Fuji Crumbles
“Yes, this is Yoo Jae-won!”
—Chairman, this is Vice Chairman Choi Kang-wook!
“Ah, Vice Chairman. What brings you calling so early?”
“Early” referred to Korea. San Francisco had just passed 4 p.m., so Seoul was only at 8 a.m. For Yoo Jae-won, calculating time differences had become instantaneous, almost instinctive.
What Choi Kang-wook said next was startling.
—Time is not the issue. Ilseong Electronics has caused a major incident!
Ilseong Electronics? “Those bastards”?
Choi Kang-wook was an exceedingly refined and courteous man. When they first met, he had not dismissed the young Yoo Jae-won based on appearances and had treated him with genuine respect. That impression had led Yoo Jae-won to mark him as a future partner. In all their time working together, he had rarely heard Choi Kang-wook curse. Employee reports from the audit office and intelligence team consistently praised his integrity. For such a man to call Ilseong Electronics “those bastards” meant something truly serious.
“An incident? What kind of incident?”
—We just received internal testimony that Ilseong Electronics is little more than a hollow shell drowning in debt. Choi Kang-wook spoke like a machine gun, the words pouring out so rapidly that Yoo Jae-won felt as though he were listening to rap.
The call itself was urgent, yet Yoo Jae-won found his mind momentarily drifting. This development fell squarely within his predictions. Ilseong Electronics’ reluctance to extend their bonds had already struck him as odd. Bonds were routinely renegotiated—higher interest in exchange for extended maturity was standard practice. Yet even with fire at their feet, Ilseong had remained passive. They had seemed uncomfortable during every meeting with Yoo Jae-won, and now the deeper reason was clear.
—Most of Ilseong Electronics’ major assets have already been siphoned away. They even took out massive loans using land and factories as collateral, and purchased inventory from other Ilseong affiliates at inflated prices.
“So it’s an empty shell?”
—An empty shell? Precisely!
Choi Kang-wook was furious that an asset they had hoped to acquire was defective. Yoo Jae-won, however, had seen this many times in his previous life. In the secondhand market, one careless moment invited fraud. What shocked him was that Korea’s premier electronics company had resorted to the same tactics.
“How did you uncover this, Vice Chairman?”
If the intelligence team had been involved, the report would have reached Yoo Jae-won first. Yet his ID Talk showed no alerts from them.
—Several Ilseong Electronics employees have already been turned. And just now, a tip came in from a core insider.
Yoo Jae-won understood the situation at once. When a ship sank, some went down with it, but many packed their bags and jumped. Those people were now reaching out to Choi Kang-wook, the thickest lifeline available. Opportunists, perhaps, but Yoo Jae-won did not dislike them. Principle over profit? No—profit over principle. That was his way. Still, he had little use for those who were merely quick-witted without real ability. Such informants would receive fair compensation for their information and nothing more.
“If there’s an informant, most of it is probably true.”
—It is. I worry this will damage your larger plans, Chairman. The one silver lining is that they couldn’t openly strip Ilseong Electronics of its assets. After the foreign exchange crisis, capital flight is under heavy scrutiny, and the courts and tax authorities have grown stricter. With the Corruption Investigation Office law passed, the old “let’s all look the other way” attitude no longer works. They couldn’t commit outright embezzlement or breach of trust. So the large semiconductor plants and other major assets should still remain.
One question was now answered. Even after Ilseong Electronics’ bankruptcy, the lack of reaction from Japanese investors who had poured capital into the company finally made sense. The money from selling off internal assets had gone either into the Choi family’s pockets or to the Japanese investors.
Having finished his mental simulation, Yoo Jae-won issued concrete orders.
“Conduct due diligence as quickly as possible and file charges for embezzlement and breach of trust against everyone involved. Do not spare the Choi family. Work with the creditor group to have ID Technology acquire the semiconductor division, while the White Tiger Fund takes the remaining consumer electronics division and begins restructuring. Move slowly, though. Whenever defects surface, make negative remarks and act as if you’re pulling out. Just enough to prevent other buyers from taking it.”
—Understood, Chairman!
Yoo Jae-won’s basic policy remained unchanged. This time, however, he intended to layer in plenty of misdirection. Once the embezzlement and breach of trust became public, the creditor banks would grow desperate. If they could not recover their loans, it would immediately turn into bank insolvency. Under the IMF framework, failure to meet the stricter reserve requirements and non-performing loan ratios would skyrocket the risk of forced mergers. In the current situation, the only realistic path for the banks to recover any money was for ID Technology or the White Tiger Fund to acquire the assets.
“Oh! So Ilseong Electronics is becoming ID Technology’s semiconductor division? Then once we start making CPUs, we’ll be able to build computers using only ID Group components!”
Yeong-sik, who had been holding his breath while listening to the entire call, erupted the moment it ended. The now-grown Yeong-sik understood exactly what acquiring Ilseong Electronics would mean for the ID Group.
“Heh, we’re already making CPUs.”
Yoo Jae-won put on a deliberately arrogant expression while mentioning the mobile application processors that Lisa Su’s team continued to develop. Even after the prototype was completed, Lisa Su’s development team had not been disbanded. On the contrary, more development funds and personnel had been poured in to achieve steady performance improvements.
“Come on, those can’t be used in PCs. They’re barely good enough for touch phones.”
Yeong-sik mentioned touch phones. The Tiffany Phone touch version had not yet been officially revealed, but mass-production units had already been completed alongside the DAP. Given Yeong-sik’s security clearance, he could naturally reference the prototypes.
“Are you really so certain? You never know.”
Yoo Jae-won wagged his finger at Yeong-sik’s words, implying they would see. For someone who already knew the future technology tree, making confident predictions about the future was hardly difficult.
“Ah, really? But that would be pretty boring. High-end work would be impossible.”
“Hey, can’t you imagine MAP performance eventually surpassing regular CPUs?”
“Huh? Is that possible? MAP architecture is too simple. Floating-point operations would require far more calculations than a normal CPU.”
Yeong-sik’s head had clearly matured; technical jargon now flowed freely. Yet his observation was a brutal fact-check. Mobile application processors with simple logic circuits indeed suffered significant performance penalties in precise, complex calculations such as floating-point operations.
“On the other hand, clock speeds can be raised much more easily. And we can simply stack multiple identical cores to enable parallel processing.”
There were many other ways to increase speed. Multi-core designs and higher clock speeds were merely the basics. Multiple other techniques existed.
Ding!
While Yoo Jae-won and Yeong-sik bantered, the search bot results arrived. Surprisingly, the first alert came from the bot Yeong-sik had set up. Yoo Jae-won’s finished roughly thirty minutes later.
“Alright, let’s take a look.”
Being first to finish did not mean winning the bet. The density and accuracy of the search results would decide the outcome. Both men’s eyes sharpened as they examined the data.
The next day, the winner was revealed. Yeong-sik. He had finished faster and achieved higher accuracy in the big-data search. Yoo Jae-won readily acknowledged his defeat and handed over the prize—a one-month cloud system access pass.
The original bet had been a wish. The winner, Yeong-sik, had asked to use the research cloud system at ID Technology headquarters for one month. Yoo Jae-won gladly issued him a master ID. It allowed remote access to the cloud’s computing power from school or home without needing to visit in person.
Watching Yeong-sik light up more than he had when receiving a car, Yoo Jae-won did not forget to reflect on the cause of his loss. It was simple: bad luck. Although he knew the latest twenty-first-century algorithms, he also knew they could not be directly applied to the current system. The algorithm embedded in his search bot was therefore not significantly different from Yeong-sik’s. The difference lay in the starting points and the method of simultaneously accessing multiple servers. Yeong-sik had grabbed the main stem from the beginning, while Yoo Jae-won had only found the sweet potatoes.
One thing, however, was certain.
“By the way, the Japanese are acting strangely.”
The Japanese were indeed behaving oddly. The Kobe Steel quality manipulation scandal had triggered a massive plunge in the Japanese stock market. Although the index had fluctuated since, downward pressure remained strong and the Nikkei continued to fall. The losses must have been substantial, yet anger toward Abe was far milder than expected.
“In Korea, at least online, there would have been an explosion of rage.”
Japan was different. Only a few sites popular with younger users showed heated reactions; the rest were muted. Perhaps it was because posting comments was unfamiliar, or because expressing opinions in cyberspace still felt foreign. To Yoo Jae-won’s eyes, however, the public seemed far too passive.
“Should I change the plan?”
The thought that he might need to revise his Japan strategy crossed his mind. His approach had two tracks: attacking the exchange rate and attacking the securities market.
The yen exchange rate was already severely distorted by the carry trade. Had Japan’s economy been stable, the yen could have functioned as a secondary reserve currency and generated steady returns. But with Nasdaq’s collapse and the massive scandal hitting the Japanese economy, the unwinding of the yen carry trade had begun. Yoo Jae-won, George Soros, and countless hot-money players were now adding further distortion to the Japanese currency market.
—Today’s yen exchange rate: 108 yen per dollar!
Even as the Nikkei plunged, the yen’s value kept rising. As yen carry trades around the world were liquidated, transactions selling dollars and buying yen surged. Japan’s Ministry of Finance recognized the abnormality and rushed to release yen, but could not meet the distorted market demand. The faces of the ministry’s currency and foreign-exchange officials had turned ashen.
Japan’s foreign reserves ranked among the world’s highest, so it did not require IMF emergency relief like Korea had. Still, bureaucratic limitations caused it to miss every decisive moment for bold action, and losses continued to snowball.
The stock-market strategy was straightforward. Mass selling to apply downward pressure was basic. The core was to destroy the credibility of Japanese companies and trigger a crash. Using Chevron as leverage to expose the Kobe Steel quality manipulation scandal had been an excellent move. The profits from that day’s Nikkei plunge came not only from short selling but also from futures and put options.
Yoo Jae-won knew many hidden landmines buried inside Japan’s giant corporations. Kobe Steel had been a hand grenade; far larger bombs existed. His design was to detonate them in chain reaction, collapsing Japan’s credit and driving the Nikkei into freefall.
“Is Abe not that big a figure after all? Or are the Japanese simply numb to corruption?”
Even after running big-data searches with his personally crafted bot, Yoo Jae-won found the results difficult to accept.
“Why isn’t the outrage boiling over?”
It seemed Japanese public opinion would take time to reach a boil. The longer it dragged on, the greater the loss for Yoo Jae-won. He needed to conduct business across the entire world, not concentrate his capabilities solely on Japan. Moreover, with Grandfather Jeon Myeong-heon’s visit to the United States fast approaching, he concluded that settling matters within three weeks would be best.
“Then let’s try detonating something the size of dynamite this time.”
Having made his decision, Yoo Jae-won opened an IDW file on his computer. Its title read: Precise Analysis of Large-Scale Investment Losses by Japan’s Public Pension Fund.