Winning the new financial era

Chapter 653 Mobile Payment in Africa
The next day, Zhang Yida drove from the hotel to the West African headquarters of Transray Technology.

The place is also on Victoria Island, very close to the Oriental Hotel, just 5 minutes by car.

Arriving at the entrance of a high-end office building, after getting off the car, Zhang Yida took a look at it, and there was not much difference between it and the high-end office buildings in China.

The difference is that domestic security guards are generally unarmed, and at most use a frightening baton.

It's good here, there are two strong black men holding AK47 standing at the door.

This shows the law and order in Nigeria!
However, the law and order on Victoria Island is very good, and there are generally no major problems.

Because it is a wealthy neighborhood, there are many police forces deployed here, and there are also a large number of armed security guards hired by companies and wealthy people.

China's technology companies going overseas, as well as multinational companies from Europe, America and other countries generally also work here.

Cao Lu had been waiting at the entrance of the office building with several executives early on. Seeing Zhang Yida and his party arrived, he hurriedly stepped forward to greet Zhang Yida and his party to go upstairs.

Transsion Technology Co., Ltd. is registered in Hong Kong, with Ruixiang holding 51% and Transsion holding 49%.

It currently has 4 subsidiaries, and its business covers four directions: mobile payment, music, short video, and news aggregation.

The four products are: mobile payment PalmPay, music streaming platform Boomplay, short video platform Vskit, and news aggregation application Scooper.

As the headquarters in West Africa, Transray has a large scale in Lagos, with nearly 300 Chinese employees engaged in technical and operational work.

In addition, there are thousands of non-national employees, mainly engaged in auxiliary work, such as drivers, chefs, cleaning, security and so on.

Office rent is not cheap. The annual rent is 600 US dollars per square meter. Transray Technology Company rents a five-story building with a total area of ​​8000 square meters. The annual rent alone needs to spend 480 million US dollars.

In addition, Chuanrui also leased hundreds of apartments as dormitories for Chinese employees. There are three bedrooms and one living room for three employees, and the annual rent is 2 US dollars per apartment.

In addition, the apartment property fee is very high, which is equivalent to half of the rent, and it needs to pay millions of dollars a year.

This money cannot be saved. Collecting employees to live together and going out together as much as possible is also to avoid any accidents in Lagos where the law and order is not good.

Non-national employees don't need to pay for accommodation, but at most they can pay for food, but the standard of meals is far lower than that of Chinese employees.

After Zhang Yida went upstairs, he sat on the sofa in the company, flipping through the financial report of Chuanrui Company, while making some calculations in his mind.

If the annual salary of 300 Chinese employees is 1.8 million RMB, the salary of more than 1000 non-national employees is 2000 million RMB.

The two big pieces of rent and manpower expenses alone cost 2.5 million to nearly 2.6 million a year, and this does not include the marketing and promotion costs of Internet products and various administrative expenses.

In addition, this is only the expenditure in Nigeria.

Transray has a product research and development center in China, and has branches in Kenya, Egypt, South Africa, Ethiopia, Ghana and other countries. The annual expenditure of the entire company is upwards of 10 billion.

What Shen Beipeng said to him yesterday made him wake up a lot.

The domestic experience cannot be copied all over. If you foolishly spend money on subsidies in Africa, it is very likely that you will end up with chicken feathers all over the place, and the wool will be plucked by black buddies.

We must learn to calculate economic accounts!
After a brief look at the financial report, Zhang Yida almost knew it.

Putting the financial report aside, he gave an order to Cao Lu, who was sitting by the side, to call the company executives to the conference room for a meeting.

"Cao Lu, please tell us about the current development of the company's various products."

Zhang Yida Dama Jindao sat at the first place, and when everyone had arrived, he turned to look at Cao Lu who was sitting on his left, and gave an order.

Cao Lu nodded, got up and walked to the projector, ready 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 at the same time. Shall I talk about Transsion first?"

Zhang Yida nodded. Ruixiang does not have much resources in Africa, and Transsion does rely heavily on Transsion for its development. This must be admitted frankly.

However, Ruixiang's experience in R&D and operation of Internet products is not comparable to that of Transsion.

The cooperation between the two parties is also to learn from each other's strengths and jointly make a big cake. There is no such thing as who takes advantage of whom.

If Ruixiang cannot bring substantial benefits to Transsion, the ghost will cooperate with you.

Shen Beipeng and Xu Xiaoming were also present. They were very interested in the news from Transsion and wanted to hear how amazing this African king is.

Cao Lu opened the PPT and began to introduce: "In Africa, last year, Transsion far surpassed other competitors with a market share of 48.71%, and Samsung ranked second with only 10.27%.

Transsion's total shipments are 1.24 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 functional phones.

Next, let's look at the data of smart phones separately.

With affordable prices and down-to-earth functions, Transsion shipped 3406 million smartphones in Africa last year, accounting for 34.3% of the African smartphone market and ranking first in Africa.

Samsung and Huawei ranked second and third, with 22.6% and 9.9% market shares respectively.

The mobile phone brands of Transsion Holdings are all equipped with self-developed smart terminal operating systems, HiOS, itelOS and XOS.

Up to now, more than 8000 million Transsion smartphones are connected to the Internet every month, and 80% of them are African users.

At present, the four APPs under Transsion have reached cooperation with Transsion, and all of them have opened the pre-installed mode.

As long as the user purchases a Transsion mobile phone, in addition to the feature phone itel, the low-end smart phone Infinix and the mid-to-high-end brand TECNO will be pre-installed with our product applications.

At present, we have 4 Internet applications, each of which has tens of millions of monthly active users! "

Zhang Yida leaned back on the chair, thinking seriously.

Sharp is not only a shareholder of Transsion, but also a partner of Transsion in Internet business.

Transsion has contributed a lot to the reason why Transsion's four subsidiaries have been able to achieve the current results.

Directly pre-install the APP before leaving the factory, saving a lot of effort and cost for promotion.

Transsion has always been admiring the Internet layout of Apple and Rice. In addition to the four applications of the Transsion system, Transsion also has the instant messaging software Palmchat and the app store Palm Play, which were launched before the establishment of Transsion application.

Zhang Yida was very envious of these two apps, and always wanted Zhu Zhaojiang to transfer these two apps to the Chuanrui system, but the latter refused to give up.

In addition to this, Transsion's Internet domain includes mobile phone housekeepers, browsers, portals, etc., which are currently wholly owned and controlled by Transsion itself.

Of course, Zhang Yida didn't like these things very much.

Palm Play has 5000 million users in Africa, second only to the Google Store.

And Palmchat is even more ruthless. This so-called "African WeChat" app is not spared even on feature phones. One must be pre-installed and has nearly 2 million registered users.

There is a lot of room for imagination. If Transsion can continue to dominate the African smartphone market, it will not be a problem at all to tear off a big piece of the Internet market.

Cao Lu, as the CEO of the parent company Chuanrui, made a few more concluding remarks, and handed over the specific business introduction to the person in charge of the four applications.

Reeves, CEO of Palm Pay, was the first to speak on stage.

"PalmPay has now entered seven countries including Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa, with more than 7 million registered users.

The services provided include: electronic payment, transfer and remittance, mobile phone bill and data recharge, water, electricity, gas and cable TV bill payment and other services.

You can enjoy a 10% discount on recharging phone charges on PalmPay, and there is no charge for transfers between users, and a small fee for external accounts such as bank transfers.

Besides Transsion, another strategic partner of PalmPay is Visa.

Visa cardholders can bind their cards to pay on our platform, while non-card users will get a Visa virtual account, so as to access Visa's payment network and use Visa's financial products.

Next, we also plan to include more than 10 merchants that support Visa payments, so as to improve our online payment network.

At present, it is not yet ripe for us to launch consumer financial services and wealth management services such as Yongbei and Daibei.

Cooperating with Visa only enriches the number of merchants and financial services we have.

When the time is right in the future, payment will be used to derive more financial services like Ruixiang, so as to increase revenue and profits.

In addition, we have also reached cooperation with several major banks in Africa, including the Pan-African Commercial Bank. The cross-border remittance business between African countries will be our next focus. "

Zhang Yida nodded, indicating to Reeves to continue, the latter nodded slightly, and continued: "Then let me talk about PalmPay's competitors in Nigeria and even the whole of Africa.

We have seven main competitors in Nigeria, each of which has considerable strength.

They are Jumia Pay launched by local e-commerce giant Jumia, and Interswitch, which has reached a blockchain supply chain financial cooperation with Microsoft.

In addition, the valuation of Interswitch is said to be very close to a unicorn, but it has not yet publicly raised funds to truly confirm the status of a unicorn.

Once successful, they will become the second unicorn in Africa. "

Zhang Yida and Shen Beipeng looked at each other, and they both saw the strangeness in each other's eyes.

Reeves turned the page of the PPT and continued to speak: "Silicon Valley star incubator YC graduates and Paystack, which has received investment from Penguin, and financial start-up Flutterwave, a partner of Alipay, are companies supported by two Chinese giants and also ours. rival.

There are also Cellulant, which completed a large C round of financing of US$4750 million, and Paga, which completed a B+ round of investment of US$1000 million.

These two companies have been established for a long time, one in 2004 and the other in 2009, both of which have expanded their business to African countries other than Nigeria, with tens of millions of registered users, their strength should not be underestimated.

The last company is Opay, which is controlled by a Chinese-funded company like us, and their controlling shareholder is Kunlun Wanwei. "

(End of this chapter)