systems, which was unrelated to the core business of 【Cybertron Technology】.

Therefore, the shares of 【Uimi Technology】 were not important to him, but the subsequent development, debugging, and maintenance could cultivate quite a few programmers for 【Cybertron Technology】.

Compared to that, what Sun Cheng valued more was Panda Weiyun under Panda Communications.

Panda Weiyun was the cloud drive business that Panda launched a few years ago. Although during the negotiations, the Panda side vetoed handing over the enterprise-facing business of Weiyun, and in the end, the only thing the Panda Group was willing to sell to 【Cybertron Technology】 was the personal cloud drive business, for 【Cybertron Technology】, which was eager to develop and grow, this was also a big piece of fat meat.

After all, no matter how bad Weiyun was, it was one of the functional software programs attached to the largest domestic social software—Panda OO—with a total of over 300 million registered users. Although the number of monthly active users was a bit worse, at only six or seven million, about one-tenth of One Hundred Cloud Drive, there were reasons for that.

Panda's support for Weiyun had always been insufficient. Back then, Weiyun was launched in a rush to compete with One Hundred Cloud Drive, and its functions were relatively few.

Moreover, in order to save on Servers, the basic cloud drive space capacity that Weiyun gave to new users for free was too small, only 10G. Although it could be increased to 100G through a series of interactions with other software under Panda, when users compared it to the 1T of basic space given directly to new users by One Hundred Cloud Drive, they immediately felt that Weiyun was too stingy.

The most troublesome thing was the management of content uploaded by users to the cloud drive. One Hundred Cloud Drive and the vast majority of domestic cloud drive companies generally adopted a strategy of turning a blind eye, meaning that for things the state had not explicitly prohibited from being disseminated, even if they were film and television works with copyright disputes, they tacitly allowed cloud drive users to upload and even share them.

However, because Panda had many film and television companies and online video platforms under its umbrella, Weiyun adopted a strategy of prohibiting the uploading and sharing of film and television works involving copyright disputes.

Yet, more than 95% of Normal users used cloud drives precisely to find a place to store those film and television video files they had painstakingly collected from the internet, or to exchange and share them with others.

These various aspects of Panda Weiyun were the reasons why, despite holding onto the thick thigh of Panda OO—the social software with the most users in the world—its scale had never been able to squeeze into the top three of the domestic cloud drive industry.

And these, for 【Cybertron Cloud Drive】, were all minor problems.