Top of the big era

In Zhou Buqi’s view, Steam is much more valuable than a friend’s studio.

But there is no way, the United States is a financial empire, and the logic behind these transactions is not the physical attributes of the business, but the financial attributes. Whoever has higher financial attributes and is better at speculating on hot topics will be highly recognized by the capital market.

Behind Steam is a small company called Valve, which is really not worth mentioning.

Friends Studio is different. The social games it specializes in are currently the hottest and most attractive direction in the game industry, and this has resulted in a change in its attributes.

A game company turned into a financial product!

Then you can sell it at a sky-high price.

MSI acquired Steam for only US$160 million.

EA wanted to buy a friend's studio from Ziweixing, but the basic asking price reached US$1.87 billion! Moreover, this is not the final offer, but the preliminary negotiation results between Mattrick and EA.

Boss Zhou will show up next.

EA always needs to increase its offer appropriately to show respect, right?

It’s such a joy to do this kind of business!

Because Ziweixing International's assets have not been fully recognized by the capital market, Zhou Buqi has not launched the company's IPO plan, and has been thinking of ways to make money for independent development.

After this wave of operations, Ziweixing International will not need to go public for another 2-3 years, and can develop quietly.

Selling a friend's studio is just the first step.

The second step is to sell the core part of the game division to Changyou. The price will be even higher. Without 5 billion or 8 billion US dollars, it will not be possible.

There are even more powerful ones.

The third step is to sell Twitter to Google.

For this deal with Google, we cannot simply use Twitter’s current valuation to measure the value of the company. It must be an unimaginable premium, just like Google bought YouTube at a 10 times premium.

After these three transactions, Ziweixing International has the opportunity to continue to develop steadily and silently.

Delayed gratification.

A wave of listings can blind the world's attention.

The road has to be walked step by step. On this day, Zhou Buqi, accompanied by Lu Qi, Shen Xiangyang, Xu Liangjie, Mattrick, Alex Jones, Bin Gordon and others, met with EA's board of directors. meet.

Determine the final transaction plan of your friend’s studio.

The preliminary work went very smoothly.

In the end, we just went through the motions and it was basically done.

Zhou Buqi, Shen Xiangyang, and Xu Liangjie shared a car, which was considered a meeting of old friends.

Speaking of artificial intelligence.

Aster's latest mobile phone Aster4 series has been officially released, with the basic version priced at US$629 for version 5.

Not cheap at all.

But after the debut of this series, it really caused quite a stir in the mobile phone industry, and it had the influence of crying wolf.

Mainly two major innovations have caused the market to go crazy. It feels no worse than the iPhone!

1. Fingerprint unlocking.

Second, the intelligent voice assistant Rokid.

Behind this voice assistant is the artificial intelligence team led by Shen Xiangyang.

Shen Xiangyang was relatively modest, saying that voice intelligence relies on the latest deep learning and neural network algorithms, which are not mature enough and there are still many areas for improvement.

At the same time, he also showed a confident side.

In this field, he has the strongest team in the world.

Rokid must be the world's best smart voice assistant in this field, far better than Apple's Siri. In other words, in terms of mobile phone marketing, Aisda cannot brag too much, and its strength is guaranteed.

"If there is a real opponent, it can only be Google." Shen Xiangyang smiled, "I heard that Google's artificial intelligence team is also very powerful and has gone very far in this field."

Xu Liangjie smiled and said: "Google has been very busy recently, holding a big press conference."

“Google+?”

"Yes, it's Google+."

A few months after taking office as CEO of Google, Larry Page made a series of moves, acquired several companies, closed a bunch of business lines...and finally launched a heavyweight social product "Google+" at the beginning of this month. .

This immediately caused an earthquake in the social market.

It can be said that Google has poured all its resources into it, with a kind of all-or-nothing madness.

Xu Liangjie continued: "Google has gone crazy this time and is going to make social networking happen at all costs. In order to attract all Google users to Google+, Page has used a lot of unconventional means."

"Yeah?"

Zhou Buqi is really not sure. He has not used the Google+ product at all.

Xu Liangjie said: "Google's most popular C-end product now is YouTube. This time they also used YouTube's resources and played a forced bundle. YouTube users who want to leave messages must log in to Google+. "

"ah?"

Zhou Buqi was stunned.

This kind of bottomless bad operation can actually happen to Google. Larry Page is really crazy and desperate.

Xu Liangjie said: "The effect is quite obvious. It has only been online for a few days, and the number of users of Google+ has exceeded 60 million, which is growing very fast. Doesn't Friend Studio also need to cooperate with Google+ and operate on Google+? It’s a social game.”

Zhou Buqi waved his hand, "That doesn't matter. Sell this studio to EA and do whatever you like from now on. We won't play anymore!"

"Are you so disdainful of social games?"

"Not optimistic."

"This idea is not mainstream at all." Xu Liangjie shook his head and said with a smile, "Facebook's main bet is H5."

Zhou Buqi snorted: "That's all nonsense. The H5 direction is useless. The future must be an era of independent apps. This time Google is coming with a lot of force. I guess Facebook will have to drink a pot."

"I heard they're going to do something big."

"It's not surprising, Google is quite aggressive this time."

…

It took two full days for Zhou Buqi to finally reach an agreement with EA's board of directors and complete the deal for a friend's studio for US$1.92 billion.

The market has picked up and transaction prices have also increased.

In the previous life, during this critical period, EA chose to spend huge sums of money to acquire Baokai Studio to adapt to the coming era of social games and casual games.

However, Baokai Studio was acquired by Ziweixing early and became the most important game asset of the game division.

It is impossible for EA to buy Baokai. It is not bad to buy a friend's studio.

It’s just that the price of $1.92 billion is a bit high.

Although EA has been preparing for several months, it is difficult to raise such a large amount of cash, so it can only complete the transaction through stock exchange.

This was the disagreement that dominated the two days of negotiations.

Usually M\u0026A transactions will have a long lock-up period for the exchanged stocks, sometimes as long as 24 months or 36 months. In this way, the stability of the stock price is protected and large-scale selling is prevented.

But Ziweixing cannot.

What's the point of asking for EA stock?

In the future, Changyou and EA will be the main competitors. Is there any reason to hold a large amount of competitors' stocks?

It would be better to shorten the lock-up period and then sell EA's shares as soon as possible.

A compromise was finally reached, and the deal was completed for $750 million + $1.17 billion in EA stock, for a total transaction value of $1.92 billion.

The lock-up period is 3 months.

In other words, after 3 months, Ziweixing can find a way to sell this EA stock.

It mainly depends on the judgment of both parties on the market environment.

The capital market is changing for the better.

Entering July, the stock market is already changing, starting to regain lost ground and continue to rise. As the economic situation improves, EA's stock price is also recovering.

Zhou Buqi doesn't care about that much. No matter what the next trend of EA's stock is, he has already thought about it. As soon as the lock-up period comes, he will quickly find a way to sell the stock!

There is no point in hoarding EA's stock. It is not a super potential stock like Google or Apple. It is safest to sell it quickly and exchange it for cash.

The current stock price of EA is US$23.87. Ziweixing has obtained a total of 49 million shares of EA. The sooner they sell, the better!