Dongwoo Precision (1)
Seonwu looked at the account and asked, “So how much of this is mine?”
Out of the initial investment, I’d put in 300 million won and Seonwu had put in 200 million.
That made the ratio six to four.
“If we count the leverage you pulled, am I looking at something like two billion won being my share?”
“Without your 200 million, I couldn’t have leveraged that much in the first place.”
Seonwu shrugged.
“You did all the work anyway.”
“Fair enough.”
“I’d be happy with two billion, honestly.”
I said it as if I were doing him a favor.
“I’ll keep 10 billion, and you take 3 billion.”
Seonwu’s eyes went wide.
“Oh! Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t change your mind later.”
“I won’t.”
He’d done me a huge favor in my first life. Was this really too much to give back?
“What should I do with the money? Buy a car? Maybe a house?”
Seonwu looked like he was already dreaming.
And no wonder. Twenty million won had turned into 3 billion in less than a month. Even that alone was a fortune he’d never been able to touch in his past life.
If I’d been the old me, I would’ve felt like I owned the world. But compared to the goals I had ahead of me, this was still nothing.
For an individual, it was an outrageous sum. In the investment world, it was barely pocket change.
It was enough to say I’d finally gathered the seed capital to try something real.
I had no intention of fussing around with a few billion or even a few hundred billion. If I was going to start, I was going to play at least in the tens or hundreds of trillions.
I asked him seriously, “So what’ll it be? Are you pulling the money out here, or are you going to double down?”
Seonwu answered with equal seriousness.
“Hmm. If it’s 3 billion, maybe I should cash out?”
“……”
That was the normal reaction, I supposed.
If I hadn’t regressed, maybe I would’ve thought the same. What couldn’t you do with 3 billion won?
“You said your dream was to start a game company and make the games you want, right?”
“Yeah.”
“If you keep investing, I’ll make that money for you.”
“Really?”
“I told you before. Chairman Aaron Baker once made a village 60,000 times its money. And you’re thinking of quitting when we’ve only made ten times ours?”
Seonwu gave me a look of utter disbelief.
“Six thousand times 3 billion is 18 trillion, you know.”
“That kind of number isn’t hard.”
“Do you have more information on something else?”
I nodded.
“Of course. Plenty.”
After a moment’s thought, Seonwu lifted a finger and said, “Fine. Let’s double down!”
* * *
Seonwu went back to work at the company, and I spent the day combing through my memories of this period while looking for the next target to invest in.
Just gathering data online made the day disappear before I knew it.
Working at a brokerage, you ended up seeing a lot of wealthy people. Every time that happened, I used to imagine where I’d put the money if I ever got my hands on 100 million or 1 billion won.
But now that I’d actually ended up with more than 10 billion, I found it surprisingly hard to decide where to put it.
Investing in a rigged stock like last time would be nice, but opportunities like that didn’t come around every day, and if I poured this much money into a single name, the share price would shoot up immediately.
Even if it wasn’t a manipulated stock, there were plenty of shares you could buy and see rise tenfold or more. The problem was that it usually took years.
Maybe later. For now, I intended to throw long-term investing out the window and focus entirely on ultra-short-term trades.
So what would be good?
I was mulling it over when my phone rang.
When I saw the name on the screen, I answered with a grin.
“Long time no see, Sunbae.”
* * *
Lee Dong-ho, assistant manager in the research department at DA Securities, was seriously considering changing jobs.
With the company in turmoil after the Primus Fund scandal, a lot of people had been asking how that employee had uncovered the rot and what his real purpose had been in exposing it.
The Financial Supervisory Service hadn’t known. DA Securities hadn’t known. And yet some rookie had supposedly investigated it all by himself and figured it out?
Even a stray dog would laugh at that.
The more you knew, the more you saw. It was impossible for some new hire to uncover a hidden hole in the company’s finances on his own through a bit of solo investigation.
Because of that incident, even Yang Jeong-uk, the executive director who had been groomed as DA Financial Group’s heir apparent, had been taken out at the knees.
It was only natural that people began to suspect there had been someone behind the scenes pulling the strings, or at the very least someone feeding him information.
Since Han Miru had been part of the research department, suspicion naturally drifted their way.
Department head Yoon Yeong-cheol had been put on standby, and the whole office had basically ground to a halt.
Employees came in, stared at the walls all day, and then went home.
Because Dong-ho had been a senior from the same department as Han Miru at university, and because they had always been close, he was dragged into all sorts of meetings and questioned from every direction.
What was their relationship? What had they talked about regarding the Primus collapse? Had he met anyone from other financial firms? Had he taken bribes or entertainment money? The list went on.
Because they handled money, securities firms were among the most conservative of institutions.
The single most important virtue in an employee wasn’t excellent work performance. It was not causing trouble.
Dong-ho let out a long sigh.
And the guy who actually caused the mess and ran off barely answers his phone, if at all.
After kicking up that kind of storm and disappearing, there was no way he could ever get hired by a financial firm or a big corporation now. What on earth was he doing with his life?
He left work with a heavy heart and, on the way home, made the call.
“You little bastard, what have you been up to lately?”
* * *
I met Sunbae Dong-ho for the first time since quitting.
“Over here, Sunbae.”
When I waved, Dong-ho gave me a pleased smile.
“You haven’t even kept in touch properly. What have you been doing?”
“Keeping busy, in my own way.”
“Still, you look better than you did when you were at the company.”
“Do I?”
Back then, I’d barely had time to do anything but get up and go to work, then come home and shut my eyes.
“So, are you not working?”
“I’m preparing.”
In that time I had made 13 billion won, but if I wanted to set up a proper investment company, I still needed to make more.
We clinked our beer glasses for the first time in a long while.
“Seeing you like this makes me think back to our student days.”
“Yeah.”
“Now that I’ve actually worked for a while, I think I understand why everyone says school days were the best. Back then, I had no worries at all.”
Well, back then your biggest worries had been exams and grades.
Still, the way he said it made it sound like work had been brutal lately.
“How’s the atmosphere at the company?”
“Why ask when you already know? Ever since you left like that, it’s gone past bleak and straight into savage. The entire research department is basically a kite with its string cut. The department head’s been put on standby. If he doesn’t resign on his own, they’ll just shuffle him around some dead-end post and kick him out eventually.”
It had been one of Yang Jeong-uk’s signature lines, so the whole team had probably been dragged down with him.
“No wonder no reports have been going up lately.”
“What’s the point of filing reports? If it were you, could you trust a product sold by DA Securities? Funds, ELS products, none of them are moving, and deposits keep shrinking.”
I smiled bitterly.
“Sounds like the people who stayed are the only ones suffering.”
Dong-ho drained his beer in one go and shook his head.
“There are people who curse you, sure, but there are also people grateful to you. If it had blown up any later, the losses would’ve been impossible to deal with. And the ones at fault are the scammers and the people who sold it without knowing. What did the guy who exposed it do wrong? You did well.”
“Hearing that from you helps. Do you think DA Securities will be okay?”
“They seem to be patching things up somehow. Since the group’s backing them, they won’t go under. But there’s talk they’ll close a few branches and start restructuring soon. At this rate, maybe I’ll get cut too?”
“If you do get cut, what will you do?”
“I’ve even thought about going back home and farming.”
I blinked in disbelief.
“Sunbae, your hometown is Seoul.”
Dong-ho nodded.
“Exactly. Which is a problem, because I don’t even have land to farm on. I should’ve bought some land if I was ever going to farm later. I’ve been pouring my salary into stocks, and now they’ve all crashed. I’m out of money to average down, and I’m losing my mind. Don’t you have another stock like Red Hole Studio? If I could grab one that was about to rocket, I’d hand in my resignation and walk out right away.”
Seeing one’s stocks explode and quitting on the spot was every office worker’s dream, after all.
“Hang in there and stick it out a little longer.”
Once I set up my company, I intended to bring him in immediately.
If someone had done you a kindness, you owed them repayment.
If I had to name the two people I owed the biggest debts to in my first life, they were Seonwu and Sunbae Dong-ho.
Seonwu had fed and housed me when I was drifting around without a proper job, and Dong-ho had saved my life from inside that fire.
If I’d died then, would I even have been able to regress now?
As I was thinking that, Dong-ho seemed to remember something and said, “Ah, right! You know what?”
“What is it?”
“Your new hire classmate, Sung Yoon-ah.”
“Yes?”
“Apparently she’s Chairman’s granddaughter.”
That made me jump.
“What?”
How had he found out?
Dong-ho seemed to think I didn’t know either, so he explained in more detail.
“She’s Vice Chairman Yang Ja-eun’s only daughter. I’ve heard occasional stories about chaebol kids starting out as ordinary rookies, but I never imagined something like that would be happening around me. Aren’t you close with Sung Yoon-ah?”
“Close? Not really. We just exchange greetings. But how did you find out?”
Had she revealed it herself?
“It seems like it leaked during this round of personnel transfers. The whole company was turned upside down because of it.”
I thought of Sung Yoon-ah.
Even though we’d been in the same incoming class, in my first life she hadn’t had much to do with me at all. But this time, as we dealt with the Primus Fund mess, we’d become fairly friendly.
Not enough to say we were close, though.
I wondered how she was doing.
Dong-ho kept drinking and grumbling.
“The market is an absolute mess these days. You know the Cobalt Gate broke a few days ago, right?”
“Yes. Well…”
There probably wasn’t anyone who knew it better than I did.
“Seriously, how do you get the Foreign Ministry involved in some scheme like that? Does that even make sense?”
“It really doesn’t.”
“And the bond market’s gone crazy too.”
“Why the bond market?”
“Why do you think? Who else would it be because of?”
“Because of who?”
At my question, Dong-ho stared at me.
“Are you really asking because you don’t know?”
“I’m asking because I don’t know.”
“Because of you, of course.”
I was taken aback by that.
“Huh? Why would it be because of me?”
“After the Primus Fund mess blew up, did you really think the corporate bond market was going to be fine? Right now every institution is checking the bonds it’s holding and dumping rotten CBs and BWs. You could call it a fire sale.”
“Ah…”
Dong-ho went on, drinking soju as he spoke.
“Right now, bond issuance for KOSDAQ companies is basically at a standstill. I’m pretty sure the marginal companies are going to buckle and go bankrupt.”
After the Primus Fund scandal, the corporate bond market had frozen for a while, and KOSDAQ companies had struggled to raise funds.
The bond market was a major financing channel for businesses. With that market frozen solid, there were no doubt plenty of companies taking a hit.
In fact, several firms really did go under during this period.
The reason I hadn’t thought of it was simple: in the original timeline, it had happened two years later.
Had the Primus Fund scandal erupted now, had the bond-market panic been dragged forward too?
After hearing Dong-ho out, something came back to me.
Come to think of it, hadn’t that company’s liquidity crisis started around this time?
At the time, they’d somehow managed to get past it, but a year later they’d end up staring at bankruptcy anyway. If the Primus Fund scandal had broken now, what would have happened to that company?
I searched for it on my phone.
Sure enough, the company had gone into workout after failing to repay its maturing bonds, and its stock was now suspended from trading.
I looked at Dong-ho and said, “Can you check the bond price for Dongwoo Precision?”