While Jimmy's condition stabilized further, Charlie and Vera had already driven to Pu’er in Yorkshire Hill.This city, named after tea, had a history of over a thousand years. It was not only a stop on the ancient Mass Tea Street, but also an important tea-producing area for Pu'er tea today.When Vera left Diggero many years ago, she brought her parents' ashes with her and finally buried them in Pu’er. It had been over three hundred years since she had last visited this place, and Vera had completely forgotten what the city used to look like.According to Vera, when she left Diggero, she only brought her parents' urns with her. When she buried them in Pu’er, she secretly chose a Feng Shui geomantic treasure land to bury the two urns and did not provide coffins for her parents nor did she build a tomb or tombstone.Finding two urns buried over three hundred years ago here was basically like finding a needle in a haystack. Fortunately, Vera remembered that she had buried her parents
She continued, “I just don't know if that Pu'er tea tree is still there. If the tree is gone, it might be a bit difficult to find the location.”Charlie said, “It's okay, I'll accompany you to search for it until we find it.”Vera nodded gratefully and said to Charlie, “If that Pu'er tea tree is still alive, it should be over a thousand years old. It's definitely the largest and most lush tea tree here.”She couldn't help but sigh and say, “However, it still falls short compared to the mother Pu'er tea tree with a lifespan of ten thousand years by Heavenly Lake.”Charlie chuckled, “There’s a huge difference between a thousand years and ten thousand years.”As they got closer, the details of Mount Twint became clearer.Vera pointed excitedly at a particularly lush tea tree near the mountaintop and said to Charlie, “If I'm not mistaken, my parents' ashes are buried under that tree!”Charlie looked up and saw a huge tree standing prominently on the side ridge near the mountaintop.
Looking at it this way, it was not easy to enter openly, and sneaking in wouldn’t be easy either. After all, there were security guards everywhere and surveillance cameras with no blind spots. Even if he snuck in, he might get caught. He could not just force his way up, right?The security guard, upon seeing that Charlie didn't seem like a malicious person who had ulterior motives, spoke up, “Young man, let me tell you, this place is just a tea plantation, and we also have basic tea processing here. The real leaders don't work here. If you really want to talk about a collaboration, go to the downtown area of Pu'er. There's a building called Violet Tower there, which is our headquarters. You need to make an appointment there first. If they arrange for you to visit this area, they'll notify us naturally.”Vera, feeling a bit down, gently tugged at Charlie's sleeve and said, “Why don't we go to Pu'er to talk to their group first?”Charlie also knew that it wouldn't be easy to get in
Violet Group was a well-known company in Yorkshire Hill, but because they were mainly involved in the tea industry, they weren't widely known outside the tea industry. Sophie had never even heard of Violet Group's name before. However, her style of doing things has always been efficient and direct, so she grabbed a pen and paper from her desk on the other end of the line and said, “Alright, Mr. Wade. How can I help you on my end?”Charlie said, “I hope you can negotiate with their boss on behalf of the Schulz Group. If they're curious about why a prestigious young lady like you from the Schulz family is interested in a tea company like theirs, just tell them that your grandfather in Madagascar loves their tea, so you plan to buy the company. In short, maintain a wealthy and capricious tone.”Sophie agreed without hesitation and said, “Okay, Mr. Wade. Please give me ten minutes. I'll grasp a rough understanding of the basic situation of this company first, and I'll then communicate
“Without going public, Gideon could only hold onto this business and its annual profit of tens of millions of dollars. What he actually gets in hand is just about tens of millions. His dream of going public and cashing in several hundred million seems hopeless.”Charlie was surprised by how quickly Sophie could summarize so much useful information in just 10 minutes. He greatly appreciated her business acumen, judgment, and skills.He asked Sophie, “Miss Schulz, from your perspective, how much should we offer to successfully acquire this company?”Sophie replied, “Mr. Wade, based on the information I've gathered so far, Gideon, their boss, publicly holds 57.6% of the shares, but when factoring in other equity structures and option holdings, the overall ownership should be around 78.5%, making him the unquestionable major shareholder. To successfully acquire Violet Group, as long as we can get Gideon's approval, it will be considered a success.”“Judging from Gideon's current income
At this moment, in Violet Tower in downtown Pu’er.The sixty-two-year-old Gideon had just finished hosting a distributor conference. As he still had to host a dinner for the distributors at the hotel in the evening, he could only take a brief rest in his office for now even though he was exhausted, then gather the strength to head to the banquet venue when the time came.Gideon felt somewhat depressed today. Over the recent years, distributors had become increasingly dominant in front of the group. In the past, it was the group that exerted pressure on the distributors, assessing their performance, forcing them to increase their inventory continuously and often withholding their year-end rebates for various reasons to make them work harder and be more obedient.But in recent years, with the rise of e-commerce, most traditional brands had lost this absolute advantage in front of distributors, especially in industries such as alcohol and tea, which were opaque fast-moving consumer goo
He believed that the prerequisite to making money was to first do a good job with the tea leaves so that the money earned could be justified. It was precisely because of this passion and reverence that he had never been able to find a real opportunity to get rich overnight.Those swindlers, on the other hand, were different. If they sold a batch of tea leaves for fifty dollars and possibly sold tens of thousands of batches of tea leaves in a day, they would easily make millions in profit overnight.Sometimes when Gideon saw these people making so much money, he would also lose confidence in the tea industry. He felt that most industries would form a situation where bad money drives out good. If he did want to become bad money himself, he would only be pushed out by it. Rather than letting that happen, it would be better for him to cash out as soon as possible.However, cashing out was not as simple as imagined. Take a bakery for example. The boss worked hard for a year, and although
Gideon, feeling frustrated, cursed, “In you young people's words, this year's Pu'er tea market is damn chaotic!”Gideon paused for a moment before he continued, “Damn it! Not only are the major traditional tea companies desperately lowering prices to undercut the market, but those emerging brands are also using marketing and pricing tactics to continuously attack the market space of our traditional tea companies. You say your tea is good, they say that the price of the same tea next door is half our price. You ask them to taste both teas, they say there's no difference in the taste. How can we deal with them?!”Wind was also extremely frustrated as he said, “More and more people are drinking tea now, but there aren't many who truly understand tea. They're all just following trends. They won’t be able to tell the difference between tea that costs a hundred dollars per kilogram or ten thousand dollars per kilogram.”Gideon nodded in agreement and sighed as he said, “What's worse is th