Rebirth of England.

Chapter 746: Gap
In addition to talking about Alipay, Boss Ma couldn't help but complain to Baron about the unpleasantness between him and another shareholder, Yahoo.

When Yahoo first participated in Alibaba's Series E financing, it was Yahoo's founder Yang Zhiyuan and Boss Ma who facilitated this cooperation. After that, Yahoo held 9.9% of Alibaba's shares.

At that time, the relationship between Alibaba and Yahoo was still very good, thanks to the good personal relationship between Boss Ma and Yang Zhiyuan.

This originated in 2005, when Lu Ji, a core figure of the then influential Chinese community Huayuan Technology Association and a Yahoo employee, invited his boss Yang Zhiyuan to be the keynote speaker at that year's Huayuan Annual Meeting. Coincidentally, at that time, Boss Ma was also invited to Silicon Valley - in the "Pebble Beach" in the Bay Area. The two sides met for the first time, and subsequently Yahoo cooperated with Alibaba and participated in Alibaba's E round of financing.

Then came Microsoft's offer of $2008 billion to acquire Yahoo in 440.

Jerry Yang, who was the CEO of Yahoo at the time, believed that Microsoft's bid underestimated the value of Yahoo, so he resisted the acquisition, which ultimately led to the failure of Microsoft's acquisition.

This incident made shareholders who were disappointed with Yahoo's independent development prospects particularly angry. In addition, Google announced that it would give up its advertising cooperation with Yahoo, which made Google's plan to bring Yahoo $8 million in revenue each year come to nothing. This eventually led to Yang Zhiyuan, who had a good personal relationship with Boss Ma, resigning from the position of CEO of Yahoo, and Carol Bartz, known as the "Iron Lady", took over as CEO of Yahoo.

Carol Bartz was not prepared to establish any personal friendship with Mr. Ma. After she took over Yahoo, her attitude towards Alibaba was just a business matter.

Carol Bartz, who is known as the "Iron Lady", is also a very tough person. She has complaints about many things, including Alibaba's operation of Yahoo China.

This led to the deterioration of the relationship between Yahoo and Alibaba, especially after Mr. Ma tried to split Alipay from Alibaba. Carol Bartz even expressed her dissatisfaction to Mr. Ma directly at the Alibaba board meeting.

Fortunately, the current situation is different from the original time and space. Yahoo only holds less than 10% of Alibaba’s shares, instead of the largest share of 40%. Otherwise, Boss Ma would probably have a very difficult time.

In this regard, although Baron gave many words of comfort to Mr. Ma during the conversation, he was still happy to see the rift between Yahoo and Mr. Ma, and the fact that SoftBank was now dissatisfied with Mr. Ma's actions.

After all, these things can also put Baron in a relatively advantageous position in Alibaba. He does not want Yahoo and Softbank to affect the development of Alibaba, nor does he want Boss Ma to have too much control over Alibaba. At least if Boss Ma can have the final say in Alibaba without his help, it will actually be disadvantageous to investors including him.

He also doesn't want something like the split of Alipay to happen again.

In addition to this meeting with Mr. Ma, Baron also met with Li Lu, CEO of Tianhe Capital.

After acquiring Nanjing Automobile Group, TRW-NAC is now developing very well. In addition to the joint venture with British Motor Group, they are also preparing to launch a wholly-owned domestic brand of TRW-NAC this year.

In addition, Tianhe Real Estate, which is wholly owned by Tianhe Capital, is also developing rapidly, and Tianhe Real Estate expects to expand its land reserves in first-tier cities through mergers and acquisitions within this year.

It can be said that China's real estate industry will gradually change its pattern in the next two years.

First of all, since last year, cities in China have started to intensively launch many regulatory policies. "Since last year, cities including Yanjing and Shanghai have successively introduced purchase restriction policies. According to our understanding, many cities will also introduce similar measures this year..."

When talking about Tianhe Real Estate, Li Lu said in a deep voice:

"According to our speculation, in the short term, the introduction of purchase restrictions in some cities will lead to stagflation of housing prices, but in the medium and long term, this policy of suppressing demand only increases transaction costs and puts demand on the back burner, and does not effectively meet demand. Therefore, although it seems that some real estate companies will be in a difficult situation at present, after a period of time, these suppressed demands will explode and bring about a wave of rush to buy. This is also an opportunity for us to expand our scale through mergers and acquisitions."

Thanks to the lucrative returns on financial investments from Tianhe Capital's IE Fund in HK, Tianhe Capital currently has sufficient funds, especially foreign exchange.

But unlike Tianhe Real Estate, many real estate companies have felt the cold winter.

This is because not only did China launch regulatory policies including purchase restrictions, but throughout 2010, all real estate-related IPOs and financing methods such as additional issuances and backdoor listings were all halted.

Those real estate companies waiting to go public need to continue waiting for the day when the restrictions are lifted...

Real estate is an industry that requires a large amount of capital circulation. This situation has made things worse for many real estate companies, forcing them to seek more financing methods.

Just like in Barron's previous life, the number of mergers and acquisitions between real estate companies has exploded in the past two years.

Now that Tianhe Real Estate has sufficient funds, it can take advantage of the current opportunity to expand its scale through mergers and acquisitions.

Currently, Tianhe Real Estate’s main projects are concentrated in Jiangsu Province, Shanghai and Chengdu. A considerable portion of the land was acquired when Barron reached an agreement with Li Chaoren when he went to HK last time and took over part of the land he had accumulated.

The "Tianhe Li" in Chengdu - the land that Swire Group acquired and built into Taikoo Li in Baron's previous life - has completed demolition and broken ground. This is also the largest project currently undertaken by Tianhe Real Estate.

The next best thing to this place is the commercial complex centered on Costco in Shanghai. This project will be completed in the second half of this year, and Costco’s first store in mainland China will then open.

"Although Shanghai is quite interested in the Marvel-MGM Studios project, they have already confirmed with Disney that Disneyland will be located there. In addition to the studio, we will also include a film and television base and some related real estate projects. The land area required is too large. Shanghai, which has already approved the Disneyland project, is not too enthusiastic..."

Having said that, Li Lu paused and continued:
"However, many other cities are very interested in our plan, including Tianjin, Dalian and Qindao..."

(End of this chapter)