The next day, Zhang Yida took a bus from the hotel to the West African headquarters of Chuanrui Technology Company.
The place is also on Victoria Island, very close to the Oriental Hotel, only a five-minute drive away.
Arriving at the entrance of a high-end office building, Zhang Yida took a few glances after getting off the car, and found that it was not much different from high-end office buildings in China.
The difference is that domestic security guards usually use bare hands or at most a baton to scare people.
This is a good place, there are two strong black men holding AK47s standing at the door.
This shows how safe Nigeria is!
However, the security on Victoria Island is very good and there are generally no big problems.
Because it is a wealthy neighborhood, there are a lot of police deployed here, and there are also a large number of armed security guards hired by companies and wealthy people.
China's overseas technology companies, as well as multinational companies from Europe, the United States and other countries, generally work here.
Cao Lu had already waited at the entrance of the office building with several senior executives. When he saw Zhang Yida and his entourage arriving, he quickly stepped forward to greet Zhang Yida and his entourage upstairs.
Chuanrui Technology is registered in Hong Kong, with Ruixiang holding 51% of the shares and Chuanyin holding 49%.
It currently has four subsidiaries, covering four directions: mobile payment, music, short video, and news aggregation.
The four products are: mobile payment PalmPay, music streaming platform y, short video platform Vskit, and news aggregation application Scooper.
As the West Africa headquarters, Chuanrui has a large scale in Lagos, with nearly 300 Chinese employees engaged in technology and operations alone.
In addition, there are thousands of non-citizen employees, mainly engaged in auxiliary work, such as drivers, chefs, cleaning, security, etc.
The rent of office buildings is not cheap. The annual rent is 600 US dollars per square meter. Chuanrui Technology Company rented five floors, covering a total of 8,000 square meters. The annual rent alone costs 4.8 million US dollars.
In addition, Chuanrui has also rented hundreds of apartments as dormitories for Chinese employees, with three bedrooms and one living room for three employees. The annual rent is 20,000 US dollars per apartment, and the annual expenditure on this is another 2 million US dollars.
In addition, apartment property fees are very high, equivalent to half of the rent, and you need to pay millions of dollars a year.
This money cannot be saved. Keeping employees together and traveling together as much as possible is also to avoid any accidents in Lagos, where public security is not good.
Non-citizen employees do not need to be provided with accommodation. At most, food is provided, but the meal standard is far lower than that of Chinese employees.
After Zhang Yida went upstairs, he sat on the sofa in the company, looking through Chuanrui Company's financial report and doing some rough calculations in his mind.
If we include the annual salary of 300 Chinese employees of 180 million yuan, and the salary of more than 1,000 non-citizen employees of 20 million yuan.
Just the two big chunks of rent and labor expenses cost 250 million and nearly 260 million every year. This does not include the cost of Internet product marketing and promotion and various administrative expenses.
In addition, this is only the expenditure in Nigeria.
Chuanrui has a product research and development center in China, and branches in Kenya, Egypt, South Africa, Ethiopia, Ghana and other countries. The entire company's annual expenditure is upwards of 1 billion.
What Shen Beipeng said to him yesterday made him alert a lot.
Domestic experience cannot be copied entirely. If you foolishly spend money on subsidies in Africa, you will probably end up with a piece of chicken feathers and be harvested by unscrupulous buddies.
You must learn to calculate economic accounts!
After briefly looking at the financial report, Zhang Yida almost had an idea.
Putting the financial report aside, he gave an order to Cao Lu, who was sitting next to him, and asked him to call all the company executives to the conference room to prepare for the meeting.
"Cao Lu, please first talk about the development of each of the company's products."
Zhang Yida Da Ma Jin Dao was sitting at the head of the table. After seeing everyone had arrived, he turned to look at Cao Lu, who was sitting on his left, and gave an order.
Cao Lu nodded, stood up and walked to the projector, preparing to play the PPT.
Cao Lu looked at Zhang Yida and asked for instructions: "Transsion is an important shareholder of our company and an important partner. Why don't I talk about Transsion first?"
Zhang Yida nodded. Ruixiang did not have much resources in Africa. Chuanrui indeed relied heavily on Chuanyin for its development. This must be admitted frankly.
But Ruixiang’s R&D and operation experience in Internet products is not comparable to Transsion.
The cooperation between the two parties is also to learn from each other's strengths and make the pie bigger together. There is no such thing as one taking advantage of the other.
If Ruixiang cannot bring substantial benefits to Transsion, then only ghosts will cooperate with you.
Shen Beipeng and Xu Xiaoming were also present. They were very interested in Chuanyin's information and wanted to hear how amazing this African king was.
Cao Lu opened the PPT and began to introduce: "In Africa, Transsion far surpassed other competitors with a market share of 48.71% last year, and Samsung, which ranked second, only had 10.27%.
Transsion’s total shipment volume is 124 million units, ranking fourth among global mobile phone brand manufacturers, second only to Samsung, Apple and Huawei, and higher than rice, oppo and vivo.
Of course, this number includes feature phones.
Next, let’s look at the data of smartphones alone.
With affordable prices and down-to-earth functions, Transsion shipped 34.06 million smartphones in Africa last year, accounting for 34.3% of the African smartphone market and also ranking first in Africa.
Samsung and Huawei ranked second and third, with 22.6% and 9.9% market shares respectively.
Transsion Holdings’ mobile phone brands are equipped with independently developed smart terminal operating systems, HiOS, itelOS and XOS.
As of now, more than 80 million Transsion smartphones are connected to the Internet every month, 80% of which are African users.
Currently, four APPs owned by Chuangrui have reached cooperation with Transsion, and all of them are in pre-installed mode.
As long as users purchase a Transsion mobile phone, in addition to the feature phone Itel, all future low-end smartphones Infinix and mid-to-high-end brand TEO will be pre-installed with our product applications.
Currently, we have four Internet applications, each of which has tens of millions of monthly active users!”
Zhang Yida leaned on his chair and was thinking seriously.
Ruixiang is not only a shareholder of Transsion, but also a partner of Transsion in the Internet business.
ChuanRui’s four subsidiaries have contributed a lot to ChuanRui’s current achievements.
Directly pre-installing the APP from the factory saves a lot of promotion energy and costs.
Transsion has always admired the Internet layout strategies of Apple and Rice. In addition to the four applications of the Chuangrui system, Transsion also owns the instant messaging software Palmchat and the application store Palm Play, which were launched before the establishment of Chuangrui. application.
Zhang Yida was very envious of these two applications and always wanted Zhu Zhaojiang to transfer these two softwares to the Chuanrui system, but the latter refused to let him go.
In addition to this, Transsion's Internet territory also includes mobile butlers, browsers, portals, etc., which are currently fully controlled by Transsion itself.
Of course, Zhang Yida didn't like these very much either.
Palm Play has 50 million users in Africa, second only to Google Play.
Palmchat is even more ruthless. This application, called "Africa's WeChat", is not even available on feature phones. It must be pre-installed and has nearly 200 million registered users.
There is a lot of room for imagination here. If Transsion can continue to dominate the African smartphone market, it will not be a problem to tear off a big piece of the Internet market.
As the CEO of the parent company Chuanrui, Cao Lu made a few concluding remarks and handed over specific business introductions to the heads of the four applications.
As the CEO of Palm Pay, Reeves was the first to take the stage to speak.
“PalmPay has currently entered 7 countries including Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa, with more than 30 million registered users.
The services provided include: electronic payment, transfer and remittance, mobile phone bill and data recharge, water, electricity, gas and cable TV payment services, etc.
You can enjoy a 10% discount when recharging phone bills on PalmPay. There is no fee for transfers between users. A small fee is charged for transfers to external accounts, such as bank transfers.
In addition to Transsion, another strategic partner of PalmPay is Visa.
Visa cardholders can link their cards for payment on our platform, while users without a card will obtain a Visa virtual account, thereby accessing Visa's payment network and using Visa's financial products.
Next, we also plan to include more than 100,000 merchants that support Visa payment to improve our online payment network.
At present, it is not yet mature for us to launch consumer financial services and wealth management services such as Yongbei and Loanbei.
Cooperating with Visa only enriches our number of merchants and financial services.
When the time comes, we will still use payments to derive more financial services like Ruixiang did, in order to increase revenue and profits.
In addition, we have also reached cooperation with several major African banks, including the Pan-African Commercial Bank, and cross-border remittance business between African countries will be our next focus."
Zhang Yida nodded and motioned for Reeves to continue. The latter nodded slightly and continued: "Then let me talk about PalmPay's competitors in Nigeria and even Africa as a whole.
There are seven main competitors in Nigeria, and each of them has considerable strength.
They are Jumia Pay, launched by local e-commerce giant Jumia, and Ich, which has reached a blockchain supply chain financial cooperation with Microsoft.
In addition, it is said that the valuation of the company Ich is very close to that of a unicorn, but it has not yet publicly raised funds to truly confirm its unicorn status.
Once successful, they will become Africa's second unicorn."
Zhang Yida and Shen Beipeng looked at each other and saw the strange look in each other's eyes.
Reeves turned the page of the PPT and continued: "Paystack, a graduate of the Silicon Valley star incubator YC and received investment from Penguin, and the financial start-up Flutterwave, a partner of Alipay, are companies supported by China's two giants and are also ours.
Strong enemy.
There are also t, which completed a large-scale C round of financing of US$47.5 million, and Paga, which completed a B+ round of investment of US$10 million.
These two companies have been established for a relatively long time, one in 2004 and the other in 2009. Both of them have expanded their business to African countries except Nigeria. They have tens of millions of registered users, and their strength cannot be underestimated.
The last one is Opay, which is controlled by a Chinese-funded company like us, and their controlling shareholder is Kunlun Wanwei."