On June 1, half a month after multi-party negotiations, Zhou Yujie reached an agreement with several major investment companies. Six investment companies including CITIC Capital, China Merchants Equity Investment, China Investment, CICC Capital, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and China Post Capital obtained 20% of Toutiao's equity for US$1.5 billion. After financing, Toutiao was valued at 7.5 billion US dollars.

Due to the strategic arrangements for Toutiao’s information database, in the past half month, CITIC Capital has already purchased land that meets the construction of Toutiao’s new servers in four major cities across the country. These lands are also invested as funds at the original price. After the funds are recorded, large server groups will be built soon.

At the same time, CITIC Bank and Bank of Communications also jointly gave Toutiao a loan of RMB 5 billion. In the future, the money will be used to build new server bases and purchase server equipment.

"cheers."

After signing the agreement, Zhou Yujie, several major national funds and some senior executives of Toutiao gathered together to celebrate the perfect success of this financing.

In the history of the Internet, domestic companies rarely participated in the investment of giants. Even if there were, they were only a small scale, which also made countless netizens regret later generations. After all, Baidu was cheaper to several major funds in the United States, Tengxun was cheaper to South African newspapers, Alibaba was even cheaper to Masayoshi Son, and other companies such as Sina, NetEase, etc., which are actually not much different.

This time, Toutiao's financing directly blocked overseas venture capital because Toutiao's business method could not achieve any results abroad. Bytes in later generations also tried to launch an overseas version of Toutiao, but it was not successful because Toutiao is a news platform, and overseas news control is very strict, so it is impossible to reprint it at will.

If you want to go overseas, you can only succeed by using a short video platform made by netizens because there are no copyright restrictions.

As for BAT, the latter two are already competitors. Although Baidu has deep cooperation with Toutiao in the payment field, it is actually a competitor in the information flow field. Although it is not fierce yet, it is impossible to let it participate in Toutiao's financing.

Wu Xiaodong drank a cocktail and walked over and said, "Mr. Zhou, I want to tell you another good news. We have convinced the government website to join Toutiao. In the future, your company will send someone to Yanjing and make technical arrangements."

"Thank you, Mr. Wu." Zhou Yujie smiled and raised his wine glass. Inviting government departments to join is a curved process. The most troublesome thing is the previous companies. As long as someone joins in the front, the effect is very good, the subsequent departments will be much simpler. Now it is easier to start from the central departments.

If major official departments gather in Toutiao, it will also bring considerable traffic to Toutiao, and the subsequent full efforts to attract the Quxin official account platform will be much simpler.

After the banquet, the hotel staff began to clean the venue.

Zhou Yujie did not rush back, but took Toutiao's senior management to the balcony above the hotel, which was a separate swimming pool, overlooking the small half of the Shanghai area and several chess and card tables.

Whether you have money or not, Chinese people's hobbies are playing mahjong or poker. Since the advent of the Internet era, these have been electronicized, but no matter how good the electronic service is, it cannot compare to the scene.

The few people were playing poker while chatting about the company casually.

"Mr. Zhou, Shared WIFI has been tested internally. When will we launch the market?" Lin Youde asked.

Zhou Yujie thought for a while and said, "If it is popularized quickly, shared WIFI, it will also be beneficial to our business. However, there will definitely be a lot of controversy in the future. Arrange a small team to pretend to go out and start a business, and then put the product in their name. After two months, Toutiao can directly invest in shares and take advantage of the trend to attract traffic."

Although sharing WIFI products itself comes with their own traffic, and as long as someone uses it, they will inform the people around you, this process still takes time. If Toutiao drives traffic, through the data of AppTiao, specifically targeting those who do not have enough traffic, it will form a huge user base in extreme times, and these people will also spread to the people around you, and eventually reach an incredible data, and the number of users will exceed Toutiao or Quxin, which is almost the same as QQ.

And at that level, reverse traffic will have very good results, not to mention that with shared WIFI, in this era of expensive traffic, it is equivalent to mastering half of the "telecom traffic", which is the operator's unique monopoly privilege.

However, sharing WIFI has not had a good reputation in later generations, and its monetization channels are limited and its lifespan is short. It is actually not important to be "in the name" of Toutiao. It is better to release it and develop it, as long as it actually belongs to you.

"Okay." Lin Youde nodded and agreed.

Zhou Yujie continued: "However, there is another thing. I need to acquire a mobile browser company. Which one does not matter. As long as there is perfect kernel optimization, it is enough. For users, after we acquire it, we can attract traffic."

Whether it is a mobile browser or a PC browser, it can be said to be a web-side operating system because it needs to be compatible with different web pages, that is, developers of each web page need to match different browsers.

The browser's kernel is the core of its technology. The core's research and development is very difficult. 360 once organized more than 400 people to overcome the research and development, but in the end it was left unresolved because the difficulty was too great. In the end, it only optimized Google's Chrome browser core and obediently paid the patent fee.

There are 4 browser kernels in the global market. However, after Google opened its source, it directly cut off the idea of ​​others to form kernels. Even in the 1920s, China still did not have its own kernel technology, and all of them were patents of foreign giants. This is actually as restricted by others, just like operating systems and chips, but it is not known to the public.

But even if you use Google's browser kernel, it takes a lot of manpower to create your own browser. In addition, the mobile browser only copied the concept of the PC side in the early stage, which is completely different from the operating model of mobile browsers in later generations.

Therefore, in the early stages of Toutiao's development, Zhou Yujie did not spend energy on his own browser, but with the increase in the explosive growth of mobile Internet users, the role of the browser will gradually be reflected, which is also a very important traffic entrance.

However, it is a waste of time to build a browser by yourself. It is the most convenient to acquire a ready-made team. Even if you spend more money, as long as the browser is made earlier, you can recover any cost.

"Browser?" Lin Youde thought about the several companies he knew, nodded and said, "No problem, tomorrow I will send someone to check which browser is suitable for us."
Chapter completed!