Shortly after the kidnapping incident, the venture capital company was convinced that the billion-dollar joint venture capital targeting SAL was approved in principle. Although the venture capital company will inevitably be controversial due to the excessive valuation issue, everyone has to admit that SAL is a company worth investing in.

Especially the unique voice recognition technology in the world, it has basically formed a de facto technology monopoly. It’s okay for voice navigation instruments. To be honest, everyone has little expectations for this market. It’s basically over to achieve a value of $10 billion.

What really attracts everyone is Cai Siqiang's ambition for the mobile phone market. Compared with navigation devices, this market is not the same as the order of magnitude. The annual sales volume can reach a market of one billion units, and coupled with the unique voice recognition technology, sales of tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars can be achieved.

Look at Apple. When everyone thinks of this, they can't help but feel excited. They unanimously believe that SAL can accumulate experience in consumer electronic production and sales through navigation devices, which is very useful for entering the mobile phone market in the future. What's more, SAL is a sister company that produces brain wave products. To what extent can brain wave technology be applied? No one has the bottom line now. After all, this thing is too cutting-edge.

But everyone believes that brain wave technology is definitely not just applied to a few games. If you boldly imagine that one day brain wave technology can be combined with mobile phones, it will be a new technological revolution. Being able to stand at the forefront of the technological revolution may be like investing in Intel in the 1970s, Microsoft in the 1980s, and Google in the late 1990s. That is really a strong investment in venture capital's life.

So, after countless seminars, several venture capital tycoons finally made up their minds to bet on the future.

After the general direction was determined, Cai Siqiang found that it was not easy to talk about some details next. With such a large investment, the company established a board of directors, the seats of venture capital representatives on the board of directors, the schedule of capital investment, the legal documents of venture capital agreements, etc., and the following matters are very professional.

Fortunately, Cai Siqiang finally realized that he was in control of the macroscopic operation. For these microscopic operations, he directly hired a very famous professional consulting company in China to deal with it. Considering that there were countless legal issues involved, non-senior professionals could not understand it at all. In order to avoid being deceived by becoming a blind man touching his elephant, Cai Siqiang not only hired a professional team, but also invested heavily in an expert to serve as the company's investment and financing director.

This only deals with the aspects related to venture capital contracts, so many fronts and ends need to be cleaned up. In order to start the merger, the company needs to attract professionals from all walks of life, including senior management teams, as well as enrichment as soon as possible. Otherwise, it would be a joke if the company merges but does not have relevant personnel management.

During this high-level expansion, Cai Siqiang directly recruited two general manager assistants, one assisted in domestic affairs and the other assisted in overseas affairs.

In domestic affairs alone, there are so many things to deal with, which keeps the general manager in charge of domestic affairs busy all day long.

After the funding problem was solved, the implementation of overseas mergers and acquisitions was put on the agenda. The first thing to do was to build an overseas acquisition team. In this regard, Cai Siqiang is completely an amateur, but several venture capital giants have extensive connections in this regard, so they quickly recommended several good and professional mergers and acquisition consulting companies to Cai Siqiang.

Once the agreement is signed, everyone is a trench person. Cai Siqiang is not afraid that a few venture capital bigwigs will hide their own private interests in this regard. After all, one billion US dollars is not a small amount.

After comparison, Cai Siqiang chose a consulting company with rich experience in the European market as the main acquisition consultant. They not only have the first M&A business in the European market, but more importantly, they have a good understanding of European listed companies, and have in-depth research on who is the major shareholder and who is the behind-the-scenes controller.

Therefore, when the M&A service consulting agreement was signed, the consultant formulated two plans for the acquisition of SAL. Since SAL was preparing to acquire in cash, the consultant suggested that Cai Siqiang first contact with several major shareholders to see if he could directly acquire the shares in the hands of the major shareholder to achieve control.

According to the information provided by the consultant, among the major shareholders with Tomtom, Gerald, who owns 27% of the largest shareholders, is the largest shareholder. He is one of the co-founders of Tomtom and is now the chairman of the board of directors. In recent years, most of the difficulties of Tomtom's company were caused by the board of directors' decision-making mistakes led by him. After more than three years of continuous plunge, ordinary shareholders have changed from admiration to extreme disappointment about Gerald.

The second largest shareholder with 24% is the current company's CEO Diabi, also one of the co-founders of Tomtom. In his early years, he worked with Gerald to become Tomtom's dominant position in the European market. However, in recent years, due to disagreement with Gerald in the company's global expansion strategy, the two have repeatedly disagreed in major decisions.

The third largest shareholder, which holds 17%, is an investment company. They have been investing in Tomtom at a low price in recent years to prepare for arbitrage. However, Tomtom is a long way to go, and this investment company is already very disappointed. However, due to the large investment, even if they want to withdraw, they cannot find the next one to take over.

Therefore, in the consultant's plan, the first set of plans is mainly to acquire the shares in the hands of these three shareholders.

The first target Cai Siqiang visited was Gerald, the largest shareholder. Facing this mysterious person from the East, Gerald was very surprised.

"Acquiring the shares in my hands?" Gerald looked at Cai Siqiang, a little unable to believe his ears. When did Orientals start to come to the Western market to stir up trouble?

"No, I have no intention of selling the stocks. Tomtom was created by me, and I will never give up." Gerald refused. In his mind, this is his company and he definitely doesn't want people to interfere.

"Mr. Gerald, I think we'd better see the reality clearly." The M&A consultant opened the notebook.

"In 2010, Tomtom had an after-tax profit of 107 million euros, but by 2011, Tomtom's profit became 68 million euros, and in 2012, it was only 7 million euros. Since the beginning of this year, the semi-annual report shows that it had lost 35 million euros in the first half of the year, and it is expected to lose more than 50 million euros throughout the year."

"Frankly speaking, if Tomtom does not have external funds or technical breakthroughs, no one can turn the tide. Over the past few years, the stock price has fallen from more than 30 euros to around 2.2 euros now. This is the market's objective response to the tomtom situation." The words of the M&A consultant seemed to pierce Gerald's heart like a needle, but Gerald was unable to refute it.
Chapter completed!