Chapter 25 Auto Loans
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Although Columbia Bank is named after the country, it is not a very attractive investment target in the US capital market. It can be said that compared with most banks in the United States, Columbia Bank is an out-and-out small bank.
Seryozha carried out the acquisition through an offshore company. Because Seryozha intends to borrow the platform of the Bank of Colombia for a long time, his privatization action cannot tolerate any irregularities, and the acquisition must be carried out in full compliance with the law. .
In order to test the local market reaction in Colombia in advance, Seriosha asked the Mediterranean Trading Company to order more than 800 Lada Nivas from the Volga Automobile Factory and transport them by sea to Colombia for Escobar to operate.
It is thousands of miles away from Rostov on the Black Sea coast to Buenaventura in Colombia. When the fleet was halfway through, Sergesha's acquisition has entered the next stage, because Sergesha got the Colombian bank 5% of the shares, he must show his placard to the US government regulatory agencies before proceeding to the next step. Under such circumstances, Seryozha could only compete with the existing operators for the controlling stake in Bank of Colombia.
The amount of funds held by Xie Liaosha is not comparable to that of ordinary small consortiums. With Xie Liaosha's investment regardless of cost, although he spent a lot of money, he won precious time. For the newly acquired bank, Seriosha did not participate too much in the management, but only supplemented a sum of funds to specialize in the auto loan business.
Under Escobar's low-price sales strategy, Lada Niva has gradually become familiar to Colombian consumers. First of all, the biggest advantage of this car is that it is too cheap, even cheaper than Japanese brand cars. Escobar proposed a 5% down payment sales strategy for this car, and the corresponding Colombian bank provided a minimum of three years and a maximum of five years of low-interest loans for this car. In this way, most of the customers who were originally excluded by the consumption threshold of cars have been attracted. All of a sudden, Escobar's car sales company was crowded with people from the moment it opened.
In order to attract attention, the car sales company also specially displayed the scene of Lada Niva dragging a plowshare and using it as a tractor. The unique skills of driving the car up the 45-degree stairs are even more amazing. Lada Niva's parts are highly versatile and simple in structure, so local experienced auto mechanics can quickly master the maintenance skills of this kind of car after simple training. In order to solve the shortcomings of Lada Niva's inability to pull goods, the car sales company even launched a matching trailer to transport goods with this car. The biggest disadvantage of Lada Niva is that it does not have Japanese cars to save fuel, but it is not a problem in Colombia, because their neighbor is the country with the most abundant crude oil reserves in the world-Venezuela, and Colombia is also one of the oil-producing countries. Gasoline is very cheap here.
Seryozha had a certain purpose in deciding to let Escobar be responsible for the sales. Because Escobar's sales speed is directly proportional to the speed of capital operation, the more he sells, the more legal income he will earn. Therefore, Escobar even resorted to some unconventional means to help Lada Niva gain more market share. Some car dealers selling Japanese brands as well as European and American brands soon found that the police and government departments began to trouble them from time to time. Seryozha is even more happy to see this, because both the Mediterranean Trading Company and the Colombian Bank will gain more benefits from it.
The Mediterranean Trading Company converted its profits into raw materials for agricultural products in Latin America, importing cocoa, soybeans, sugar cane, corn, and coffee from Brazil, and importing frozen beef from Argentina. Now, except for the thriving Japanese economy, the economies of almost all old industrial countries have fallen into a stage of stagnation or even recession, and Latin America, as a traditional raw material exporting country, has also suffered greatly from this.
The prices of these agricultural products are not high now, and the Mediterranean Trading Company naturally made a lot of money from them.
Although the Mediterranean Trading Company is a state-owned company, the profits obtained do not belong to Sergei. But he is the enterprise created by Sergey Sha, and it is still firmly in the hands of his own people. The better the development of the Mediterranean Trading Company, the more secure Seryozha's position in the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation will be. It is actually unscientific to expect one company after another to save the Soviet Union. It can only help Seryozha to stabilize his official position. Seryozha will rely on the Mediterranean Trading Company to further grasp more power of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. As long as the Mediterranean Trading Company develops well, Seryozha will be more valuable in the eyes of the Kremlin's top brass.
In fact, in Seryozha's view, apart from the shortage of daily necessities and food supplies, the common people in the Soviet Union are not that far behind Western Europe or even the United States in other aspects. Life is much happier. Almost every household in the Soviet Union has popularized basic household appliances such as radios, refrigerators, televisions, and washing machines. Moreover, there are not a few families who own cars. Although the gap between housing and the United States is still far away, it has already crossed the threshold of developing countries on the whole. At least from now on, it seems that the entire country's economy has not yet reached the point where it must be disintegrated.
Just two months after Seryozha returned to Moscow, Yakovlev also arranged everything and returned to the country. After he came back, he would naturally report to Gorbachev, and Seryozha would naturally go with him.
As expected of a member of the Central Committee, Yakovlev has a thorough understanding of the problems of the United Kingdom and some Western European countries. He introduced Gorbachev in detail to a series of measures taken by Prime Minister Thatcher after he came to power. In his rhetoric, he praised the British reform path. He specifically pointed out that French President Mitterrand has been aggressively nationalizing banks and industrial groups since he came to power in 1981, but just one year after he took office, he made a 180-degree change and began to learn from Mrs. Thatcher. Privatization was rampant. Seryozha looked at Yakovlev with deep meaning. Although this guy is a communist, he believes in capitalism more in his bones. However, the example Yakovlev mentioned that British Steel became the most efficient steel company in Europe after privatization moved Gorbachev. Because everyone here knows that one of the biggest problems facing the Soviet domestic economy is the problem of labor efficiency.
"Secretary Gorbachev, it seems that the British and the French have completely abandoned Keynes's theory of large state-owned enterprises. On the contrary, the liberal economy advocated by Prime Minister Thatcher can better solve the current predicament. !” Yakovlev said meaningfully.