Lunch was in the style of Anhui cuisine.

Su Yehao rather enjoyed both the braised soft-shelled turtle with ham, and the stinky mandarin fish.

Leaving aside the fatty, tender soft-shelled turtle, which tasted similar no matter where it was prepared, the stinky mandarin fish was much like stinky tofu: it smelled awful, but tasted wonderful.

After they'd eaten their fill, they immediately set off, taking the highway toward Lin'an.

Once they arrived in Xiaoshan, Lin'an, Su Yehao first took a look at his own cultural tourism city.

The enormous construction site was located on the riverbank, very close to the Lin'an city center. They were currently busy building the shopping center first, and its main structure was already taking shape.

Mentioning the Lin'an Sihai International Cultural Tourism City, Su Yehao couldn't help but smile.

"I heard my dad mention that Xiaoshan was especially proactive back then, selling the land to Sihai International at the demolition price, directly by the *mu*. The deal was finalized in 2000, and in 2001 Xiaoshan was incorporated into Lin'an, becoming a district and abolishing the city status. It was as if they suddenly made a fortune from the increased value."

Yin Liuli, holding her sleeping daughter, said softly, "I've noticed that it seems like everywhere wants your dad to invest. There's a cultural tourism city not only in Shanghai, but also in Xiamen and Suzhou."

"Of course. Other real estate companies are just small-time operators, but my family's cultural tourism city projects are not only massive in scale, but also require an initial investment of at least five billion RMB, and they can improve the city's image and attract tourists. The real money comes from the residential business. You could say my family took advantage of a good opportunity. It's basically impossible now to find thousands of *mu* of land near the city center to sell to my family at rock-bottom prices to build a cultural tourism city. In the past two years, only the Xiamen Cultural Tourism City has been added; the rest were projects negotiated before 2001."

Su Yehao didn't get out of the car.

After circling the construction site for a while, he had the driver take them across the river to the Tao Bao City, which was built with an investment of over one billion RMB.

The entire Tao Bao City was mainly for incubating the first batch of e-commerce businesses. The Lin'an branch of Tao Bao.com was also located there. Construction began at the start of last year, and the first phase had just been completed.

With the value of real estate in the mainland continuing to rise, Su Yehao was quite willing to invest money in the real estate industry. He usually built or directly acquired office buildings, while in other countries he mainly leased.

For example, the rental fees for Yanwenzi Group's branch in Japan could be used to deduct taxes, which seemed more cost-effective.

Yin Liuli recalled when she first met Su Yehao; he was nothing more than a smooth-talking rich kid. In the blink of an eye, he had actually grown the Su family business to its current scale, with assets that had increased dozens of times over. Just thinking about it felt incredibly magical.

She pressed him, "There are more and more kinds of things on Tao Bao. I often use it to buy things when I'm in Pengcheng. If it were to be listed, what would its total market value be? I often see people online discussing topics about Tao Bao, and the situation seems pretty good."

Hearing this question, Su Yehao considered it for a few seconds and shook his head, answering:

"I'm not too sure either. I can only give you a rough number, maybe around a valuation of two billion dollars. This is mainly because my market share is relatively high, probably accounting for about eighty percent of the internet e-commerce market. I don't plan on raising funds for the time being, so the valuation doesn't mean much. In three or four years, it might grow to ten billion dollars. This is just the beginning."

The two-billion-dollar valuation only included Tao Bao's commercial and personal business segments, plus some real estate.

As for the Credit Bao payment system, it was independent of the entire Tao Bao system. It cooperated not only with UnionPay, but also with customers of the Red Panda Network Mall, avoiding the need for repetitive infrastructure development.

Don't think that Su Yehao was just an absentee manager for a long time; he had already formulated the development strategy. He just needed to implement it according to the template in his memory. Mr. Ma was actually just a tool, mainly responsible for marketing. He was basically just following the script.

With the Credit Bao payment tool in hand, as well as tAt, tot, Yinhai Software, and other companies helping to bring in user traffic, Tao Bao's revenue data and active user scale were much higher than in its previous life during the same period. Outsider eBay simply didn't have the strength to compete with it.

Because it had formed a scale ahead of time, the expansion period seemed to have no bottlenecks. It continued to grow as the number of mainland internet users increased.

Since Su Yehao entered the mainland internet market in 1997, he had invested a total of more than two billion RMB to date. To describe it as bulldozing his way forward would be an understatement.

There was no need to compete with anyone for business.

As new internet users appeared, they could casually use a "Su-branded" product, and an entire internet ecosystem would be directly arranged for them, with links and interconnections between each product.

This almost-monopolistic, powerful advantage, in turn, pushed up the valuations of companies like Tao Bao and tAt, giving Su Yehao the confidence to attract a round A financing for the tot search engine and portal website at a valuation of between two and two and a half billion dollars.

Learning about Tao Bao's valuation, Yin Liuli didn't seem surprised. She had been shocked too many times; she was already numb.

When they arrived at Tao Bao City, Su Yehao wasn't in a hurry to contact Mr. Ma. Instead, he took Yin Liuli to wander around and inspect the area. They could see that many merchants selling general merchandise, clothing, sunglasses, and so on had already moved into the indoor market, which resembled a wholesale market. Many people were sitting in front of their computers, and the sound of "di di di" could be heard from time to time.

Since they even had Credit Bao, an instant messaging system similar to Wang Wang was even simpler. Su Yehao occasionally used Tao Bao to shop, and the goods could be delivered to Hong Kong City in about a week, but it wasn't free shipping.

Due to the underdeveloped logistics system, the vast majority of products on Tao Bao temporarily didn't include shipping costs. Users needed to pay out of their own pockets.

Fortunately, the prices of online goods were relatively cheap. After users got used to paying for shipping, they still felt it was very affordable. In this era, they hadn't yet developed the habit of not buying anything that didn't offer free shipping.

This could barely be considered an advantage of entering the market early. Su Yehao set the rules, and without comparison, there was no sense of disappointment.

The bodyguards were relatively far away, and Su Yehao was only wearing a white shirt because of the heat. He was also wearing a mask. He and Yin Liuli wandered around for quite a while, but they hadn't yet attracted the attention of others.

Speaking in Mandarin, he asked several shop owners how their business was.

It seemed these bosses had learned to be cunning, afraid of being disturbed by their competitors. Each of them joked around, never mentioning their turnover.

The merchants who were first invited to move into Tao Bao City were often not small in scale. They were among the first to try e-commerce. You could see a couple busily packing clothes, with hundreds of express boxes piled up in front of their store, bearing the logo of "Cong Ya" Express.

Cong Ya Express, a homophone for "rush," had a logo of a fat yellow duck carrying a scallion.

The name of this express company was chosen by internet users through a vote. At the beginning of this year, the entire logistics channel was spun off from Tao Bao and separately capitalized for development, gradually expanding to hundreds of cities of all sizes in the coastal areas.

Currently, internet users were mainly concentrated in the economically developed coastal areas, and the remaining express deliveries were mainly transported through the postal service.

It just so happened that the postal service had been losing money for years, so the cooperation between the two parties was still considered pleasant for the time being. Apart from the slow transportation speed, there weren't any major flaws...