New Investment (8)
I went into the office.
Dong-ho, who was there alone, raised a hand in greeting.
“Why are you so late?”
“I had to stop by and meet Chairman Yoo Jae-ho.”
“Oh, really?”
Back when I first mentioned Chairman Yoo Jae-ho, people had reacted as if I’d said something unbelievable. These days, though, they barely blinked, as if I’d just come back from visiting some neighborhood uncle.
“When did you get in?”
“I clocked in on time.”
“Diligent as ever.”
“Of course. A branch manager has to set an example.”
He looked like the type who’d slack off just enough to coast on his salary, but in reality he was a pretty conscientious man.
I liked that about him.
I glanced around the office. Without me even noticing, all sorts of equipment and furniture had been added. Kim Beom-seok had even brought in gear for music production.
“We’re moving soon, so start packing your stuff ahead of time.”
At that, Dong-ho tilted his head.
“Where are we moving to?”
“Yuseong Town.”
“Why there?”
“You know Yuseong Trading is selling off Yuseong Town D-Dong this time, right?”
“I saw the article. They’re really selling it?”
“Yes. We’re going to buy it.”
Dong-ho’s eyes widened.
“What? We’re buying it?”
“Yes. If we keep it a clean deal, they said they’d let us have it a little cheaper.”
“Hmm, a clean deal always comes with a discount. That’s just the rule.”
This wasn’t just something I was saying for effect. Deals on buildings that large came with a mountain of incidental costs.
And in this case, we were planning to leave building management to Yuseong Trading and security to Y-One.
From their perspective, even after selling the building, they’d still secure a long-term client. That gave them room to lower the price accordingly.
“So how much is it?”
“Probably a little over 700 billion won.”
“Huh. We talk about trillions all the time, so 700 billion somehow sounds cheap.”
“Right?”
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
“After everything you’ve done for us, shouldn’t they just give it to us for free?”
“It’s not Chairman Yoo Jae-ho’s personal building.”
It was a precious asset belonging to Yuseong Trading’s shareholders. That meant the sale process had to be fair and transparent.
“But do we really need to move? There are only three of us anyway.”
That was possible because we were outsourcing everything else to headquarters.
It wasn’t the branch supporting headquarters. It was the other way around.
“How long do you expect the two of us to keep having this little private nest? We’re going to be hiring more people from here on out, so we need to prepare now.”
I planned to split the investment division into two separate teams: one for entertainment, one for fashion.
“And honestly, this building’s security is terrible.”
“Why would we need security?”
“The sign isn’t up yet, but if people find out this place is Continue Capital, don’t you think the people who lost money to us might show up swinging clubs?”
“Ah, that could happen. The security at Yuseong Town is on another level, though. Even if labor unions come marching in to protest, they don’t even blink.”
“Exactly.”
We were still talking when Kim Beom-seok walked in.
Dong-ho turned to his friend. “Hey! We’re moving.”
“Where to?”
“Yuseong Town.”
“Huh?”
I told Kim Beom-seok that we were going to buy the building.
“You should suggest that Mabel Entertainment move in too. Tell them the rent’ll be cheap. It’s a pain having to go back and forth between agencies.”
At that, Dong-ho looked happier than Kim Beom-seok did.
“Oh! That’s a great idea. Then we’ll be able to see LunaTeens too.”
“……”
His mind was nothing but girl groups.
“So once the purchase is done, we’ll move into Yuseong Town?”
“Why wait until then? There are plenty of empty offices already.”
Now that the affiliates had been moving out, there were a lot of vacant floors.
Since the building had been earmarked for sale, they hadn’t taken on any new tenants after that either. And since it had originally been used as office space, there was no real need for interior construction. We’d only need to bring in some furniture and equipment.
Dong-ho said, visibly moved, “It’s not even rent. Just thinking about buying a place and moving in makes my chest swell. They say Koreans are all about real estate, and I guess that blood runs in me too.”
“Save the emotion for later. Go over to Yuseong Trading and negotiate the purchase.”
At my words, Dong-ho panicked.
“Huh? Me?”
“Then who else?”
“Who’s coming out on their side?”
This wasn’t just any building. Among commercial properties, it was the kind of deal that only came around once in a blue moon.
At this scale, I figured it’d probably be...
“A division head from construction, maybe? Someone named Choi Man-bu, was it?”
“……”
Dong-ho looked flustered. “No, seriously, does it make any sense to send someone who’s never even done a single apartment deal to negotiate a 700-billion-won office building?”
“You don’t need to worry.”
“How am I not supposed to worry? The construction division’s headquarters are in Yongsan, aren’t they? What if I ask the price and say I’m not buying—aren’t they going to ask if I came here to buy a building or get thrown out?”
“……”
Just what kind of place was Yongsan, anyway?
“They’ll just present the price and terms themselves. There’s no way they’d gouge us just because they know us, right?”
“Actually, people you know are scarier. You know Minsik? He bought a used car from a relative who sells used cars, and the repair bills ended up costing as much as the car itself.”
“Ah, that’s terrible for Minsik.”
I had no idea who Minsik was, but this was exactly why conglomerates should be allowed into the used-car market.
Still, this was a big-company asset we could trust, so there was no reason to worry. Why would they try to squeeze us over a building worth only a few hundred billion won when we were doing business together on projects worth tens of trillions?
“Me negotiating a building sale with Yuseong Trading’s boss...”
I said to Dong-ho, who was already starting to shrink in on himself, “Why are you being so timid when you’re the branch manager of Continue Capital Korea? Maybe not against electronics, but you don’t have to feel inferior to trading companies.”
“You’re saying that because you don’t know me well enough. I still have a bit of a small-citizen complex.”
“……”
I understood that feeling better than anyone.
He’d spent his whole life as an ordinary little guy, and only now was he finally getting comfortable enough to breathe, so of course I understood.
I patted Dong-ho on the shoulder.
“Forget all that nonsense, square your shoulders, and go in there with your head held high.”
I walked into a café near the DA Securities headquarters.
It had been a while since I’d been in Yeouido.
Maybe because I’d come right around the time people were heading home from work, the streets were packed with office workers on their way out. Just by looking at their faces, I could get a rough sense of how the market had fared that day.
I waited a little while, and then Sung Yoon-ah appeared.
“Have you been waiting long?”
“I just got here too.”
She looked lovely even in casual clothes, but she still suited a suit best.
We sat across from each other and drank our coffee.
“Judging by everyone’s faces, the market must have bounced a little in the final stretch.”
“It dropped more than 1 percent, actually.”
“Really? Then why does everyone look so cheerful?”
“Because it’s Friday.”
“Ah...”
If the weekend was starting tomorrow, I guess losing money was still tolerable enough to laugh about.
Embarrassed that I’d been wrong, I quickly changed the subject.
“Yeouido still has so many office workers. Feels like I was working here only yesterday.”
“It really hasn’t been that long.”
I remembered something I’d once heard from a professor.
“Do you know why Yeouido became Korea’s financial center?”
“Hmm. Why?”
She wore the expression of someone who already knew the answer but was asking anyway.
“Around the 1980s, the government started trying to create Korea’s Wall Street by attracting financial firms to Yeouido. First, the Korea Stock Exchange, which had been in Myeong-dong, moved here, and all the financial institutions scattered around the city followed.”
Finance and industry were like two wings on the same body.
For industry to grow, finance had to support it. That was why every country tried to cultivate its financial sector once its industrial base grew large enough.
So Korea developed Yeouido in Seoul as its financial center, while China cultivated Pudong in Shanghai as its own.
“Once the exchange moved, the brokerages followed on their own. These days everything can be handled online, but back then people still had to go to the exchange in person all the time. And at the time, the closer you were to the exchange, the faster your order went through.”
Sung Yoon-ah’s eyes widened.
“Really?”
“Why not? YK Securities even claims that because they use the same building as the exchange, their orders go through 0.004 seconds faster since they don’t have to pass through a server.”
In ordinary life, 0.004 seconds meant nothing. But in the financial markets, a thousandth of a second could mean hundreds of billions of won shifting hands.
Anyone who’d traded stocks knew that if two orders were sent at the same time, the one that arrived even 0.1 seconds earlier got filled first. If they arrived simultaneously, the larger order got priority.
In practice, tiny variables like the internet line, the server, and even the weather could create small differences in speed.
Most securities firms used direct lines connected straight to the exchange. They were more stable and faster, allowing them to process a huge volume of trades.
That was why institutions could trade faster than individual investors even when they received the same information at the same time.
“So the securities firms that use the exchange the most are clustered in Yeouido, while private equity firms are scattered around Gangnam.”
“What about the Gwanghwamun and Jongno areas? Aren’t there a lot there too?”
“That’s where all the embassies are concentrated. Foreign financial firms like that.”
“Ah! So that’s why.”
Sung Yoon-ah stirred her coffee with a straw and asked, “What did you do during the day?”
“I met Chairman Yoo Jae-ho.”
I told her what we’d discussed.
Sung Yoon-ah jumped in surprise.
“Oh! You’re buying the Yuseong Town building? There must be a lot of firms competing to win the mandate for that sale.”
At that scale, the brokerage fee alone would be in the tens of billions of won. Of course everyone would be fighting over it.
I straightened my back and lifted my chin.
“I’m a Gangnam landlord now.”
At this rate, hadn’t I earned the right to log into Capria TV and throw a few gifts at some streamer?
Sung Yoon-ah let out a small laugh.
“When you put it that way, you suddenly sound kind of cool.”
Once the small talk had run its course, we stood up from our seats.
The reason we were meeting today was that the Mini Cooper we’d ordered had finally come in.
“I could pick it up on my own, you know.”
“I’m the one who introduced you, so I should see it through to the end.”
“Is there even anything to see through?”
“Well, whether the engine’s fine, whether the car runs properly, that sort of thing.”
“You can even tell that?”
Sung Yoon-ah answered with confidence. “What’s with that tone? I own a Mini too.”
“I know. You drove it to the office every now and then.”
That was why she’d asked me to introduce her to the dealer in the first place.
“Come to think of it, what’s your younger brother doing these days? Working, or running a business?”
“He’s in college. Second year.”
“Oh! Then there’s quite an age gap.”
“There is.”
“Is your brother at Korea University, by any chance?”
I shook my head firmly.
“As if. He’s just going to some university out in Incheon somewhere.”
“Didn’t you help him study when he was a student?”
Even my parents had once hoped for that.
They’d thought maybe if I taught her diligently enough, my little sister might get into a good university too.
But...
“After trying to teach her for a while, I realized something.”
“What was that?”
“There are people in this world who can study, and people who can’t.”
Unfortunately, my younger sister was the latter.
My parents had tried to make her study until middle school and eventually gave up. And it wasn’t as if our family had ever been the type to force academics on anyone in the first place.
Sung Yoon-ah propped her chin on one hand and looked at me intently.
“You really do like your little brother.”
“Why would you get that impression?”
“You know that? You smile every time you talk about him.”
“Me?”
Could that just be because my toes had been itching nonstop since earlier?
“An older brother buying his little brother or sister a Mini as their first car—that’s enviable.”
“Didn’t your parents buy your Mini for you, Yoon-ah?”
“Come on. A mother buying it and an older brother buying it are totally different things.”
I had no idea what the difference was, but if she said there was one, then I suppose there was.
“Come to think of it, what was your first car, Miru?”
I thought back for a moment.
“I don’t really remember my first car. For a while, though, I rode motorcycles pretty hard.”
“Oh! So motorcycle riding is your hobby?”
“Not a hobby. It was for business.”
“What kind of business?”
I grinned.
“Heh. I wasn’t planning to brag, so I didn’t mention it, but back in the day I was a fried-chicken delivery ace.”
Sung Yoon-ah stared at me in disbelief.
“That’s not business. That’s just a delivery job, isn’t it?”
I wagged a finger from side to side and explained.
“No, no. I worked with a sense of mission and ownership—‘Get the chicken into the customer’s mouth before it goes cold.’”
Because I was the owner.
For the record, after the group was dissolved, Limited Chicken was sold to an American private equity fund, and it’s still doing well to this day. Either way, chicken was delicious.
“But isn’t riding a motorcycle kind of dangerous?”
I nodded.
“It is. Extremely dangerous.”
In fact, there weren’t many people who understood just how dangerous motorcycles were better than I did.
If you made one wrong move in an accident, you could end up regressing ten years.
I was worried I might regress again, so now I didn’t even look at two-wheeled vehicles anymore.