A New Investment (7)
I gave the troubled chairman the solution I had in mind.
"How about splitting the group in two?"
"What?"
"Let Hwaan Energy go to the second son, and give the rest to the eldest."
"Wouldn't Hwaan Energy be too large for that?"
"If it hadn't been for Vice President Heo Min-woong, Hwaan Group would have backed out of hydrogen energy entirely when the Thomas Motors disaster hit. He's the one who kept it alive this far."
Chairman Heo Seonghun's brow furrowed slightly.
If I hadn't been the one sitting across from him, he might have snapped at me. That was how sensitive group division was.
"Do you think it's as easy as you make it sound? As you know, Hwaan Group's holding company is Hwaan. If you control Hwaan, you control the entire family of affiliates."
Of all Chairman Heo's assets, the most important was the holding company, Hwaan.
Inheritance only mattered if the value was roughly equal.
That was why the successor got the holding company and the key affiliates, while the other children were given shares in non-core subsidiaries, real estate, and cash.
In the end, the person who inherited Hwaan became the master of the vast Hwaan Group empire. And that decision rested solely on the chairman's discretion.
To hand down Hwaan Energy separately, Hwaan would have to sell off its stake in the company—but Heo Min-woong didn't have the money to buy it.
Maybe it would have been possible if they had sold before the stock price ran up. But now it had climbed too high.
I offered him a simple answer.
"Why not split the holding company through a corporate spin-off? Then your sons won't end up clawing at each other over it."
"Hah..."
Chairman Heo seemed to have a knot in his stomach, because he downed a shot of soju in one go.
I had noticed it before, but the way he drank was fierce.
"And if you don't split it, but just pass it all to one son?"
"When you choose a successor, the question isn't whether he's the eldest or the youngest, or who contributed more to the group."
"Then what is it?"
"Only the shareholders' interests. The shareholders of Hwaan Energy like Vice President Heo Min-woong. If you try to push him out, the backlash will be enormous."
Come to think of it, it was ironic.
He had probably put him there in the first place with the intention of handing Hwaan Energy down to him. And then the company had suddenly grown larger than even the group's traditional core businesses.
In other words, it had become too big to carve off and give away.
I told the man who was still agonizing over it, "This isn't something you need to decide right away, so why not watch a little longer before making a call?"
"How much longer?"
"Three years should be enough."
If he made his decision now, he would have no choice but to choose Heo Minhong. And if that happened, Heo Min-woong would be driven out of the group. So for the moment, he needed time.
Chairman Heo nodded.
"Then let's just drink."
That was as far as I could help. The rest would be up to Heo Min-woong.
We clinked our soju glasses together.
I got up when the sun was already high overhead.
"Ugh..."
When I came into the living room, Sun-woo was there.
"Who did you drink with so much last night?"
"Chairman Heo Seonghun."
Sun-woo nearly jumped at my answer.
"What? The guy who got sentenced after pretending to punch a prosecutor who asked whether he had assaulted someone in court, and then said, 'I just gave him a few shots to the jaw'?"
"Yeah. That guy."
So while the other chaebol chairmen were going to prison for embezzlement and breach of trust, he had gone in proudly for assault. As always, after the state had weighed his contributions to the country and the negative impact his imprisonment might have on the economy, he had been granted a suspended sentence on appeal.
"Why was he with you?"
"He's been worrying a lot lately about the glorious future of the group. I gave him a little counseling."
"Why would he ask you for advice?"
"Exactly."
We ordered lunch after a long while apart.
The menu was hangover soup.
My stomach felt off, so I just scooped up the broth and ate it in a lazy, half-hearted way.
I had no idea how some old chairman could drink that well.
I asked Sun-woo, "How's the company formation going?"
"I'm working hard on it."
In the end, Sun-woo had started a game company.
The name was SW Games.
Of course, the investment money came from Continue Capital.
The structure was simple: we created a separate U.S. corporation, made Sun-woo the owner of that entity, and had that corporation invest in SW Games to own 100 percent of the shares.
Sun-woo had been telling me about the trends in the Korean game industry lately.
"After the rate-manipulation scandal, public opinion toward P2W games has turned negative, and now P2E games are flooding the market. The so-called cash-out games."
"Haven't people been making money from games for ages?"
P2E stood for Play to Earn.
Trading expensive items for cash in online games had existed since the earliest days, and the Crown currency in Brotherhood M was practically cash already.
"That's true, but these days the trend is to fuse it with cryptocurrency."
The whole thing was kind of amusing.
You played the game, exchanged the in-game currency for a cryptocurrency issued by the game company, and then cashed that cryptocurrency out again through an exchange.
"That's not a game. That's pachinko."
Pachinko, strictly speaking, wasn't gambling.
All you could win with the balls was a prize. The only difference was that there happened to be a pawnshop right next door that would buy that prize for cash.
Apply that to a P2E game, and the game was pachinko, the balls were cryptocurrency, and the exchange was the pawnshop.
"From the game company's point of view, it's a jackpot. They make money selling the game, and they can make money selling the coin too."
"Then if the company suddenly dumps a ton of coins on the market, wouldn't the value crash?"
"That's a risk, yeah. So some companies are trying to combine blockchain trading, DeFi, and NFTs and call it an entire coin ecosystem."
"..."
They really did throw every impressive-sounding buzzword into the pot.
Still, I heard the effect was huge, since their stock prices were skyrocketing.
"You're not planning to make a cash-out game too, are you?"
Sun-woo shook his head.
"What are you talking about? I need to make a gigantic MMORPG set in a fantasy world."
"That sounds like a great idea."
It was Sun-woo's dream and his goal.
That was why he had worked so hard at LD Studio.
Right before my regression, WeChant had released Pangaea, the VR MMORPG Sun-woo had once been developing before he abandoned it, and the game had become a massive hit. Thanks to Pangaea's success, WeChant rose to first in market capitalization in China and second in the world.
Snow Crash was, naturally, first, because it was the company that had built the underlying technology in the first place.
"Money? I'll support you with as much as you need, so build whatever game you want."
"Even if it takes hundreds of billions of won?"
"Even if it takes trillions, I don't care."
What was the point of making money if not to support a friend's game?
Until now, he had probably been forced to work under all kinds of restrictions at LD Studio. Now, though, the road was open for him to make exactly what he wanted.
And if he still couldn't make it properly with this kind of backing... well, that would be his own fault.
"Anyway, now we need office space too."
I said it flatly.
"Gangnam."
"Not Pangyo?"
"If we're commuting, Gangnam is closer, isn't it?"
"But rent in Gangnam is expensive."
"Don't worry about that. A guy I know just happened to say he's selling a building, so I'm planning to meet him later."
"Who is it?"
"JaeTiger."
"...Huh?"
Yuseong Town, Gangnam.
I met Chairman Yoo Jae-ho in his office on the forty-sixth floor of Building A.
"It seems Representative Namgoong Seok has finally declared his candidacy in the primary."
Representative Namgoong Seok's bid for the presidency was one of the biggest political stories in the country.
Chairman Im Changsik had congratulated him with a smile, but inside, he must have been burning alive.
He had probably been thinking the presidency was practically his, only to be blindsided by an unexpectedly powerful rival.
The non-mainstream lawmakers of the Woori Kookmin Party were lining up one after another to declare support for Namgoong Seok and join his camp.
With public sentiment for a change in administration running so high, once Namgoong Seok beat Chairman Im in the primary, the road to the presidency would be almost a straight shot.
"I was honestly a little surprised watching it all unfold. When I first said we should back Representative Namgoong Seok for president, I thought it would be impossible. But just the other day, he overtook Chairman Im and came in first in the polls for the next presidency."
"Isn't that a good thing?"
"The chaebols don't seem to think so."
That was because Representative Namgoong Seok had announced he would revise the Commercial Act to shut down the tricks the chaebols used.
They couldn't make a big fuss because of public opinion, but even owners of companies with market caps of less than a few hundred billion won were protesting.
Well, dogs can bark all they like; the train still moves on.
We moved on to the real business.
"Construction of the data center and the acquisition of related companies are still proceeding according to plan. We're also developing a new semiconductor to use in the data center."
Korea was a semiconductor powerhouse, and everyone knew it.
But while the country was strong in finished products, it was weak in materials, parts, and equipment. It was strong in memory semiconductors but weak in non-memory. Strong in manufacturing, weak in design.
Yuseong Electronics understood those problems very well.
They had acquired Dongwoo Precision to strengthen their investment in equipment, and they were buying up memory semiconductor design firms and nurturing them.
"The trend from here on out is custom chip design."
Big Tech companies that had achieved economies of scale were moving into an era where they designed and used their own chips.
The first company to stand out there was Enple.
In my previous life, Enple had developed its own chipset around NP Semi and then embedded it in its own devices, completely overturning the memory semiconductor market.
But this time, Yuseong Electronics had acquired that company.
Even if the chips weren't as powerful as Enple's, if they could design and release something good enough, wouldn't that be enough to reshape the industry landscape in the years ahead?
"Vice Chairman Kwon Hyeok-jun told me something similar. He said that thanks to those acquisitions, Yuseong Electronics' ability to develop system semiconductors had been accelerated by a year and a half."
A year and a half might not sound like much, but in an advanced industry, it was a massive leap forward.
If that was the value of the advice I had given, maybe it was worth more than ten trillion won.
So naturally, that was why he was cooperating so actively with what I was doing.
"Do you remember LunaVax?"
"Of course."
About a year ago, I had asked Yuseong Bio to invest in LunaVax's drug development.
"How's it going?"
"They've moved into clinical trials for a pediatric lymphoma treatment."
Developing a new drug was no easy task. Even if a hundred compounds entered clinical trials, fewer than one would actually make it through Phase 3 and reach the market.
"It's still too early to say for sure, but the mood seems pretty good."
"I'll have to tell David Lockhart."
"Wouldn't it be disheartening if you told him in advance and then it failed?"
"He'd expect that much. Just knowing it's being tried at all will make him happy."
In any case, it would work out in the end.
I offered my thanks on David's behalf.
"Thank you for the investment."
"Then I should be the one saying that. I heard you recently proposed investing in Areum."
"Yes."
"I'm really glad. She's a talented girl, and thanks to meeting you, she's gotten her chance. I'm sure Areum will do well."
"I think so too."
I casually brought up the reason I had come today.
"Come to think of it, I heard rumors that one of the Yuseong Town buildings is being put up for sale."
Chairman Yoo nodded.
"The data center is costing more to build than I expected. Since one of the affiliates has already moved out, I was planning to sell Building D anyway."
The Yuseong Town complex, completed about ten years ago, consisted of four buildings and was currently owned by Yuseong Trading, which leased space to other affiliates.
Yuseong Trading had announced it would be selling one of them.
They had sold it in my previous life too, but the timing was a little earlier this time.
"Sell it to us."
At my words, he looked surprised.
"I thought you weren't very interested in real estate investment."
"It's for practical use. A friend is starting a game company and needs a place to work."
This time, he looked genuinely taken aback.
"You're buying a building because of a friend?"
"Of course, he's not just any friend."
"Then what is he?"
"A close friend."
"..."
And as a bonus, I was planning to use it as our Korean branch too.
Right now, the office was rented month to month. If we were going to keep doing business in Korea, we needed a proper base. We also needed to hire staff and split departments, so the bigger the building, the better.
"Are you really planning to buy it?"
"If the price is right. Do I get a friend discount, by any chance?"
Chairman Yoo thought for a moment, then asked, "What number were you looking at?"
"..."
Did he perhaps grow up in Yongsan?
That was an excellent line, very much like the owner of a phone company.
I remembered the selling price of the Yuseong Town building from my previous life.
"If you go through open bidding, I think it'll land around 750 billion won. If we acquire it, we'll leave building management and security with Yuseong Trading and Y-One just as they are, so please take that into account and cut us a little slack. We'll do a clean cash deal—no consortium structure, no fuss."
It was coming from me, the man who had once hit a seller rating of 97 degrees on Carrot Market, so he could trust it.
How was a person supposed to live doing nothing but stocks every day?
He needed at least one building in Gangnam.