At the same time, during the conversation with the other party, the Magic City side also raised one thing, that is, the local Oriental Satellite TV hopes to interview His Royal Highness the Duke of Devonshire.
In fact, the last time Barron came to China and invested in Penguin and Alibaba successively, among the media that wanted to interview him was Dragon TV, but he declined all these interview requests at that time.
This time, the Cavendish Hotel Group under Barron's name is once again spending a huge amount of money to build a luxury hotel in Shanghai. Dragon TV also hopes to take this opportunity to conduct an exclusive interview with the young duke from England.
Thinking that he was interested in promoting the castle manor tourism project under the Grace Cultural Tourism Group in China, Barron agreed.
However, he also suggested that he hoped to change the approach, which was to wait until he returned to England and invite the Dragon TV crew to his estates to film, accept interviews from them in the estates, and allow them to visit his estates.
Moreover, all expenses for the team's trip to England can be provided by Barron.
Dragon TV was very interested in his suggestion. After all, it was a good idea to be able to visit the estate of a top British aristocrat and interview the Duke there. I'm sure the audience would be very interested in it.
So this matter was confirmed, and after Barron completes his trip to Asia and returns to England, the team here will set off.
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"You have a good image, and you have learned some Chinese from Laura. This is very helpful for Chinese people to have a good impression of you, so you will have some interviews during this period. Before Rob Pike arrives, in addition to continuing to discuss the specific matters of Devonshire Bund Hotel with Shanghai, you will also help Grace Tourism Group with preheating publicity."
Barron and his team will go to Japan next, so Yulia will stay here temporarily before Rob Pike, CEO of Cavendish Hotel Group, sets off to Shanghai to handle the specific matters regarding the establishment of Devonshire Hotel in Shanghai.
Up to now, they have stayed in China for more than ten days. Next, they are ready to leave China and go to Japan.
However, before leaving China, Barron took Wang Wanting to Hangzhou to meet with Alibaba's boss Ma.
Boss Ma told Barron that in addition to Alibaba's B2B business, they were also preparing a new business for domestic individual consumers, which was Taobao.
Barron knew that this would be a major move for Alibaba. After launching Taobao, Alibaba started its journey to become a domestic e-commerce giant in China.
In addition, accompanied by Boss Ma, Barron also visited Yiwu and praised the scale of transactions there.
"Before, I wanted to help merchants here sell their products overseas, but recently I found that the domestic market also has great potential, so I came up with the idea of establishing Taobao."
Boss Ma introduced himself to Barron in high spirits.
However, Barron had other ideas when he proposed to visit here.
Through the operation of Duke's Selection supermarket, Barron has now opened up the high-end market. However, the concept of organic food is just in its infancy in Europe and the United States. Therefore, in terms of overall scale, it cannot be as large as retail giants such as Walmart, Carrefour and Tesco.
However, there are already retail giants such as Tesco, Sainsbury's and Kingfisher in the British market. If we enter these businesses, how can we open up the market and compete with these giants that already have scale advantages?
With the power of China's "world factory", on the basis of good quality control, we can provide British consumers with high-quality and low-priced goods. This is a direction that Barron is currently thinking of.
Previously, Barron still had some doubts about the quality of Chinese products at that time. After all, during this period, Chinese products did adopt the strategy of impacting the market with low prices. However, after coming to Yiwu this time and carefully looking at some products, Barron has gained a lot more confidence.
So, just as Baron and his group left China and took a chartered plane to Japan, in England, DS Industrial Investment Company, after acquiring O2 Telecom, once again made an offer to Home Retail Group, the owner of Argos, a well-known British department store chain retailer. They hoped to acquire the department store chain retailer with a total of more than 400 stores in England and Ireland for 600 million pounds.
Argos is one of the top retailers in the UK. Except for food, it sells almost everything, with a total of 17,000 varieties and specifications.
Especially in the sales of toys, small appliances and home electronics, as well as furniture, gold and silver jewelry and sports and leisure products, Argos' sales performance is considered to be unmatched by other sellers.
Today, Argos has more than 400 branches in the UK and Ireland, employs nearly 20,000 employees and has more than 15 million regular customers.
The reason why Barron was most interested in buying this retailer was that Argos adopted a different operating approach from traditional retailers when it was established.
It captures the essence of life in modern British society: there are more and more people who are affluent but have limited leisure time, especially young people who know how to use modern network technology and are easily receptive to new ideas, who are its loyal customers.
Therefore, in terms of operations, Argos embodies its core capabilities in satisfying customers' most convenient shopping methods, providing a variety of style choices and high-quality and low-priced goods.
This can be seen from its business purpose - we provide the most convenient shopping method and offer customers the most affordable and high-quality goods and services.
Argos provides customers with a variety of communication platforms, allowing them to shop conveniently anytime and anywhere.
Customers can choose to go to an Argos store, send a text message, or call the 24-hour free service hotline.
A variety of shopping channels meet different consumption needs and provide customers with maximum convenience.
Argos' store operations are also completely different from traditional store operations.
Walk into any Argos store and you won't see shelves, let alone products - the goods are stored in warehouses at the back of the store or upstairs.
If customers want to shop, they can look through the shopping guides or posters displayed in the store. These materials are readily available in all stores, and customers can also take them home and choose slowly.
All products sold are described in these written materials and are accompanied by product codes and color pictures.
Warehouse-style chain stores have many advantages: they can minimize costs, do not require a large storefront, and do not require many employees to be responsible for sales, which greatly reduces the cost of building rental and human resources - goods do not need to be placed on shelves, and possible damage during the circulation of goods is avoided.
Argos is a listed company, and Home Retail Group holds most of the shares in the company. Based on the closing price of the previous trading day, the market value of Argos is about 550 million pounds. Therefore, DS Industrial Investment Company increased part of the premium and offered 600 million pounds, hoping to acquire Argos from Home Retail Group.