The Bidding War (2)
While Young-hoon was on the phone with President Park of New Seoul Distribution, he searched through Deputy Hong's desk and drawers for the bidding documents, but they were nowhere to be found — stuffed away who knew where.
"Sir, I've looked through Deputy Hong's desk, but I can't find them anywhere. Could you send them over to me again? Do you happen to know my email address?"
Young-hoon recited his email address and waited for the bidding documents to arrive.
Even during that brief wait, all sorts of thoughts churned through his head.
First, he had reported the situation to his team leader, Deputy General Manager Cho. Cho pulled a face as if he'd never heard a word of it before.
In a word, he was screwed.
Cho had no time to waste, so he ordered Young-hoon to take full responsibility and back up the bidding project himself.
Son of a—! What kind of joke was this? Bidding unit prices didn't materialize out of thin air. You had to study the blueprints and specifications before setting prices, and the construction costs were supposed to come from the agency while the product prices were provided by headquarters. With nothing but a blank slate in front of him, the first thing to do was receive whatever materials the agency sent over.
About thirty minutes later, the email arrived.
The file was enormous — over ten gigabytes. Opening the attachments revealed the blueprints and specifications. More than four thousand ceiling-mounted heating and cooling units. That made this, at minimum, a massive tender worth over ten billion won.
Of course, the products had procurement prices registered with the Public Procurement Service, but in a lowest-bid auction those registered prices were thoroughly ignored. Naturally, their competitor, Samjung Electronics, would disregard them just the same.
This was a private dogfight between Samjung Electronics and LK Electronics and no one else. Plenty of small and mid-sized firms would enter the tender as well, but they couldn't compete on price, so the winner would be either LK Electronics or Samjung Electronics, full stop.
From here on, it was a game of reading the other side's mind.
The bidding deadline was tomorrow, which meant the bid price had to be calculated by end of day. It was nothing short of a state of emergency.
And in the middle of all this, group messages kept flooding in from his girls — Five Girls — who had no idea what was going on. If he hadn't been swamped, he'd have been happy to play along, but this was wartime. He ignored them without a shred of guilt.
Even Director Yoon, honorable retirement looming though it was, attended the emergency meeting. Fortunately, the agency had worked out the construction costs in meticulous detail, so all that remained was to set the unit prices per product.
But the marketing department — the sales side — couldn't unilaterally decide on product prices. An agreement with the manufacturing plant was required, and drafting the approval request and getting it signed all the way up to a plant executive meant passing through at least ten stages of authorization. Even in the best case, that would take two days or more.
So they decided to skip every one of those stages. The price would have to be settled in a head-to-head showdown between the marketing executive and the plant's executive.
Armed with the unit prices decided in an internal meeting, Director Yoon, the Sales Support Team Leader, and Deputy General Manager Cho went to see Managing Director Kim.
Time flew by like a typhoon. Lunch was, of course, skipped by everyone.
All that remained now was the final showdown with Managing Director Kim and the manufacturing plant executives.
Director Yoon, the Sales Support Team Leader, and Deputy General Manager Cho got chewed out by Managing Director Kim in what was nearly a torrent of curses.
"You people! The bid closes tomorrow and you're filing the report now? How does that work? And you knew full well how nitpicky those plant bastards are, and you still wait until now to report! If we call the plant out of the blue and notify them of a bid price we decided on our own, it's obvious they'll throw a fit! Is this how you people do your jobs?"
After holding forth for a good long while, Managing Director Kim seemed to calm himself somewhat, and in a noticeably more level tone he demanded a solution.
"In any case, the mess has already happened, so let's solve it first and assign blame later. I don't have time to read a report on this, so explain it to me in detail yourself, Cho."
"Managing Director, first of all, I apologize. This tender is a project by Hankook University to replace the aging air conditioners in its lecture halls, professors' research offices, and administrative offices with ceiling-mounted units during winter break. That's 4,137 indoor units. Our simulation put the product cost at 5.22 billion won, and the construction costs calculated by the agency came to 4.77 billion won. We arrived at a total of 9.99 billion won. We had the Sales Support Team verify the agency's construction estimate, and it seems to have been calculated rather tight."
"So how much do you think Samjung Electronics will bid?"
"Most likely under ten billion won, sir."
"Then Samjung will assume we're bidding under ten billion too, won't they? Wouldn't they have already guessed we'd come in around 9.99 billion?"
"That's a very real possibility."
"The way I see it, if we don't go in under 9.9 billion, we have no chance of winning this thing. I'll call the air conditioner plant myself, so hold on a moment."
It was clear the man hadn't earned his Managing Director title by playing go-stop. He sized up the competitor's expected bid with pinpoint accuracy.
Managing Director Kim spent some twenty minutes on the phone with the plant executive. He would bellow, then drop to a honeyed murmur, then bellow again, then coo once more — in a word, slapping one cheek while stroking the other. After a long call, he finally seemed to have wrangled an OK.
"Thank God plant executive Kwak is my junior from school — otherwise it never would've happened. Here's what we do: bid 9.89 billion. Notify the agency — 4.72 billion in construction, 5.17 billion for the product. And once you see how things stand at the bid opening, squeeze the construction side for up to another fifty million won of slack. All that matters is the number we write down, doesn't it?"
"The construction estimate is already tight, sir. If we cut another fifty million from here, I think the agency will push back. And if we pass the entire fifty million of slack onto the agency, I doubt they'll have anything left even if we do win the bid."
"Cho, are you on the agency's payroll? The company gives plenty of leeway too! If the construction runs short, we can always subsidize it later. Winning first is what matters. Would you rather lose the bid and get torn apart, or win it and clean up after? Win it first, then think! Have the bid results reported to me by tomorrow. Call in with the outcome either way before anything else. Now then — everyone out. Cho, you stay."
A short while later, only the two of them remained in the executive's office.
"Cho, how do you manage to botch things this badly? I've been working this hard to push you up to Department Head, and you keep disappointing me?"
"Managing Director, I'm sorry. I have no excuses."
"Who's handling New Seoul Distribution?"
"Deputy Hong Ji-sam, sir."
"That explains it... Fine, leave it be. Word is his father is being promoted to Vice Chairman and coming over to our company. Don't lay a finger on that Hong fellow. Not for nothing."
"Understood, sir. I'll notify the agency to submit their bid at this price."
"We have to win tomorrow's bid. Got it? Now go."
Deputy General Manager Cho hated Deputy Hong's guts — hated him enough to want to stomp him into the ground. If the man weren't royalty, he'd have been sent packing long ago and then some.
Even Managing Director Kim seemed to tiptoe around Deputy Hong. A Managing Director, weathered through every storm land and sky could throw at him, bowing his head to some mere deputy — it was, in a word, infuriating.
But what could you do? The brat had been born with a diamond spoon in his mouth. Managing Director Kim's was probably a dirt spoon with only a little dirt shaken off, and Cho himself was a dirt spoon through and through.
Watching quietly from the sidelines, Young-hoon saw that when Deputy General Manager Cho returned to the office, he personally called President Park of New Seoul Distribution, explained the situation, and secured his agreement.
Cho was sharp, and he tied up loose ends cleanly. If only he'd never gotten tangled up with that Hong character, he was unquestionably a man of real talent — the kind who could climb to executive rank on his own merits.
A hurricane of a morning had blown past. Everyone had skipped lunch and was running on fumes.
Deputy General Manager Cho had gone out to grab a belated lunch, and the rest of Marketing Team 3 had picked up something quick before trickling back into the office.
Park Dae-ri invited Young-hoon for a cup of coffee, so they migrated to the break room.
"I swear, I will never understand how that bastard Hong lives his life."
"Tell me about it. Stashing a project that big in his desk drawer — it doesn't compute. But watch him run a fake delivery scheme and he's a maestro."
"He just hates being bothered. He probably figured if he took this one on he might not even recoup the effort, so he lumped it. What other reason would there be?"
"I wonder what that bastard's doing right now. Does he even know the office has been turned upside down?"
"Wouldn't Deputy General Manager Cho have told him?"
The man in question, Deputy Hong, was at home. He'd pleaded sick and was lying in his room — though in truth, he was simply hungover. Yesterday had been the birthday of a friend he'd known since childhood. The friend was throwing a party, so he'd attended with his disposable girlfriend of the week and enjoyed a night of utter debauchery. He'd stayed up until dawn and come home mid-morning to rest, only for his team leader, Deputy General Manager Cho, to call. Cho asked about the New Seoul Distribution account, and his memory was hazy. He'd heard something about it maybe ten days ago, but he'd let it go in one ear and out the other, so his recollection was spotty at best. In the end, Cho couldn't even bring himself to yell at him — just told him to rest up at home and hung up politely.
What is this uneasy feeling? Ah, whatever. I'll find out what's going on when I clock in tomorrow. Better get some more sleep.
Without a care in the world, Deputy Hong drifted back off to dreamland.
Young-hoon was now at the bank.
After all the chaos he'd stirred up, Manager Kim hadn't asked too many questions about why he was leaving. He'd walked out of the office, and about ten minutes later, he found the bank. The company's own branch was right there on the premises, but he'd deliberately come to this one a little farther away — the last thing he needed was to be spotted by someone he knew.
He pulled a number ticket. Six or so people ahead of him in the queue. A ten-minute wait, roughly.
While he waited, he browsed the internet on his phone. Just as President Lee Jae-man had said, "A Loving Heart" was climbing the music charts, and "Love After Separation" was riding high on the real-time search rankings as well. It struck him as almost surreal that a song of his was enjoying this kind of popularity. Strictly speaking, it wasn't his — it was a song he'd pulled out of the ring of the Archmage Hains — but still.
He was scrolling through the comments on the articles when his number flashed up on the display board.
"Guest number 231, how may I help you?"
Approaching the counter, he was greeted by a pretty bank teller in her twenties, smiling brightly as she asked his business.
"Oh, yes. I'd like to deposit these checks into my account, please."
Young-hoon handed over his passbook and the checks, blushing for no good reason. Perhaps she found the look on his face endearing, because the teller accepted them with her smile firmly in place.
But the moment she read the amounts written on the checks, her face froze solid.
Saying nothing, she ran a query on the terminal in front of her, then spoke up carefully.
"Um, sir? I'm terribly sorry, but would you mind waiting just a moment?"
"I'm sorry? No, you just need to deposit these, don't you? Is there some kind of problem?"
Young-hoon couldn't imagine what the issue might be, yet a nagging worry crept in — was something wrong with the checks?
"No, sir, not at all. It's simply that we need to verify a few things. Thank you for your patience."
"Fine. Then please make it quick."
Two or three minutes after the teller excused herself and disappeared, a middle-aged man in his forties — his hairline already in full retreat — appeared and escorted Young-hoon back to his private office.