Chapter 89: Why Is He So Rich?

“Seriously? Their power got cut off by the cleaning lady? Does something like that really happen in this world? What on earth are Tenda’s network admins doing?”

“What’s so strange about that? My little brother was playing with fire at home and even burned down my mother’s bedroom!”

“Come on, it’s obvious Tenda’s servers blew up and they’re just dragging a cleaning lady out to take the blame!”

“Hey, you can’t put it like that. Anything is possible. Tenda is such a huge company; they surely wouldn’t lie. They can’t be that shameless, can they? Surely not!”

Faced with Tenda’s announcement, the users were in an uproar. Quite a few people saw through Tenda’s little trick, but most still chose to believe the story about the cleaning lady.

After all, the tale of a cleaning lady cutting the power was far more amusing than a simple server crash. So although our Pony’s scheme was absurd to the point of being laughable, dragging a cleaning lady in to take the blame produced surprisingly good results. At the very least, hardly anyone was discussing how dreadful Tenda’s servers were; instead, people began wondering whether that cleaning lady really possessed miraculous powers.

No one ended up harboring any great hatred or resentment toward Tenda because of it.

But inside Tenda, the atmosphere was far from cheerful. Everyone from top to bottom kept their mouths shut, afraid of angering Pony Ma, and Pony Ma once again gathered all the executives for a meeting.

Ah, ever since OO came along, Tenda had been holding more meetings than government offices.

“Thank you all for coming. Let’s keep today’s meeting as brief as possible, because we simply don’t have time,” Pony Ma said with a sigh. “I’ve already decided that we will reopen the servers at dawn. There are fewer people online then, so the servers should be able to hold. But once the night is over and daytime traffic comes back, they’ll collapse again.”

“So before tomorrow morning, we must come up with a solution to deal with this situation!”

“Chairman, I think the only thing we can do now is temporarily give up QQ Voice,” Li Dan said at once. “Our servers simply cannot handle the traffic from QQ Voice. That is a fact we cannot change no matter what we do. So until we expand the servers, we can’t reopen QQ Voice. After all, the most important thing is to preserve our existing user base and make sure people can still use QQ for text chat!”

“Yes!”

“That’s the only way!”

The other executives nodded in agreement. It wasn’t that Li Dan’s plan was especially brilliant; it was simply the only plan left. Otherwise, what were they supposed to do, have the cleaning lady water the servers every day?

“No!” To everyone’s surprise, Pony Ma flatly rejected the idea. “If we suspend QQ Voice, that would be the same as telling the world that QQ’s technology is inferior to OO’s.”

“This isn’t about my pride. What matters is that voice chat is the standard of the next era. Right now only OO can operate normally, and that will draw a huge number of users over to OO, making them OO’s users.”

“Every time OO gains a user, we lose one. A few months from now, once we’ve lost enough users, our problem will no longer be how to crush OO. It will be how not to be crushed by OO!”

“As much as I hate to admit it, gentlemen, without QQ Voice, we’d be nothing but sitting ducks, waiting to die!”

“Damn it, how did things end up like this? Why can OO keep voice services running? Do they have more servers than we do? Are they really that rich?” Ceng Qing cursed under his breath. He still couldn’t understand where OO was getting all this money from.

“Exactly. Where on earth is OO getting so much money?” Li Dan sighed as well. In the end, QQ’s current predicament came down to being poor. If they had money, they could just buy back hundreds of millions’ worth of servers, and every problem would be solved.

“The money was probably invested by Huang He,” Zhang Zhidong said. “I heard that with that mystery-box business, he paid off all 350 million in bank debt in just a few months, and still made several hundred million more on top of that.”

“How do you know that?” everyone in the meeting room asked in unison, even Pony Ma looking curious.

“I heard it from Old Luo over at Weming Crossroads...” Halfway through, Zhang Zhidong suddenly felt awkward. Wasn’t this basically exposing his own hobby?

Still, on reflection, this was the moment when the company’s very survival hung in the balance, so there was no time to care about that. Zhang Zhidong could only continue. “I heard it from Old Luo. He’s from the Jiangnan Group. He used to be a cobbler, but later Jiangnan Group went more than half a year without being able to pay wages. So Huang He told them to sell mystery boxes.”

“Turns out those mystery boxes sold like crazy. Last week they went back to Wenzhou for a meeting and collected all the unpaid wages. On top of that, Jiangnan Group is going to open several hundred branch companies across the country to really build up and scale the mystery-box industry!”

“That was when Old Luo heard that Huang He had not only paid off all his bank loans, but also bought each of his younger sisters-in-law jewelry worth several million, and even gave each of them a Porsche. In any case, he made a killing!” As Zhang Zhidong said this, he couldn’t help but show a look of envy. He wanted a Rolls-Royce too.

“How reliable is what this Old Luo says?” Li Dan asked.

Zhang Zhidong shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what he told me. We get along pretty well, and that’s what he said.”

Could Zhang Zhidong and Old Luo not get along? Just with Tianxing phones alone, Zhang Zhidong had three of them, and none were drawn from the lottery; he bought them with Jiangnan coins. Of course Old Luo had to cultivate a good relationship with him. On top of that, he could brag a little about how formidable his backing was, and then they could chat about the factory gossip surrounding those much-discussed younger sisters-in-law. Time passed pleasantly that way.

“He was definitely exaggerating, but Huang He made a fortune, and that much is certain. He probably put all the money he made into OO, which is why they have more servers than we do,” Ceng Qing concluded.

“Chairman, we’ve just received the latest news!” Li Dan returned after answering a phone call, reporting at once. “A friend of mine learned something from a Compaq sales representative. Last month, a company in Wenzhou placed an order for servers worth 150 million yuan, and they bought up all of Compaq’s inventory in this country. If we want to buy servers too, we’ll have to wait until next month for them to arrive by sea freight.”

“One hundred and fifty million!” Everyone swallowed in unison. No wonder OO could hold on. One hundred and fifty million yuan—more than double the cost of QQ’s servers. No wonder they could withstand such terrifying traffic.

“Damn it, Huang He has that much money. If he wanted to, he could put it into industry, real estate, coal mines, or even run after schoolgirls for all I care. Why does he have to come after us on the internet? Doesn’t he know that over the past two years, we haven’t made a single cent in profit?” Pony Ma roared, genuinely feeling wronged.