"Movie Age" can be sold in the mainland. Although it is a major benefit, it is still quite complicated to operate and you have to prepare early.

Magazine is currently in traditional vertical and traditional Chinese style. The mainland is used to horizontal and simplified Chinese characters. If you want to increase sales, you must specialize in mainland versions. However, Hong Kong factories that can print simplified Chinese characters basically do not exist. You either use sample magazines to print in the mainland or open a printing factory yourself. No matter which one is a troublesome.

The ultimate goal of Shen Chong's film magazine is to master the public opinion tools that influence the film industry. However, at this stage, its main function is to gather talents. The current mainland mechanism is extremely rigid. You have to introduce letters when you go out. Talents cannot move at all. The only function of selling magazines to the mainland is to give mainland filmmakers a window to understand Hong Kong movies.

So Chen Chong followed the great man all the way from Huangshan to Beijing, without mentioning the topic of selling magazines to the mainland, but just gained the opportunity to interview mainland film factories.

Only through interviews can he easily contact various film talents in the mainland and prepare for the future.

Chen Chong plans to dig reporters from the mainland, or recruit people like Rover who come to Hong Kong from the mainland as journalists. In short, you must be familiar with people from the mainland. At the beginning of reform and opening up, the situation was complicated, so you must be careful in everything to avoid stepping on landmines.

However, Oriental Charming Film Company is still calm.

"Crazy Job" successfully broke through the box office mark of 10 million yuan and finally received 10.53 million yuan. It was originally only in a Broadway theater. It was released for two weeks and the box office was only more than 500,000 yuan. Shen Chong's marketing package not only attracted a large number of audiences, but also doubled the ticket price of the movie, so it eventually received more than 800,000 yuan.

Ann Hui has been hiding in Japan and went to the mainland again. "The Crazy Tribulation" whizzes by like a typhoon. Now, time has changed, leaving only a legendary number, which is amazing.

Wang Jing is worthy of being a high-yield director of Kuaishou. She was the first director and filmed the movie in more than a month. When Shen Chong came back, the movie called "Chasing Girls" was already waiting for Shaw Brothers to schedule.

Wang Jing is the on-the-job screenwriter of Shaw Brothers. Her father is a famous director and a gold medal producer at TVB. She has a close relationship with Shaw Brothers. Shaw Brothers has also tasted the sweetness from "Crazy Job", so she is naturally very willing to continue to cooperate with Oriental Charm.

Although it was the second movie of the company, Chen Chongge didn't take it much to heart. After the baptism of "Crazy Job", Zeng Lizhen and Jiang Zhiqiang were no longer novices. One was responsible for the production and the other was responsible for the distribution, and with the support of Shaw Brothers' mature theater chain, it was just right for exercise.

Wang Jing doesn't need to pay attention to it deliberately - he has a good father, he has talent, and can lower his figure to please the audience. In the commercial environment of Hong Kong, he can be like a fish in water. He can be brilliant as long as he has a little chance, and there is no need to support him at all.

As for Yu Yunkang's "The Evil List" and Weng Weiquan's "The Rules", Chen Chong plans to decide how to shoot it after talking to them personally. These two movies, both of the quality and innovation, are very worth looking forward to.

The more high-quality movies, the better. Otherwise, when the Hong Kong Film Awards are founded next year, wouldn’t "Crazy Job" be too lonely? Besides, the dominant family is definitely not a good thing for a startup film award.

After dealing with the affairs accumulated by the magazine and the film company in two months, Chen Chong immediately let go and integrate other resources.

The wonders of his experience in the mainland and the wonderful situation can only be understood but not expressed in words. Chen Chong himself has no idea what the impact of this experience will have on the future. However, the plan depends on people and the success of things is in heaven. First, make your own plate and become bigger and stronger. When the opportunity comes in the future, the cake you can grab will be big.

First, reorganize the Matrix Technology Investment Company into a holding company, divest the Rubik's Cube business, and hand it over to the newly established "Kaiyuan Toys Co., Ltd.", and then go to the mainland to invest and build a factory in the name of Kaiyuan Li. In this way, Shen Chong's film strategy plan for Taiwan will not be affected.

Then inject all the shares of "Software Art Development Company" and "Actvision Game Production Company" they hold into Matrix Technology Holding Company for convenient unified management.

Before entering the mainland, Shen Chong made arrangements for the issuance of VisiCalc, both pre-sale, trial version, and advertising. When it was officially released, it was supported by chain stores and sufficient stockings. Therefore, after it was launched in mid-June, sales were booming, and more than 20,000 sets were sold in a month, each set of one packaging box, one instruction manual, and two floppy disks. The cost was extremely low, and the price was as high as US$99, with an astonishing profit. (Note 1)

The application for VisiCalc's spreadsheet patent has not yet been completed, it is expensive and has not made much progress.

As for the "personal software" sales chain store jointly with Festra, Shen Chong does not intend to continue to inject capital for the time being. The larger the scale, the greater the power of this sales platform, but it is time-consuming, labor-intensive and expensive to build.

So he changed his initial strategy and planned to attract some investors to play together. He just needed to maintain his controlling stake and ensure that his own software and games were not affected when they were released.

Compared with VisiCalc, Tetris, which had higher expectations, was insufficient sales due to a major mistake and did not show the style of a super money-making weapon.

Tetris was launched at the end of June, only one week later than VisiCalc, and only sold more than 10,000 units in more than 20 days. There are millions of Atari VCS hosts on the market. Compared with the two, the sales volume is terrible.

It’s not that it’s not selling well, but that there is no goods on the market - Activision has no money to make game cartridges.

In 1979, game cartridges belonged to the high-tech industry. Only a few companies in Silicon Valley could produce them in the world. They are a typical seller's market. These cheating companies stipulate that for each card cartridge, a deposit of $10 in advance is required. (Note 2)

Several game development engineers from Activision were only responsible for design and research and development when they were in Atari, regardless of manufacturing, and turned a blind eye to the outside world. They didn't know about this at all. They didn't know, and Chen Chong didn't know... So before going to the mainland, the money reserved for the company and after removing the publicity costs, they could only produce more than 10,000 sets of Tetris.

These Tetris were sold out in a few days, but in 1979 there were no instant access items such as Alipay. The main event of the chain store manager Festra was on the East Coast, and he focused all his energy on VisiCalc, which caused Activision to be unable to recover the payment in time and then produce cassettes.

The technology home is a technology home. When they saw that they had no money, they did not take the initiative to contact Festra to ask for the payment. Instead, they stayed in a villa in Silicon Valley and ate for more than 20 days.

This situation made Chen Chong very angry, so he simply injected capital again in the name of Matrix Technology Holding Company, diluted other people's shares, and then reorganized Activision, found a headhunting company to find a professional manager to come over, responsible for daily operations, management and R&D, upgraded Activision from a small workshop to a regular company, and then took out the creativity of "Tank War" to let these technology homes go to trouble.

Chen Chong came to the United States this time and went to Wall Street for the first stop. The Iranian revolution has been going on for more than half a year. The Middle East is in turmoil. Unfortunately, oil prices are still rising slowly, with an increase of less than 10% in two months. (Note 3)

How to make quick money in this half-dead state?

It's better to invest in Microsoft and Apple...

So after handling its business, Chen Chong went straight to Bellevue, Seattle. Microsoft only had more than a dozen employees, had a turnover of just over one million, and had not yet registered as a formal company. As partners, Bill Gates and Paul Allen held all the equity of the company at a ratio of 6:4. After Chen Chong came over, he spent $1 million, accounting for 30% of the shares, and became the third partner of the company.

Chen Chong had no interest in controlling Microsoft. He invested in Microsoft mainly because of Bill Gates. No matter how much controversy there was, he was a rare business genius in the history of computer software. As long as he followed him, he would be rich, comfortable and relaxed, why not do it...

As for Apple, Chen Chong could only drool. After several rounds of financing, Apple's stocks have been divided into 70% and 80% of them. As long as they are not blind, they can see that Apple is in full swing. As long as they go public, the original shares in their hands will definitely be valuable. If they want to acquire them, it will not only take time, but also cost money.

With the mentality of how much you can, Chen Chong hired two stock brokers to help pay attention to the acquisition of Apple's original shares, and then left the United States.

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Note 1: For this price, see Bricklin's interview.

Note 2: See "Adari Shock".
Chapter completed!