Chapter 368: End of Year Arrangements

With Robert Shaye, Wang Xu seemed to be freed from endless complicated affairs all of a sudden. It turned out that professional producers are not just for show.

He was a foreigner who could not speak Chinese and had to rely on translators everywhere. It didn't take him long to sort out everything and then settle all the contracts with all parties.

Whether it was the actors in the ugly country or the team in Hong Kong, it seemed that he just made a few phone calls and quickly settled it.

As for the imperial capital, they were fully cooperative. The two green hands of the studio were ordered around by Robert Shaye. The whole team was like a sports car running at full speed, running all the way on the highway.

Robert Shaye also expressed his feelings to Wang Xu several times that the team in China was really easy to use, fast, and strong in execution. All the special effects requirements given by Wang Xu were taking shape quickly.

Wang Xu felt relieved, and so did Robert Shaye. Wang Xu's script was detailed down to the point of every shot, and the effects needed for various special effects seemed to have been in Wang Xu's mind. Wang Xu claimed that he had it all planned out, and asked the foreigner to learn a Chinese idiom.

Wang Xu had other work, so Robert quickly worked out various plans. The team would meet after the Spring Festival next year, and the filming would be completed in May, with only three months of shooting time.

He made this according to Wang Xu's existing shooting plan, and he left a lot of money. He knew the director, and he would definitely have additional ideas during the shooting.

Everything went in order. New Line won a $5 million investment and obtained half of the Ugly box office share. The other half was split between New Line and Wang Xu, and the copyright of the film still belonged to Wang Xu's studio.

Golden Harvest also got $5 million, but it enjoyed 50% of the Asian box office alone, and New Line and Wang Xu split it in half.

As for other markets, it was divided equally among the three.

As for Imperial Films, they invested a total of 1 million RMB, which was packaged and distributed together with Wang Xu.

Wang Xu basically doesn't need to continue investing. Wang Xu's script, the salary of the two leading actors, plus the previous investment in software, hardware, development of new special effects, two streets produced, etc. are all converted into investment, totaling 5 million US dollars.

In general, Wang Xu can't allocate much box office, but Wang Xu has opened a new men's clothing brand W.X and a women's clothing brand W.F as mid-range clothing under Wang Chao Clothing.

Selling clothes and glasses for the male and female protagonists together, 200,000 sets were prepared in the early stage, black windbreaker, plus black leather pants vest, each set of prices is more than 500 US dollars, but the materials are all chemical fiber, straight and handsome, but lack the special texture of leather jackets, just sell in quantity.

And only with the Wang Chao label, that is the real authentic, real leather jacket, the price of a set is more than 20,000 US dollars.

Only this can restore the effect in the movie 100%, but Wang Xu didn't prepare much of this kind of goods, there are only dozens of sets in a city, such expensive things, just make some money with tears.

T-shirts printed with various matrix logos have been prepared for millions of goods.

This matter did not start now, but after Wang Xu planned to make this movie and commercialize it, Wang Xu told Tang Yun to start preparing.

Tang Yun was almost fed up with Wang Xu's slow personality. This time, how could he not take the feathers as a command and start setting up stores all over the world early? He didn't believe that Wang Xu's fashionable and cool fashions could not be sold.

At the beginning, the clothes would be sold as peripherals in the cinema, and Tang Yun would also open stores in the two central cities of Los Angeles and New York, while in other cities, the most famous department store Macy's would be handed over to operate the counters on its behalf.

This model is certainly not as good as the complete monopoly model in later generations, but on the one hand, the pure monopoly store model in this era is not so popular, and traditional department stores are still very competitive. Ugly Chinese still have the tradition of giving priority to large department stores when shopping in shopping malls.

Until ten years later, Macy's was still the top clothing sales in the United States, and then it was slowly replaced by new specialty stores. Urban comprehensive commercial complexes with specialty stores gradually replaced traditional department stores and became the new preferred business model.

Wang Xu was not worried. It would be no problem to change it at that time. This time, he was selected by Macy's to become the first Chinese partner, thanks to Robert Shaye's introduction, and the reputation of Wang Xu and Wang Fei as famous pop rock singers.

Or, they came for this kind of advertising effect. This year, Wang Fei's new English album has become very popular in the United States, and MTV has long dominated the song request charts.

Although Wang Xu only has two songs in it, he still hooked the hearts of countless boys and girls with his handsome looks.

Therefore, with the increasing popularity of the couple, Tang Yun's ambition is also expanding wildly, especially since she opened Wang Chao specialty stores in Hong Kong and Xiao Ri Zi, she has already set her sights on the world.

It is enough for Huaxia to have a few top-level stores. If they open too many, they will not make money. Their clothes are too expensive. Even WX and WF, which are one level lower, seem out of touch with the masses.

But if they are placed overseas, there will be no problem. Wang Chao is right to be expensive. It is not a big deal to sell a set of clothes for thousands or tens of thousands.

WX and WF are high-end clothes that can be sold in large quantities.

The main selling point is youth, fashion, and a little rebellious. The target market is young people from middle-class families. The clothing prices are generally between one hundred and two hundred dollars. This is definitely not cheap for young people in the West, but it is not expensive either.

This is Tang Yun's ambition. Wang Xu is naturally okay with it. He just needs to support her. He doesn't even need a loan. He just needs to continue to invest the money he saved before.

It's nothing more than finding some processing factories. The processing factories are still in Suzhou. Zhou Feng made the connection. Suzhou's Beijing Office directly brought in several garment manufacturing companies to get orders.

This era is in the transition period from processing with supplied materials to full-scale OEM. Both state-owned enterprises and private enterprises face the same dilemma.

The development of private enterprises in Suzhou is actually not very strong. Since the rapid development of Zhou Feng's family's enterprises, the Suzhou government seems to have come to its senses.

They did not chase foreign companies as they did in history, but gave more support to local state-owned and private enterprises.

Since Xiangxuehai got the compressor technology and received government support, it can be said that it immediately entered the fast lane and created an ultra-standard development path of three months of production, profitability, and immediate construction of the second phase.

Moreover, Xiangxuehai established a research institute in cooperation with Shuimu. According to the contract, it began to invest part of the profits to conduct research on improvement and expansion solutions based on existing compressor products.

Although the time is still short and there are no results yet, and it is still in the process of research and development, even if it is just to expand the power and add some research on automation control, it can be enough to bring Xiangxuehai a visible future.

So, give some trust here, it is still a traditional strength of Gusu, so hurry up.

Tang Yun visited several companies in Gusu and finally chose the one with the most standardized management. It was originally impossible to see anything else, but the standardization of management could still be seen.

When Wang Xu chatted with everyone, he also talked more or less about what various advanced factories should look like.

This is the advantage of a time traveler. If you ask him how he can do that, he doesn't know, but he really knows what an advanced enterprise looks like, and knows what things can't be pretended.

The same is the manufacturing of ready-made clothing, the standardization of the assembly line, the management of raw logistics, the inspection of finished products, the mental outlook of the staff, these differences show the differences between each enterprise.

Million-level orders are not small, and the cost of these clothes is not high. Wang Xu provides a unified version and a unified quality inspection standard. This is Tang Yun's own ability. He has been studying management courses and has been to Shuimu for free.

In the name of Wang Xu's sister, any teacher will give three thin faces to come and listen to the class. Is that a matter?

In fact, Wang Jinghua has also used Wang Xu's name a lot. Basically, just say hello. This is the importance of connections.

If you want to say who among these people knows Wang Xu's power best, the first one should be Senior Brother Yuzhuo, and the second one is Wang Jinghua.

As for Wang Fei, she doesn't care. How much power is her man. She enjoys that kind of privilege and knows more deeply where the privilege comes from. This is enough.

In any case, the joining of Robert Shaye allows Wang Xu to get rid of all kinds of tedious affairs and let him focus on real movies.

For example, choosing actors. Now this film has become famous in China and Hong Kong. The cooperation between China, Hollywood and Hong Kong is a big gimmick.

Although such a medium-investment movie with an investment of 15 million US dollars is not outstanding in the United States. It will not cause any effect in Hollywood, but for Hong Kong, where movies with an investment of more than 10 million Hong Kong dollars are considered large investments, it is explosive news.

Jiang Wen and Jiang Wu in China have already confirmed their roles. Jiang Wen can be regarded as the second male lead, while Jiang Wu is just an ordinary NPC. Who told him not to graduate yet? Just show his face.

Liu Xiaoqing also played a cameo role, a pure cameo. John Travolta was confirmed as the counter-actor, Zhang Guorong was confirmed as the third male lead, and Wang Fei played the first female lead.

The main characters have actually returned to their positions, and the rest don’t have many important roles. The more important ones are the four members of the team, one of whom is a big role who died at the beginning.

Even so, there are still some second-tier actors in Hong Kong who frequently seek to contact Golden Harvest. Of course, Wang Fei's friends were also explored by their friends, thinking that they could know some inside information.

Fortunately, the people who have a good relationship with Wang Fei are also of high status, and ordinary people cannot approach them, so those who can come are generally of high status. They are not here for any role, but want to hear gossip, and the result is that Wang Fei chatted with Sister Mei for a long time at night.

Wang Xu chatted with Zhang Guorong for a long time, one at home and the other in the office, but they talked about gossip.

Then all kinds of gossip were passed back, and Wang Xu really didn't care about these, and he said it, it wasn't a confidential project.

And Golden Harvest is a person who knows how to create momentum. Hong Kong's set has been played to perfection, how could it not take advantage of the momentum? Didn't you see that the pace of Golden Harvest's listing has been rapidly accelerated.

The result is that not long after the news of the three-party cooperation was released, the names of Wang Xu and Wang Fei once again resounded throughout Hong Kong.

As the saying goes, "Fame comes from the sky when you sit at home." The couple is really low-key, but their true strength does not allow it.

What else can they do? They just make some money with tears.

It's almost the end of December. This year's New Year's Eve party once again invited Wang Fei, and she also brought five little ones.

The Spring Festival Gala is a must-see for Xia Shi. Wang Fei’s background is so powerful now. Everyone from top to bottom will give him some face. This is not the result of a few papers, but the bonus brought by the supercomputing project.

At least recently, the supercomputing project has settled in four companies established by Great Wall, Inspur, Tongfang and Founder. The first two are the leaders of Chinese computers, especially Great Wall, which is an enterprise under the Ministry of Electronics Industry and a state-owned enterprise with pure blood.

At that time, Great Wall 0520 can be said to have fired the first shot of Chinese computer production, but unfortunately, this company has always insisted on state-owned assets and invested a lot of money in technology research.

It was the first computer company in China to break through the BIOS restrictions. Later, it broke through the technical restrictions of various peripherals including hard disks, power supplies, motherboards, etc., and even made all the products except CPU domestically produced. Then it was defeated by a price war among famous manufacturers around the world.

It can be said that Great Wall died tragically at that time, especially in the field of hard disks. It was the only manufacturer in China that made hard disks. Unfortunately, the hard disk technology it made was not good enough, so the price could not be lowered. At the beginning, it could still survive by relying on government orders.

Later, the international situation changed and policies were adjusted. Its price was 4,000 yuan, while Seagate sold it for 800 yuan in the market. So it died immediately, and the second-generation hard disk under development also became a bubble.

At this time, reflection was popular, and reflection also reflected on the system. It was purely state-owned and purely domestic. How could this country be determined? Then it was reformed, and it was reformed many times. Later, it was listed in Shenzhen, but it was not successful.

In addition, his personality was not as greedy as the leader of a certain computing company, and he seemed to be easier to talk to. His personality made the whole enterprise less wolfish.

The company was relatively mild, but don’t think it was a good thing. In the national environment in the 1990s, wolfishness was really a necessity for survival. At that time, Huawei could really fight with friendly companies for a single order.

A certain computing company relied on this wolf nature to use various tricks to turn the company into a private one, and then made drastic internationalization. As a company, it can be said that it has developed much better than Great Wall.

But for Huaxia, it is really a matter of opinion. When it acquired IBM PC, it was still very popular with the public and received national praise. But now looking back, it may not be a rice and millet plan to move the center of gravity of assets outward.

And Great Wall gradually became unsuccessful. Now, except for power supplies, it is still somewhat famous, and the others are not even third-rate.

However, in Wang Xu's view, Great Wall is actually one of the few IT companies that can invest real money in research and development, and it is also one of the few companies that Wang Xu can praise. There are actually many such companies now, such as Kingsoft, ZTE and Huawei.

It's just that everyone was crossing the river in the dark at that time, and no one knew where the road was, but the problem of Great Wall was actually decision-making and mentality.

They spread the funds too far and did not focus enough.

Apart from the CPU, they almost grabbed everything from the chassis to the display, but the result was that nothing was really done well. Except for the power supply that was the first breakthrough, the others could not reach the high level of the industry.

In the past two years, they even specially developed a bunch of supporting software and wanted to develop a free operating system. They spent a lot of money, but the results were not very good.

Great Wall wanted to quickly achieve national localization, but the result was the collapse of overall benefits. It was also fate.

Like ZTE and Huawei, they are all focused on the field of switches, deeply engaged in research, and even if they are pirated, they must compare with the highest level. Instead, they have taken a smooth road.

The first batch of supercomputing technology licenses were Tongfang and Inspur, and the second batch chose Founder and Great Wall half a year later. In fact, the Institute of Computing Technology also came. They also coveted this technology. Their connections are not small, and they persuaded many people from the Shuimu Management Committee.

However, Wang Xu directly voted for Great Wall, which made the Institute of Computing Technology suffer a loss. For this, his colleagues in the Huazhong University of Science and Technology scolded Wang Xu a lot, but Wang Xu was not angry. He invited several leaders of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology to have a meal and twisted his mouth.

Wang Xu didn't say anything, just talked about some capital operation methods and the ownership of some land. As for what happened later, it really had nothing to do with Wang Xu.

Really, what bad intentions could Wang Xu, who looks delicate, have? He is pure and innocent, Dong Si and Wang Er, just like that.

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(See you another day)