Judging from the results of Goldman Sachs' investment in Alibaba, it is really a heartbreaking story.

Later when we mentioned Alibaba, the first thing that everyone thought of was that in addition to the richest man in horse who looked very handsome and ancient, that was another famous short man, the Korean-Japanese Masayoshi Son.

As everyone knows, he spent 6 minutes to finalize a $20 million investment in Alibaba in January 2000. What everyone doesn’t know is that he led the investment in Alibaba several rounds and persisted until the end, thus achieving an investment achievement that dwarfed Buffett.

In fact, Goldman Sachs could have done better.

This is one of the five well-known investment banks on Wall Street, which is the first among venture capitalists to be optimistic about the richest man in Ma and Alibaba.

Many successes seem accidental, but in fact they are inevitable, but sometimes they seem inevitable, but when they think about it, they feel quite accidental.

In March 1999, it should be said that Ma's richest man, who failed several times in entrepreneurship, led or encouraged him, could actually be said to have fooled the later famous "Eighteen Arhats" again - mostly his students, who founded Alibaba in his own family in Hangzhou.

It should be said that his chance choice happened to be a good time.

This year, Chinese Internet companies are extremely popular, attracting many international venture capital institutions, including Tigerfund, to spend money freely.

Among them, Sina received US$16 million in investment from Warden International, and Sohu also received US$6 million and more than US$30 million in financing.

International venture capitalists' optimism about the domestic Internet naturally led to the optimism of domestic related institutions in this field - at least at that time, our Internet companies generally adopted a follow-up strategy. Venture capital investors, which are not strong in China, also followed the pace of international giants.

Although he did not make much name in the Yellow Pages project before, the richest man at that time was at least one of the well-known figures in the domestic Internet field, and was well-known to many people, like the three major portals and the founders of Baidu, Tencent, and 3721.

Therefore, at the beginning of the group's establishment, many investors had olive branches to the richest man in Ma, but he was cautious and did not immediately get overwhelmed by this investment craze. He rejected as many as 38 mainland investors in a row. He had a bigger goal and a longer vision.

The richest man in Malaysia hopes that Alibaba's first venture capital will not only bring money, but also bring more non-financial elements, such as further venture capital and other overseas resources.

Later, he really fulfilled his wish.

It is very accidental that Alibaba and Goldman Sachs joined forces for the first time, or it can be said that it is very inevitable.

There is one in his founding team who is a venture capital manager, that is, CFO, Cai Chongxin.

Before joining Alibaba, he achieved the position of vice president at Swedish Investment Group (Investorab), and has a close relationship with the venture capital circle.

He quickly brought good news to the richest man Ma. The Hong Kong investment manager of Goldman Sachs, who had met him, revealed to him that Goldman Sachs is also interested in entering the Chinese Internet market.

With his efforts and after a field investigation, in October of the same year, Goldman Sachs, along with Fidelity Investment and Singapore Government Technology Development Fund, investab and others invested $5 million in Alibaba. The equity obtained was consistent with the equity obtained by Yahoo's investment of $1 billion in 2005 - 40%.

Compared with Alibaba's performance later, it was simply insignificant investment, but it was very critical. It injected new blood into this startup with only 500,000 yuan in founding funds.

Among them, Goldman Sachs invested $3.3 million, making it the largest shareholder in addition to the founding team at that time.

However, until now, many of Goldman Sachs' executives and partners are increasingly unfavorable to the prospects of this investment.

One of the main reasons for this is Taobao founded by Alibaba this year.

Before this, Alibaba platform has actually developed quite well because it allows many domestic companies to deal with international buyers directly - although it still fails to make a profit.

However, the establishment of Taobao has attracted fear from ebay, an e-commerce giant that has already acquired eBay in the country.

ebay is a company with a market value of up to tens of billions of dollars. They know that the best time to defeat an opponent is not to give him the opportunity to grow and grow. When he is reborn, he will punch him.

Therefore, they have formulated a very clear and targeted strategy this year: a small investment of 100 million US dollars to block Taobao in all aspects.

Ebay's president has asserted more than once with confidence that "it can only survive for up to 18 months,"

What supported his argument was that they were spending a lot of money everywhere.

This can be seen from the publicity.

They first signed a strict exclusive advertising agreement with the most well-known portal websites in China: they can only accept our advertisements, but they must not accept Taobao.

Being forced, Taobao can only spend money on some small websites to make pop-up advertisements with hooligan nature.

But soon even this path was not working.

Taobao just reached an agreement with a website, and ebay immediately rushed over with a checkbook, "How much does your website's advertising revenue cost? I'll cover it all!"

After being forced to do so, Taobao could only be pitiful and helpless, advertising on subways, buses and billboards in a very traditional way.

So we had an impression of Taobao's very down-to-earth publicity at the time. Haha, it was actually a choice that was forced to do anything.

How can such a traditional method be compared with ebay?

Especially, at present, this is actually a competition about burning money. How can Taobao compare with ebay?

Especially, this happened when they have invested in Alibaba for more than four years but still have no profit.

It has been a failure for many years, but now it has provoked such a powerful opponent. Now, based on the current situation, within Goldman Sachs, those supporters who used to promote "our investment in China are based on the long-term" have also given up their comments on Alibaba, which are somewhat similar to "no/zuo/no/die".

So when the review at the end of the year was reviewed, no one opposed this proposal anymore.

Paulson looked from above his glasses at the head of the Asia region who asked the question, “When will the deadline of our investment expire? Do they have a clear listing plan?”

Generally speaking, each venture capital will set a term for each investment in advance, generally 3 years, and the maximum period will not exceed 5 years.

"Our investment will expire at the end of next year. As for listing," the person in charge shook his head. "We still see no hope,"

He understood what the boss meant.

The investment returns of venture capital generally come from the transfer of shares held by the invested company when it goes public. Whether you can pay dividends during the years of investment is not the key, the key is whether you can go public.

However, what we all know is that the richest man of horse is as famous as his big mouth.

"How did they plan to go public?" Paulson asked, after all, it will be nearly a year before it expires. If the front foot here is withdrawn, the back foot from there will be listed? Wouldn't that be a very shameless thing?

"We have talked to Mr. Ma many times about this issue. His opinion is that at least his company can generate 1 million yuan in profits and taxes every day, which is the right time to go public," he said.

"Renminbi?"

"right,"

Paulson made a rough calculation and said that it would be a listing of RMB 365 million, or about US$45 million, which is not too difficult.

“What is their average daily revenue this year?”

"It's far less than 1 million a day, and it's estimated that next year, the revenue per day will be 1 million."

Paulson shook his head immediately. It will not be until next year that his daily revenue will reach 1 million. But you told me that you will have to wait until 1 million in profits and taxes are paid every day before going public. Now that you have acted to provoke giants like ebay, can we wait until that day?

"Sell," he said immediately, turning over that page, "next item,"

"Okay, we'll look for potential buyers right away," the head of the Asia region continued to report. This is not a sad thing. The investment we made in the first place can still have a few times the return. "If we don't expect it, our investment in SMIC will be listed on NYSE and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at the same time in the first quarter of next year."

This is good news, but Paulson was not too happy, frowned, "Wait, the buyer of the previous investment," he thought for a moment, "we are the consultants of Netflix this nextdoor merger?"

Not to mention before, Feng Yiping's acquisition of Netflix is ​​still very attractive to him. That young man in China is indeed a surprising guy.

“Yes, what do you mean?”

"Don't waste time, let the person in charge there contact Yipingfeng first to see if he has the intention to take over,"

"OK,"

…………

Shenzhen is about to fly to the capital, and Feng Yiping, who is having dinner with Tongcheng.com, and Fu Yunning and Xiang Xiaofang, have a strange face after putting down the phone, and there is a hint of mixed feelings.

"How come one level?" Huang Jingping asked with concern.

"Nothing, come on, drink,"

He just mentioned the richest man Ma a few days ago. Now that such a great thing hit him, he really couldn't believe it. (To be continued.)

:
Chapter completed!