To make matters worse, Netease was found to be suspected of accounting fraud in the second quarter of 200/kloc-0. Therefore, Netease had to recalculate its income in 2000, which led to a 52% decrease in its actual income in 2000, which was only $4 million (from $8.3 million before).
Investors on Wall Street have sold Netease shares in their hands. On September 4th, 20001year, Nasdaq announced that Netease shares were suspended due to financial fraud. At this time, Netease's share price is only 0.64 US dollars (15.5 US dollars at the time of listing).
Netease, as one of the representatives of China Stock Exchange, was suspended by Nasdaq for a time and became a hot news pursued by major media. More and more negative news was exposed, and it was difficult to tell the truth from the false, which made Ding Lei, once the richest man, feel unprepared.
Ding Lei handled a group of company executives related to financial fraud internally, and launched a four-month complaint with relevant US departments abroad.
The stock suspension did not stop Netease from being in Ding Lei. Ding Lei turned his attention to online games. The story starts from June 2000 165438+ 10/9. Ding Lei personally visited Guangzhou Tianxia Company. At that time, the domestic online game industry was in the ascendant, and Ding Lei had already set foot in the online game market. After communicating with the top management of Tianxia Company, the two sides hit it off. On the same day, Ding Lei decided to invest in Tianxia Company, and expounded this idea at the board meeting of Netease.
A few days later, Ding Lei replied that Netease would not invest in Tianxia Company, but would buy it wholly. But this process is very long, until March of 200 1 year, Netease completed the acquisition of Tianxia Company. However, before that, the staff of the world had moved to the office of Guangzhou Tianhe Software Park and developed a new generation of online game The Journey to the West in the office of 1500 square meters.
Deli Sun, CEO of Netease at that time, was a Hong Kong resident. Stephen Chow, a famous Hong Kong movie star, is a good friend. Therefore, he invited Stephen Chow as the spokesperson of the new online game The Journey to the West, and used the Stephen Chow movie A Chinese Odyssey as the official name of the game.
Advanced server technology, high standard image quality and popular elements and gameplay. In addition, the special selling points of the game "Guofeng" and "Journey to the West" are undoubtedly more in line with the preferences of domestic players, making "A Chinese Odyssey 1" have quite good sales.
Perhaps, it is because there are too many excellent games that I want to make a good-looking online game. "A Chinese Odyssey 1" has more stringent requirements for computer hardware configuration than online games on the market at that time. This also made many domestic players complain at that time. At that time, domestic home computers were not popular, the hardware configuration was backward, and the development time of the game itself was less than one year. There are big or small problems in technology, planning, marketing, art and many other aspects, such as game flashback, bugs, plug-ins and so on.
When Ding Lei summarized the failure of a Chinese Odyssey, he found that IE browser at that time could no longer support the running of the game, which also led to frequent jams and poor user experience.
In the development of A Chinese Odyssey 2, the mistakes were corrected in time, and the game was run on the client, which greatly improved the fluency of the game. Ding Lei realized that in addition to the optimization of game technology itself, marketing has always been a shortcoming of Netease games. He found an old acquaintance, Duan Yongping, and asked him that the sales of the little bully learning machine in Duan Yongping had exceeded 100 million yuan, and he was known as the god of enterprise marketing. Duan Yongping not only created the little bully learning machine, but also created well-known national brands such as BBK, vivo and OPPO, and even indirectly helped Huang Zheng to establish Pinduoduo. Of course, this is another story.
Duan Yongping taught Ding a set of exclusive marketing cheats to "occupy" all Internet cafes in small and medium-sized cities as quickly as possible.
He is very optimistic about the market prospect of online games in Ding Lei. Duan Yongping and his then wife Liu Xin bought 6.5438+0.52 million shares of Netease in the open market, accounting for 5.05% of Netease's total share capital.
For Netease's delisting risk, Duan Yongping later said:
It's simple. Pay some money, and find several lawyers to calculate the probability and amount of money for this case to be delisted according to the law and previous cases if Netease wants compensation.
Looking back now, Duan Yongping didn't mistake Ding Lei and Netease. This investment made him get hundreds of times of generous returns, and also made him the Buffett of China. Netease in Ding Leili also dodged a bullet because of the timely help in Duan Yongping.
After investing in Netease, Duan Yongping seems to have "disappeared" in the Internet world for some time, and when he came out again, it was already the era of mobile Internet. This is a wonderful story.