Brother Ma’s departure was truly seamless, but unlike the situation in Huang He’s plan where he was forced out by himself, Brother Ma left of his own accord.
According to Huang He’s plan, the normal development process should have been as follows.
After Facebook completely crushed QQ Space, and QQ’s market share dropped below 40%, Huang He would have Fan Jie contact various investors, and these investors would directly pressure Brother Ma, forcing Brother Ma’s team to withdraw from operations.
Concurrently, Huang He would use Zeng Qing, a pawn he had incidentally placed, to have Zeng Qing contact other members of Brother Ma’s team, telling them the tricks to operate games and earn more easy money, thus further dividing Brother Ma’s team from within.
With this dual strategy of internal and external attacks, Brother Ma would have no choice but to leave, even if he didn’t want to, and would be forced out by investors and his own team in a humiliating manner. At that time, Huang He would then descend upon Tengda to sweep the battlefield, purchasing the QQ business at a low price, while Tengda’s remaining team would transform Tengda entirely into a gaming company, ultimately eliminating this competitor and achieving a monopoly for QQ.
This strategy was quite reliable, and Huang He had reviewed it several times, believing that Brother Ma had no means of resistance and could only watch his plan succeed step by step.
However, Huang He had not accounted for one step: Brother Ma’s refusal to resist and his decision to leave on his own.
Much later, Huang He pieced together Brother Ma’s series of actions through some intelligence.
First, the day after Zhang Rong announced his coming out, Brother Ma directly convened a meeting with his core management team. In the meeting, he frankly stated that he had failed, that QQ was unlikely to be revived, and that defeating Jiangnan Group was impossible. Therefore, he decided to retire and hand over his CEO position to Zeng Qing, as Zeng Qing had a complete set of methods to continue operating Tengda and allow everyone to earn money in the future.
However, he, Brother Ma, was unwilling to endure the humiliation of eating from Huang He’s hand, so he would leave Tengda entirely and even sell all his shares in Tengda. He would not leave any trace in Tengda.
After Brother Ma announced this decision, the core team naturally tried to persuade him to stay, crying and begging. Zeng Qing even swore to the heavens that he would never be CEO, that only Brother Ma could hold this position.
Of course, what these people truly thought in their hearts was unknown. In any case, throughout the process, everyone advised Brother Ma not to leave, but not a single person stood up to say that they could unite and continue fighting, to confront Jiangnan Group head-on, or anything of the sort.
Brother Ma perhaps saw through this, so he refused very decisively. After an hour and more of back and forth, the core team gradually accepted Brother Ma’s resignation and watched him with teary eyes.
“However, my brothers, since I have decided to leave, and the QQ business has no future, our most important task now is to sell QQ for a good price. After all, it is a child we painstakingly raised. We cannot sell it cheaply under any circumstances, at least for several hundred million yuan, so that each of us can receive tens of millions of yuan. What do you think!” Brother Ma said.
“We will do as the boss says!” Including Zeng Qing, no one had any objections. After all, everyone held shares, and the higher the selling price, the more money they would receive. Who would refuse such a good thing?
“So you must listen to me, and I guarantee to lead you to sell QQ at a high price!” Brother Ma said with a smile, and everyone nodded vigorously. The team, which had begun to drift apart, was thus reunited around Brother Ma.
On the other side, after gathering the team, Tengda announced a piece of news: Tengda would never admit defeat and would fight Jiangnan to the death. Therefore, Tengda planned to raise another 1 billion yuan to expand Tengda’s servers, while maintaining the operation of QQ Space and developing QQ’s video call function, so that all QQ users would no longer be limited to voice calls but could use cameras for video calls, thus completely suppressing QQ in terms of features and reversing QQ’s decline.
Thus, Brother Ma once again convened the investors, expressing his hope that they would continue to invest 1 billion yuan.
The result was, as one might expect, that these investors would be out of their minds to continue investing 1 billion yuan in Tengda at this time. However, Brother Ma’s attitude was firm. He stated that if the investors were unwilling to continue investing, he would spin off Lianzhong Games, which was under Tengda, into a completely new company and then sell that company, thereby obtaining a large sum of money.
After all, Lianzhong Games generated millions in profits each month and was the only company under Tengda that made money year after year.
If Lianzhong Games were truly sold, it could fetch at least three to four hundred million yuan.
But this was something investors absolutely dared not do. Tengda’s valuation had already severely shrunk, relying solely on its only profitable subsidiary, Lianzhong Games, to support it.
However, once Lianzhong Games was sold, Tengda’s valuation would likely shrink by more than half in an instant, and their investment would be equivalent to a loss of more than half.
This was not all. What was most crucial was that the money obtained from selling Lianzhong Games belonged to the company and was to be used for the company’s daily operations. Therefore, these investors would not receive any of this money at all, and it would ultimately only be poured into the bottomless pit of Tengda QQ.
This was something the investors absolutely would not allow.
Thus, the conflict between the team and the investors erupted. The investors quickly organized a third-party market survey, and after confirming that QQ’s market share had fallen below 40%, the investors decided to invoke the contract rules to replace the entire management team.
But at this moment, QQ urgently launched an event called "Ten Times Experience for AFK." The rules of the event were simple: if a player kept QQ online for more than 10 hours a day, they would receive 10 times the QQ level experience, thus achieving rapid QQ level progression.
This event was naturally like drinking poison to quench thirst; it would consume the appeal of QQ levels themselves. However, it was undeniable that the effect of this event was extremely significant. A large number of QQ and QQ dual users chose to increase their QQ AFK time. The direct consequence of this was a doubling of active QQ users, and the market share almost overnight returned to above 50%. The investor team discovered in horror that they could not replace Tengda’s team at all.
Thus, these investors were about to go berserk. Just as the conflict between Tengda and the investors was about to erupt, Zeng Qing, from within the Tengda team, suddenly contacted several of the investors.
Zeng Qing expressed his deep dissatisfaction with Brother Ma’s persistent commitment to QQ, as he had already realized that QQ could not be saved.
He did not want to see Brother Ma exhaust the company’s last bit of vitality to save something that could not be saved. Therefore, Zeng Qing found these investors and proposed to cooperate.
As Zeng Qing was the person with the second-largest shareholding in the Tengda team after Brother Ma, if he could also unite other members of the team, they could sideline Brother Ma and gain control of the team.
Since Tengda was controlled by the Tengda founder team, by gaining control of the team in this way, they could in turn gain control of the entire Tengda, and Zeng Qing would then become Tengda’s CEO.
He was willing to cooperate with the investors to implement new operational strategies.
The investors were naturally delighted with Zeng Qing’s defection, and they did not doubt Zeng Qing’s reasons for defecting. After all, even a fool could see that QQ was beyond saving, and it was natural for Zeng Qing to make this correct decision to protect the value of his shares.
However, Zeng Qing also told the investors that the key was to persuade all the founder team members except Brother Ma, and these people were almost all loyal followers of Brother Ma, making it difficult to expect them to betray Brother Ma.
But it was not entirely impossible. Their biggest concern now was the continuous shrinkage of their shares in Tengda. Therefore, if the investors were willing to immediately acquire their Tengda shares with cash, they believed these founders would definitely make the right decision.
This made the investors hesitate.
At present, the founder team held 20% of the shares, with Brother Ma holding 8% and the remaining 12% held by others.
If they calculated based on the previous acquisition of 60% of shares for 800 million yuan, then acquiring these 12% of shares would cost 160 million yuan, which was a huge sum!
Would the investors be willing to spend another 160 million yuan to buy 12% of the shares now?
Of course, they were not willing. Their original intention was to cut their losses; there was no reason to continue pouring money into it.
However, Zeng Qing told these investors that he had a perfect plan.
First, after completely discarding Brother Ma, they would immediately spin off the QQ business and sell it to Jiangnan Group.
Jiangnan Group was extremely covetous of the QQ business. Even if they asked for 1 billion yuan, Jiangnan Group might grudgingly accept it, because this would allow Jiangnan Group to completely dominate the market, and they would be willing to purchase it.
In this way, just by selling QQ, their investment of 160 million yuan could be fully recovered, and they could even earn a considerable profit.
At the same time, Tengda’s current technical team was also a treasure. They planned to develop QQ into a gaming company in the future, specializing in producing various online games. Zeng Qing himself had a prior connection with Huang He, who had personally promised that if he was willing to sell QQ, he would provide them with 10 years of free traffic and resources from QQ Game Center.
And now Tengda had acquired Kaixuan, a heavyweight game. As long as they reached cooperation with QQ before June of this year, allowing Kaixuan to be launched through the QQ game platform, this would definitely be an online game comparable to Legend of Mir, with a monthly income of two to three hundred million yuan in the future!
Indeed, Zeng Qing was quite eloquent, making these investors’ hearts flutter. After calculating, they felt it was indeed very profitable, so they agreed to Zeng Qing’s plan.