Chapter 357

After returning from Tasmania, Jennifer spent another three days in Melbourne before returning to Los Angeles.

In the whole westero system, only the enterprises directly held by westero, including the four core "women", and a large number of listed or unlisted companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, AOL and Nokia, have reached 36, and are still increasing. The number of other secondary and tertiary subsidiaries is even larger.

Although Simon decentralizes power as much as possible, because of the large number of enterprises, the daily affairs that need to be handled by him are still very heavy and complicated.

The female assistant's position in Simon's business empire is just like his eyes. She is in charge of an assistant office with six other assistants, and constantly sifts and summarizes the information of all enterprises in the whole westero system, and then transfers it to Simon for processing.

Simon stayed in Melbourne to follow up on Batman: the dark knight and remote control the entire westrow system.

In the early stage of development, enterprises will always appear more vigorous, especially the westero system, which has been expanding rapidly in recent years.

Florence.

The continued turmoil in Europe has not affected Italy. However, the country on the peninsula has always been difficult to have too much say in Europe, both economically and politically.

Sophia Fissi is also less concerned about politics and has been negotiating with the Gucci family recently.

The last male member of Gucci's second generation, 85 year old Aldo Gucci, died last month, which was nothing.

Melisandro company has achieved absolute control over Gucci. No matter what, it is difficult for Gucci family to exert too much influence on this luxury brand.

However, the internal disputes of Gucci family are well known to many people. Aldo Gucci didn't make arrangements for his death. He held 12% of Gucci shares in his name until the last second of his life, and then left them to several children.

Without the prior arrangement of the family trust, several of Aldo Gucci's children will face the inevitable problem of estate tax.

The more serious problem is that several of Aldo Gucci's children can't give enough cash to pay inheritance tax. Although Gucci's recovery is very rapid, Sofia has spent all the company's surplus funds on business expansion, and doesn't plan to give shareholders any dividends in recent years.

As a result, the Gucci family had to choose to sell the 12% stake.

Melisandro, who owns the support of the westrow system behind the scenes, is naturally the most suitable target to take over. Sofia also intends to take this equity. With this 12% share, melisandro's shareholding in Gucci can reach 75%.

However, compared with the initial cost of $170 million for Simon's acquisition of 63% of Gucci's shares, the Gucci family's 12% stake was priced at $150 million this time. Although the external evaluation of Gucci's market value is rising, Sofia is unlikely to accept such an offer. After discussing with Simon, melisandro's offer is capped at $100 million, so Sofia has been bargaining with Gucci family.

Because only 12% of the shares have no access to Gucci's control, and the price is still so high, apart from melisandro, the Gucci family can not find a second offer taker in a short time.

Helsinki.

After Nokia's mobile communications division was owned by westero, without the drag of other assets, it got another $50 million. Yoma Ollila quickly started the research and development of mobile phones and base station equipment related to GSM technology.

The direct border with the Soviet Union and the turmoil in Europe in the past year have made Finland a little nervous, but life still has to pass.

In the first half of this year, Finland has started to build the first GSM pilot network in Europe or the world. Although it is dominated by Siemens Group in Germany, Nokia also takes part in it.

However, it will take at least a year for GSM to go into commercial use.

Nokia's mobile communication department can not completely throw away its accumulated experience for many years. In the first half of the year, it continued to launch two analog signal mobile phones, and the sales volume was quite good.

New York.

Simon and his assistant spent time together in a cabin in Tasmania when James Leibold officially signed a stake in San Diego based wireless communications technology company Qualcomm.

In the past two years, Qualcomm has initially completed the patent layout of CMDA technology, and has been recognized by at-t, bell Pacific, Motorola and other companies. It has also established cooperative relations with Korean telecom companies, and has continued to obtain funds from all parties to invest in the research and development of CDMA commercial technology.

However, after several successive capital injections by at-t and other companies have been rapidly exhausted, Qualcomm has recently faced a shortage of funds.

Without navistro's share in the company, the company will have less than $200000 on its books, and even employees' salaries in August may not be paid smoothly.

The strong performance of westero in seizing the control of AOL and Cisco has made the management of Qualcomm worried. However, in a short period of time, it is difficult for Qualcomm to find a big investor who can immediately put out a large amount of money.After some bargaining, westero acquired 4 million shares of common stock of Qualcomm at the cost of $35 million, accounting for 20% of the total share capital of Qualcomm at this time.

However, westero did not get the promise that it can maintain its shareholding ratio in the follow-up financing or IPO process as other holding companies do. After accepting westero's shares, Qualcomm can continue to promote the IPO work without restriction.

San Francisco.

With the further promotion of igrit portal and World Wide Web technology, the number of users of AOL in July has exceeded that of June. It is expected that the number of users of World Wide Web will increase by 55000 to 60000 this month.

In order to keep up with the pace of market expansion, both igrit and AOL can only use the word "funds are burning".

Igrit is in a state of burning money completely. From browser software, server software, portal website technology to the development of JavaScript language at the bottom, the R & D investment is huge, but the realization of sustainable revenue is far away.

Simon originally hoped to subsidize the portal department through software sales, which is obviously not realistic in the short term.

Carol Bartz, who is in charge of the software department, has a strong personality. Although she has started to earn revenue from the installation of browser software, she does not mean to subsidize the portal department. Instead, she cut $10 million from Simon's $20 million injection for the development of the software department.

For Jeff Bezos, the remaining $10 million, the maintenance of the portal team and the newly opened two new data centers will probably only last until the end of August.

Fortunately, Jeff Bezos has begun to explore the advertising business, and successfully got two advertising orders from IBM and Microsoft, both of which were small, with a total of only $800000. He also rejected Gates' proposal to increase advertising investment in exchange for giving priority to the development of browser software on Windows platform.

Simon was very satisfied with this kind of insight.

In order to let users get the latest features as soon as possible, igrit's IE browser will make several updates almost every month.

For customers, if the browser software on one platform is often updated more timely than that on another platform, it will produce bias unconsciously.

However, although the windows operating system began to rise, apple and traditional UNIX computers are still the mainstream in recent years. Although westero is a major shareholder of Microsoft, in order to promote the world wide web technology as soon as possible and avoid giving other competitors opportunities, IE browser can not be biased towards Microsoft for the time being.

As for the competition and differences between Jeff Bezos and Carol Bartz, Simon didn't interfere too much.

Proper internal competition is also beneficial to the development of enterprises.

Moreover, it is not time for the software sector to subsidize portals. If it comes to that day, Simon will not connive at Carol Bartz's caprice.

In addition, at the end of July, AOL officially opened 100 Internet cafes.

The excellent publicity and marketing in the early stage, the leisure environment inside the Internet cafe and the public's curiosity about the Internet have attracted a large number of customers at one time.

However, as initially estimated, the 100 Internet cafes are basically unprofitable.

The fee is $3 an hour. Each Internet bar has 20 computers, and the business hours are from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. after calculation, even if an Internet bar is fully loaded, the theoretical monthly income is only $28800. In fact, half of it is good.

As it happens, the average breakeven point of each Internet bar is $15000.

If you want to make a profit, you can only rely on drinks and snacks or sell a little more peripheral food as originally expected.

Although the 100 Internet cafes have little hope of making profits, AOL has no intention of giving up this business.

After all, Simon's ultimate goal is to promote world wide web technology.

In the plan, after a period of exploration and operation, AOL plans to expand the Internet bar industry by means of authorized franchise. The franchisees only need to pay a certain franchise fee to AOL to obtain a full set of technical and program support. They can also adopt a relatively flexible operation mode to appropriately increase the number of computers, increase the online price or development amount It's easy to make a profit in other businesses.

Los Angeles.

In Simon's absence, Denise's entertainment is still as lively as a little animal in spring.

The financial data of the first half of 1990 has been completed. Although the management has not released detailed data, both the internal and external media of the company have found out a rough picture.

In the first six months of this year, just an unexpected box office hit "pretty girl" made a lot of money for danielis entertainment.

However, "pretty girl" is enough to prop up a film company's annual performance. In the first half of the year, it brought less than one tenth of the pretax profit of danilisi entertainment in the first two quarters, with the box office of more than 160 million US dollars.Only Batman: the moment of war, which was a box office hit at the end of last year, made Denise's entertainment a lot in the box office and the surrounding areas in the first half of the year.

In addition, since the end of 1988, Denise entertainment has accumulated a large number of blockbuster films, such as scream series, death poetry club, rain man, sixth sense of the supernatural, bodyguard, flying over innocence, etc. in the first half of 1990, Denise entertainment continued to bring a large amount of revenue to overseas theaters, video market and TV broadcasting platforms.

A series of popular reality shows and other TV series produced by danielis TV company are also bringing stable income to the company.

More than that, Nancy Brill's consumer entertainment division, including the games and music businesses, has made a lot of money because of a series of projects produced by the company.

Among them, Blizzard studio released the fighting version of Ninja Turtle video game in March, although it did not reach the best-selling level of last year's role-playing version of the game, but within three months, the cumulative sales volume of the game cassette also exceeded 1 million boxes, and the total sales volume is expected to exceed 2 million boxes.

Because of Nintendo's ex gratia quota, five games can be released every year according to the ex gratia standard. In addition to the fighting version of Ninja Turtles, Blizzard studio will launch a role-playing version of Ninja Turtles sequel in the second half of the year. EA company, which dannilis entertainment shares in, will also provide another three games to enter Nintendo's host platform.

Taken together, only in the first half of 1990, Denise Entertainment's net profit after tax had reached $573 million. With the success of summer films such as ghost and Ninja Turtle, the annual net profit figure can at least double.

After the financial report came out, Amy Pascal was even in a trance.

She was officially signed in March 1987, and the contract ended in March 1991, a total of four years.

Based on the company's first half results and her original salary terms, the combined rewards, cash and stock awards she will receive this year are likely to exceed $100 million.

100 million dollars.

If someone had told her a few years ago that she could become a billionaire, Amy would have felt that they were talking nonsense.

Hollywood executives, in addition to the top Steve Roth, Lou wassalman and a few others who have been in high positions for a long time and have made the enterprise large enough. Others, in fact, the salary is not high, everyone is busy, just making a hard money.

Even Steve Roth's total salary last year was only $36 million, which has been criticized as a sieve by the media and shareholders.

When you are really in Hollywood, you all know that the most profitable thing in this industry is just a handful of top stars.

As for the senior executives in the circle, although they seem to have a lot of power, they are also constrained. Most of the time, they are not only annoyed by investors, but also try every means to accommodate stars, which is not as beautiful as the outside world imagined.

However, she, Amy Pascal, a woman, can make $100 million a year in an industry where women are widely discriminated against and materialized.

In a trance, Amy even occasionally thought about how to spend such a large sum of money?

Between the vigorous expansion of the westero system, the last days of July 1990 passed silently.

In the last week of July, the situation in the Middle East, which has reached its peak, is getting worse.

Under the pretext of Kuwait's "stealing" of Iraq's oil, after demanding that Kuwait cancel its debts and provide huge reparations, Iraq's most elite tank and armored division of the Republican Guard has been stationed at the border of Iraq and Kuwait.

Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak took the initiative to visit Iraq to speak for Kuwait, but he left after meeting a rebuff.

The Middle East countries, which also felt the threat, held a large-scale joint military exercise with the US Persian Gulf fleet on July 24 in an attempt to intimidate Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, international crude oil prices soared in the last week of July.

In just one week, it has soared from the original low of $13 to near the high of $20.

Cersei capital cleared all short contracts on Monday, July 23, but it was swallowed by the rising crude oil price.

In the last week of July, the price of crude oil soared, and the long position with huge losses turned from loss to profit in just a few days, followed by amazing profits.