First Failure?
First failure?
The Anti-Monopoly Act.
Simply put, it meant carving up vicious corporations that monopolized markets and gouged prices, then selling the pieces off to other merchant groups. After all, everyone who suffered under a monopoly was the market as a whole—everyone except the monopolist itself.
And the Lotte Merchant Group had luckily slipped past the law's judgment. They hadn't gouged anyone through licensing, they'd only taken appropriate profits in line with market competition when selling barbed wire, and they'd made a decent contribution to society as well.
Ah—by "contribution to society," I mean priority supply to the military and the frontier settlements. Splitting up a merchant group that sold goods to the nation would have been a little awkward, after all.
"It's all thanks to your foresight, Master!"
"Ahaha…."
"Moreover, because we didn't force ourselves to build more factories and instead kept a generous cash reserve, we'll now be able to join the acquisition battles for the various merchant groups being torn apart by the Anti-Monopoly Act."
"Ah… ha…?"
"Haha! You foresaw all of this, didn't you?"
"Huh?"
On top of that, our merchant group was swimming in cash. Truly, absurdly swimming in cash. Ordinarily that money would have been reinvested into expanding factories—but instead of building more plants ourselves, we had shared out licenses.
And in exchange for those licenses, we had taken in even more generous piles of cash. In other words, this was our chance to scoop up the merchant groups shattered by the Anti-Monopoly Act.
"As expected of the blood of Lothringen! Haha!"
"Ah… yes…."
Around the time the conversation had gotten that far, ominous thoughts started flooding in one after another.
We're acquiring the split-up merchant groups?
It wasn't only the Lotte Merchant Group that was flush with cash. The Kissinger Merchant Group, which quite literally shoveled money out of the ground; the Cave Merchant Group, which brought in astronomical sums every second thanks to its stake in the erectile-dysfunction treatment—every last one of them had terrifying cash-raising power.
Which meant that, very soon—
"Master! A call for you, Master!"
"Kyaaaaah!"
—the other merchant groups would be calling me in as well, so they could tear into the split-up groups and devour them. Major matters like mergers and acquisitions, after all, were things I had to decide myself.
"Tell them I'm not here!"
"Pardon? I already said you were."
"Then tell them I vanished!"
"Ah—understood."
I'd bought some time for now… but I couldn't keep dodging forever. Being dragged around from one M&A table to the next was already a settled fact. We'd be paying money to buy up companies that had just been ripped apart while perfectly healthy, so there would be a mountain of things to review.
Ugh. Just imagining it made my stomach turn.
Is not buying anything… not an option?
Hmm. I felt like something similar had happened last time. If I bought nothing and then massive defects turned up in all those companies, I'd just get praised for it again, wouldn't I? Ugh. So predictable it was almost boring.
No. Still—not buying anything was the right call. All I had to do was not file a bid in the first place—
"Master!"
"What is it now."
"Our merchant group has been designated a priority bidder for this auction!"
"What?"
"It seems the fact that most of our business is military and public-sector work weighed heavily in our favor. Ah—and according to a call that just came in, the Kissinger Merchant Group and the Cave Merchant Group are the same. Both of them run fairly large-scale public projects, after all."
"…What."
My escape route had been sealed.
Being a priority bidder was a double-edged sword. The Empire had deliberately placed us on that list—there was no way they'd accept us buying nothing. This wasn't a bankruptcy auction; it was an Anti-Monopoly Act auction.
The whole point was to split the merchant groups, and we had been chosen as the axes meant to do the splitting—with a share of the honey as our reward.
And there was no chance they'd sit quietly while their axes refused to work. Trouble with the Empire was guaranteed. In the end, I would have to buy something and spend some money—if only for the Empire's face, since they had summoned us.
"I… understand. Tell the other two groups we know."
"Yes, sir!"
Kyaaaaah! Heavens above! I still hadn't managed to become a young man who just wanted to rest!
The preliminary bidding for the forcibly divided companies was conducted remotely through magic tools.
It was more modern than I'd expected.
"It's been a very long time since the Ministry of Commerce swung its sword this hard, so the competition will be extremely fierce."
"Uh-huh."
Right. I hoped it would be as fierce as possible. That way I wouldn't be able to buy a merchant group. I hoped I'd participate in the bidding and then, just barely, lose out.
"Ah. It's open now."
"Mmm."
This was still the preliminary stage. Company information was being released through the magic tools, and after reading it you decided which companies' bids you wanted to enter. The real competition and negotiations would come after that.
There would be due diligence to do, and post-acquisition plans and synergies to review, so for now it was just a matter of putting our names down. Thanks to that, I could browse the forcibly divided merchant groups with a relatively light heart.
"First up is a merchant group with exclusive mining rights to a black oil called petroleum. Here's the investment prospectus."
"…Petroleum?"
This world had oil?
"Ah. It's a black oil occasionally found underground."
"What do they use it for?"
"Well. Usually as a raw material for magitech-chemical products. It can be used as fuel too, but it's less efficient than magic stones and produces soot, so its applications are rather limited. I understand it's mainly used for making fibers, rubber, resins, cosmetics, and the like."
"Aha…."
With magic stones as a clean, efficient energy source, there was no particular reason to burn petroleum for fire. Back when people were making noise about magic-stone depletion theories and the like, research into using petroleum as an energy source had been quite active—but once magic-stone recycling technology appeared, all of that research had come to a complete stop. In other words, it was useless as a fossil fuel.
In this world, that is.
Still, the fact that it was used as a raw material was a little interesting.
"They're splitting this petroleum merchant group into four by region and auctioning each piece separately. If a lot goes unsold, they'll break it into even smaller units and auction it again. And if it still keeps failing to sell, they'll just offload the rights, some facilities, real estate, assets, and so on. From the perspective of a master hit by the Anti-Monopoly Act, that's the worst-case scenario."
"Hm? Why?"
"Because the company gets carved up and they barely get any money for it. And more than that—all the influence they've built up evaporates in an instant. Ordinarily, even if you lose a merchant group, you tend to keep some influence under the name of outside consulting."
"Aha."
So selling in the biggest chunks possible was the profitable move. That way you could somehow preserve your influence.
"Will you bid?"
"No. I want to look at more groups first."
"Understood."
My merchant group didn't need petroleum. In my previous life, how rich had the companies that monopolized oil become? Even if it was outmatched by magic stones in this world, raw-material hegemony was never something to take lightly. There was no need for me to take that kind of dangerous gamble.
I needed to pick a merchant group I could safely fail with—and that I could still fail to win the bid for.
This is harder than it looks.
Groups that looked blatantly doomed would probably succeed at auction if I bid, and groups that looked blatantly successful would be a burden to swallow. Either way, the moment I touched them, I had the feeling things would tip in my favor.
In other words—in the direction that blocked my "just rest already" life.
"Hmm. Manager, why don't you pick?"
"Pardon?"
After much agonizing, I dumped the choice on someone else. If everything I touched was guaranteed to succeed, then I just had to make someone else decide, right?
Even if a bid succeeded, I could dump the responsibility and the credit onto the manager. Same for the other groups. Across all three merchant groups, the goal was to take responsibility for nothing.
Please fail the bids. And if you succeed, please make sure there's nothing left for me to do.
"What about this one? The business division itself has no real vision, but the real estate and assets it holds are on an upward trend. Depending on the bid price, of course—but I don't think bidding would do us any harm."
"Mmm. That does sound okay…."
Real-estate speculation wouldn't expand my workload much. Bidding on a group like that would be fine.
"Hm? What's this merchant group, though?"
"Ah. It was originally the venture division inside a larger group, and it seems to have been spun off in the process of the breakup. There's a high chance it fails to find a bidder and simply dissolves into thin air."
"Aha."
"And this one…."
And so, after fretting it over with my subordinates, I put in bids on a few merchant groups—just enough not to look bad to the Ministry of Commerce. Even if my goal was to strip the company bare and leave, getting on the wrong side of state power was a different matter entirely.
Besides, being selected in the preliminary round didn't guarantee winning the actual auction, so I could take part with a relatively easy mind.
Please let every single bid fail.
Still, the absolute best outcome was still doing nothing at all.
"I'm sorry, Master. We've been pushed down to runner-up status across the board. It seems the blatant attempt to carve up assets for speculative gains left a bad impression."
"Ooooh!"
Yes. That's it.
There was value in trusting my people and leaving it to them after all.
Is this finally a failure?!