Chapter 317: Entering the Club of Billionaires Worth Over $100 Million
After seeing off Zhao Lixuan from Star Cruises, Desha accompanied Li Xiaofan to receive another client from an advertising company ranked in the top ten in the world.
Li Xiaofan took the business card from the client and saw "Ogilvy-Mather". It turned out to be the famous Ogilvy & Mather, one of the world's well-known 4A advertising companies.
In 1989, WPP, the largest advertising and media group in the UK, acquired the American-funded Ogilvy & Mather for $100 million.
WPP Group's clients are all over the world, including Heineken, Heinz, Nokia, Roche, Pfizer, Ford, British American Tobacco, IBM, Nestle, Unilever and other well-known brands of large multinational companies.
Recently, many advertising agencies have come to the company to visit and request to cooperate with Yahoo Singapore. Li Xiaofan is basically not interested in those too small companies and asked Desha and others to try to cooperate with 4A advertising.
At the beginning, many people in the company didn't know what a 4A company was.
Li Xiaofan briefly introduced them: 4A is called "American Advertising Agency Association" in English. The first four words start with the letter A, so it is abbreviated as 4A. Later, all parts of the world took this as a standard, took its core rules of engaging in advertising, being qualified and organized, and then changed the national title of the United States to the title of their respective countries or regions, forming regional 4A advertising companies. The most important agreement of the organization is to unify the client's media fee at % to avoid malicious competition. Let all major advertising companies focus on extraordinary creativity and high-quality customer service.
At present, the top ten advertising companies in the world, such as Omnicom, Interpublic, Publicis Groupe, etc., have branches in Singapore. The growing traffic and influence of Yahoo Singapore certainly attracted the attention of these advertising giants.
Ogilvy Singapore came to negotiate cooperation to help Ford Motor promote the new Mustang SVT model.
For these advertising giants, Li Xiaofan quietly told Desha: As long as they are willing to cooperate with us, the price is easy to negotiate, even if we don't make money in the beginning. The key is to establish the status of Yahoo Singapore!
…
A few days later, Netscape's stock price broke through the $100 mark, and Li Xiaofan sold the remaining 10,000 shares of Netscape to cash out $2.56 million.
At the end of November, he flew to San Francisco again.
This time he went to the Bay Area, he first signed a capital increase agreement with several Nvidia shareholders including founder Huang Renxun. Li Xiaofan invested $1 million and acquired 10% of Nvidia's equity.
Then he signed an investment agreement with Hong Youying, Dr. Chen Datong and several other Weihao Technology people. Li Xiaofan invested $2 million in Weihao Technology, accounting for 15% of the shares. After Li Xiaofan invested in Weihao Technology, Taiwanese angel investor Stanley Chiu continued to hold 25% of the shares, and the remaining 60% of the shares were held by four co-founders including Hong Youying and Chen Datong.
…
Time flies, and it was the end of 1995 in a blink of an eye. Tang Xinyi came back to Singapore to celebrate before Christmas, and stayed there until after New Year's Day before returning to Hangzhou.
During Tang Xinyi's stay in Singapore, Li Xiaofan basically took time out every day to accompany her.
After Guo Hanyue knew that Tang Xinyi had returned to Singapore, she seemed to give in to Tang Xinyi, not competing with her for favor, and silently tolerated her...
…
After New Year's Day, in mid-January 1996, Li Xiaofan invited Wu Xiaomei and other mid-level and above managers of Mingzhou Industrial and Trade Company to Singapore to hold a lively annual meeting of Yifan Company.
Everyone summed up the past and looked forward to the future...
…
In early March 1996, Yahoo received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to be listed on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange in the United States.
Immediately, the lead underwriter Morgan Stanley organized a high-intensity Road Show for Yahoo's management.
Mary Meeker's team from Morgan Stanley led Jerry Yang's Yahoo team to start intensive visits to potential investors and Yahoo management briefings across the United States. In addition to San Francisco, they also went to major financial cities in the United States such as New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles, and carried out various roadshows without stopping.
These visits have achieved gratifying results.
At the end of last year, Softbank invested a huge amount of US$100 million in Yahoo, which has firmly established Yahoo as the leader of the global Internet portal search website. The Yahoo free email service launched on December 1 last year has received 35 million global user registrations. At that time, the global Internet users were about 50 million, and Yahoo's email market share reached an astonishing 70%.
According to statistics from authoritative departments, in the first quarter of 1996, the number of Internet users in the United States exceeded 30 million, Europe exceeded 10 million, Japan exceeded 4 million, and mainland China just broke the 100,000 mark...
After the intensive and arduous investment roadshow across the United States, Morgan Stanley recommended that the initial offering price of Yahoo stock be US$35 per share based on the enthusiastic subscription willingness of global investors.
On the morning of Monday, March 25, Mary Meeker walked into the Yahoo conference room with a big smile on her face and said to several Yahoo shareholders including Jerry Yang, Filo, Masayoshi Son, Moritz and Li Xiaofan: "Dear Yahoo German shareholders, congratulations! The enthusiasm of global investors and Wall Street for our Yahoo IPO far exceeds our team's expectations. Now, after considering various factors, our team recommends that the initial offering price of our Yahoo stock be $35 per share!"
"Great!"
After screaming "Wow", the first person to jump up from his seat excitedly was Masayoshi Son of Softbank.
After hearing this shocking good news, the old Sun, who was sitting in a serious and solemn position, could no longer contain his excitement. He jumped up, waved his fists excitedly, and shouted "YES!" "YES!"...
"Oh, my God, haha, $35 issue price!" After hearing this news, several Yahoo shareholders including Jerry Yang, Filo, Moritz and Li Xiaofan also stood up excitedly and celebrated!
The most excited person here is Masayoshi Son of SoftBank Group. He has made the biggest bet and has the most shares in Yahoo.
This time, Yahoo is listed on NASDAQ and plans to issue 2.6 million shares of Yahoo stock, accounting for 10% of the total share capital of Yahoo after the issuance.
Of the remaining 23.4 million shares, the largest shareholder SoftBank holds 7.8 million shares, Sequoia Capital gets 5.62 million shares, and founders Jerry Yang and Filo each get 3.51 million shares.
And Li Xiaofan got the remaining 2.96 million shares, of which Singapore Yifan Holdings Pte. Ltd. got 2.65 million shares, Singapore Longmeng Investment and Singapore Longyue Investment each got 155,000 shares.
In January this year, when Tang Xinyi came back to Singapore for vacation, Li Xiaofan changed the name of Singapore Yifan Pte. Ltd. to "Singapore Yifan Holdings Pte. Ltd.".
Now Morgan Stanley's $35 Yahoo stock recommendation has found that the price is more than twice as high as the $13 in the previous life.
According to this issue price, the market value of SoftBank Group's 7.8 million Yahoo shares suddenly increased to US$1.0 billion, and the account book profit was US$1.0 billion, which was enough to make Masayoshi Son jump up and down like crazy!
And the 2.96 million Yahoo shares owned by the three Singaporean companies under Li Xiaofan's name also appreciated to US$1.0 billion, directly entering the US$100 million rich club!