(Chinese Version)

As a matter of fact, Internet giants such as Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Tencent, Meituan, and even Xunlei have been putting tremendous efforts in developing cloud computing technologies and services in the past two years.

While these Internet giants are focusing energy in developing cloud services to add up their business layout, there’s actually a less-shiny industry in the corner that’s on the rise, which is, the enterprise service industry. Many entrepreneurs even make enterprise service sector their very first attempt for their entrepreneurship.

While a great number of entrepreneurs in China are still paying most attention to the O2O sector, enterprise service industry has gradually become a new focus point for investment organizations. Unlike consumer-centric applications, however, entrepreneurs will need more professional knowledge and patience in order to accomplish success in this particular industry.

It’s widely accepted that tech startups could generally make a great fortune. A series of current successful tech startups that are able to make several billion US dollars, such as Jumei.com, Momo and Meituan, confirm this perception in most cases.

Indeed, in the field of To C (To Consumers), many startups could get tens of millions of dollars in funding within just a year after the launch. But on the other side of the market, which is the To B (To Businesses) sector, companies could generally have a 200-300 percent growth annually. It usually takes them about 3 years to get the similar amount of funding like To C startups. Compared to To C startups, which could have dozens of times of annual growth, To B companies no doubt appear to be less appealing to entrepreneurs in terms of growth.

“The proportion of investment in To B and To C sector is quite different between China and the US,” Zhang Ximeng, current CEO of Growing.io and former senior director of the business analysis department of LinkedIn, told Economic Weekly. “In China, about 95% of investment had been invested in the To C sector while the number in the US is 40%.”

The investment community divides To B companies into two groups. One group is platform providers, such as traditional Internet giant Alibaba, for instance, and newly emerged vertical startups like Zhaogang.com, zhaosuliao.com, and gongmingkeji.com. These companies focus on helping enterprises trade with each other. The other group is those that offer enterprise services, which include sales management, talent management, software development, customer service and data analysis service etc.

Ever since the customer relationship management (CRM) service provider Salesforce was founded in 1999, the enterprise service industry has always been a major sector that the American investment community cares for. At present, among listed companies, enterprise service providers are gradually becoming an emerging force that’s hard to come by on the market. Back in June, 2004, Salesforce went public on NYSE and its current market capitalization is now about US$48 billion, making it the industry leader of the very enterprise service sector.

In China, however, even though many entrepreneurs have been working hard on this sector for the past decade and more people are joining in, enterprise service applications still fail to become hot for entrepreneurs and the investment community today. In fact, no listed company from this industry has attained a market capitalization of over a hundred million dollars yet.

“We always say that investing in O2O and social networking projects is a blessing. There are countless projects on the market for us to choose from,” Xiong Fei, vice president of Matrix Partners China, told Economic Weekly. “However, when it comes to enterprise services, we need to be extra careful and make every shot count.” Xiong Fei and Zuo Lingye, partners of Matrix Partners China, and analyst Zhou Zi, are mainly in charge of investing in the enterprise service market.

But still, people do feel changes are taking place. According to statistics provided by Matrix Partners China, in 2014 only one company made a turnover of over a hundred million but in 2015 the number has grown to over 10.

“The year of 2015 will be a grand year of investment in the enterprise service industry,” Zuo Lingye told Economic Weekly.

Investors and entrepreneurs are very confident and they believe that something great is happening. “The golden age for the enterprise service industry has come,” Marc Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce, said encouragingly.

Investment starts to pour in

“Do you know what it’s like to fail 46 times in a row?” Cui Jian, vice president of JinGoal had contacted and talked to 62 investors from 47 investment organizations in 2014, but only a few believed in his vision. JinGoal is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) based office automation system, which provides services on web, PC, and mobile client, allowing users to exchange files and e-mails, save client records and project information. However, most investors failed to see the potential of this project and therefore the 43 investment organizations he turned to refused to invest in his project. There were in fact 3 investment organizations were willing to make investment, but no agreement had been reached due to the dissatisfying offer.

The worst part is that this was a common obstacle that the enterprise service industry had been facing for a long time. Investors just clearly didn’t think this industry was worth investing.

Things changed when Tiger Fund came along. In May, 2014, led by Tiger Fund, JinGoal received a 10 million dollars investment in its Series A round of financing and the company received another 60 million dollars investment from Tiger Fund in the same month next year.

The New-York-based Tiger Fund believed that the Chinese Internet market must possess great potential of investment for the fact it had about 50 million small and medium-sized Internet companies currently active in the country. In this case, Tiger Fund turned to BDA China Limited to look deeper into this field. In fact, the reason why Tiger Fund is making so much effort on this is that the firm missed the last golden age of the enterprise service industry in the US and it wants to make it up through investing in the market in China.

Currently, entrepreneurs in China that are running a business in the enterprise services industry have actually felt that the golden age is in fact coming. According to statistics from ITjuzi, there were about 230 investments took place in the Chinese enterprise service industry in 2014, making a 243% jump compared to that in 2013 when there were only 67 investment cases. By July this year, over 10 SaaS startups had made their series B round of financing with a total investment of over 200 million dollars. Among them, JinGoal, Beisen, OneAPM, Xiaoshouyi, Fxiaoke and Easemob etc. all had received an investment of more than ten million dollars, among which four companies were invested by Matrix Partners China.

“4 years ago, when people were not really seeing the value of the mobile Internet, we invested in Momo, and it has brought us a considerable return. The enterprise service industry is pretty much like the mobile Internet 4 years ago and it would nurture a group of competitive companies, ” Zuo Linghua, partner of Matrix Partners China said. “And therefore while many people are failing to see the potential value of such companies, we have invested in over 30 companies in the last two years.”

When Matrix Partners China started to invest in the mobile Internet industry, others didn’t really understand their action and had never thought that today Cheetah Mobile and Momo would worth more than 3 billion dollars. In 2013, Zuo Lingye from Matrix Partners China teamed up with the vice president Xiong Fei and founded the enterprise service division, signifying that Matrix Partners China had started officially to explore the enterprise service market. During the process, Matrix Partners China had invested in over 50 startups in the field of enterprise trading platform and enterprise service market.

Investment companies such as Sequoia Capital, Tiger Fund, IDG Capital, Northern Light Venture Capital, DCM Capital, Legendstar. etc. are also planning a series of moves to deploy their investment layout.

“In the past few years, the investment community has been focusing on consuming businesses such as O2O and the groupon industry that has a business closure rate of over 90%. But now investors are starting to realize that compared to consuming businesses that made many companies rich overnight, the enterprise service industry is actually a more stable option.” said, the CEO of Qiniu, Lv Guihua.

Founded in 2011, Qiniu dedicates to building data management platforms for developers in the mobile Internet era and providing cloud computing services such as online data management, transmission acceleration and audio, video, and picture cloud service on websites and smart phone apps. In July, 2014，Qiniu received several tens of million dollars in its third round of financing from CBC，Matrix Partners China, Qiming Ventures. Before this tremendous success, the company also received a million dollars from Matrix Partners China in its series A round of financing and got series B round of funding in 2012 from Qiming Ventures.

“What Qiniu Cloud does is storage service, which is the fundamental service that cloud computing technology has to offer,” founder of CBC Tian Suyu commented on the investment in Qiniu Cloud. “Qiniu has been developing fast in recent years and we have been observing their progress.”

“Our company does feel that this year the enterprise service industry will become extremely hot for VC, probably the top three fields for investment to pour in,” Zuo Lingye said. He believed that by 2018, the enterprise service industry in China would nurture a group of unicorn companies (companies with a market capitalization of over 1 billion dollars).

To some extent, Chinese investors are inspired by the thriving American market. The project leader of IDG’s ToB projects Niu Kuiguang stated that in the US there were about 45 SaaS listed companies that worth over two hundred billion dollars in total, with an average market capitalization of 1.6 billion dollars. Kuiguang also added that enterprise SaaS services and enterprise security services were two major parts of the company’s business layout. These two fields have different drives but they both lead to a market that’s worth billions.

Starting from July, 2012, IDG has made four investments in Fxiaoke, a company dedicates to providing enterprise sales management tool for enterprises. In July, 2015, Fxiaoke announced officially that the company had received another one hundred million dollars investment in its Series D round of financing, which was jointly funded by IDG Capital, Northern Light Venture Capital and DCM. Besides that, IDG also teamed up with China Growth Capital in November, 2013, to solve the angel investment of the Hangzhou-based Fraudmetrix which focused on the security problems of banks and Internet finance services. After making the angel investment happen, IDG continued to invest in the company all along. In May, 2015, Fraudmetrix announced that it had received a 30 million dollars investment from its Series B round of financing led by Qiming Ventures, which CBC, IDG Capital, China Growth Capital and Linear Venture also contributed parts of the investment.

In 2014 alone, over 15 companies in the US made their IPO, accumulating a capital of 7 billion dollars and reaching a total market value of over 40 billion dollars. In the private market, enterprise service companies, including Cloudera, Slack, and Appdynamics, have also attained a total investment of over one billion dollars.

“In the enterprise service market, there are about 27 million companies active in the western world, with the top three companies, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce, possessing a total market value of around 35 million dollars,” Zuo Lingye said. “In China, there are about 22 million companies in this sector but no SaaS company has made a market value of over ten billion dollars. No SaaS-based company has attained a market value of over one billion dollars either. So this is a perfect chance for all the entrepreneurs out there.”

However, when facing the massive investment that’s pouring in, many entrepreneurs keep their cool. Ji Weiguo, CEO of talent management service provider Beisen told Economic Weekly that even though some investment company’s To B project leader did think highly of Beisen, but due to the opposition from many other partners, the company failed to be a part of Beisen’s Series C round of financing. “People rarely understand SasS software. I have talked to over twenty partners about this and they didn’t ask the crucial questions. I think only a few investors in China actually understand and see through SasS, and Zuo Lingye is one of those very few people.”

At present, Beisen’s clients include Internet giants such as Tencent and JD. This April, Beisen announced that it had received 110 million dollars in its Series C round of financing led by Matrix Partners China and Qing Youqian and supported by Sequoia Capital China. Ji Weiguo estimated that after this round of financing, Beisen’s valuation would reach over 1 billion RMB.

Lu Yuquan, CEO of Gongming Tech which positions itself as a financial transaction platform for enterprises, also believed that in the To B sector few people were actually able to understand this sector. In July, 2014, Gongming Tech received its Series A round of financing of ten million dollars from IDG. But Lu Yuquan felt clearly that from March this year, investment organizations had become interested in the To B sector for the fact that more investors were approaching him.

The time has come

In 2010, Beisen was hoping to expand its lines of business by providing talent management software services online that covered recruiting, performance, and succession management. Ji Weiguo went to talk to My space’s technical director who later told him that this mode was called SaaS and it’s very popular in the Silicon Valley. Ji Weiguo was very excited to discover this fact and he started searching for relevant information on the Internet when he’s back home. However, the things he found were disappointing: according to experts online, SaaS was not something new and it’s just a twist of concept.

Independent technology and market research company Forrester once stated in a report in 2012 that: “As a disruptive force in the software sector, the market of SaaS only took up 1/4 of the global software market. And in the 123 specific markets, SaaS would not have much impact on the traditional sales modes of software.”

Up till now, however, Forrester might need to reassess this judgment. In the future, it’s highly possible that all software products will be purchased through clouds.

“During 2011 and 2013, the cloud service market had been growing steadily. But in 2014 the market entered a fast growing period and the market size became four times larger in just one year,” Niu Kuiguang said. “That being said, enterprises had started to accept cloud technology and SaaS.” Niu also believed that users grew less worried about data security, and that cloud applications would get further development and such tendency would continue to gain momentum in the next 5 to 10 years.

The rapid development of consumer business is also helping the enterprise service industry prosper since companies that focus on consumer businesses are all target clients of enterprise services. FotoPlace and KuaiKan Comics these two To C applications that have already flooded WeChat’s Moments for a few times both use the cloud storage and other cloud services provided by Qiniu. The director of Qiniu Li Jing stated that startup companies nowadays should pay more attention to cloud technology for the fact that once their app became popular overnight the servers might not be able to handle the sudden explosion of visits. Kuaikan Comics and FotoPlace both used Qiniu’s cloud storage service to handle the sudden surge of downloads and it turned out to be successful.

According to Qiniu, for cloud providers, IaaS（Infrastructure as a Service）and PaaS（Platform as a Service）are now becoming less popular and their differences are indeed blurring, and that SaaS is replacing them and becoming the mainstream.

“I believe most people have seen the promising future of cloud services,” CEO of Qiniu Lv Guihua said. “ The enterprise service market is worthy of trillions and the cloud-service-based enterprise services can nurture numerous startups that would worth a lot in the future.” In the past few years, Qiniu has kept an annual growth of ten times and so far its platform has amassed over two hundred thousand enterprise users, including To C companies such as HIKVISION, S.F.Express, Pingan, ZTE, OPPO, BBK, Momo. According to statistics from Qiniu, there are 50 billion files currently stored on Qiniu, with a daily upload volume of over 500 million.

“Why now? Why not last year or next year? Opportunities are indeed very important,” Easemob CEO Liu Junyan stated. “The most crucial thing here is the tendency, and the mass has accepted it and demand has been generated.”

Easemob is a mobile instant messaging cloud service provider and it had completed four rounds of financing just one year after the launch. The company’s angel investment was injected by Matrix Partners China and SIG funded the A round while Sequoia Capital funded the A+ round. In July 28th this year, Easemob announced that the company had received 12.3 million dollars in Series B round of financing, which was led by Sequoia Capital and partially invested by Matrix Partners China and SIG.

Being able to get financing in such a short time is quite rare in the field of To C. The capital market recognizes such companies for the market behind them. In northern America, the total purchase volume of customer service software market has reached 9.6 billion dollars by far. In this particular market, two unicorn companies have appeared: Zendesk and Freshdesk. At present, the market value of Zendesk has hit 1.89 billion dollars, with an annual sales volume of 187 million dollars. As for Freshdesk, the company had finished its Series E round of financing and received an investment of 50 million dollars, making the company’s market value over one billion dollars.

Even though the enterprise service market in China is comparatively lagging behind the western world, the demand for such service is still high. Due to social change and the reform of the market in China, the country had already passed the period of demographic dividend. From the long run, a 10%-15% annual growth of the labor cost has become a tendency, which requires traditional companies to improve their operation efficiency in order to be substantial.

Xiong Fei had once been to Hangzhou to check out a small warehouse that had been using the cloud warehouse management system and had around seventy people in it. They told Xiong Fei that they chose enterprise service cloud software because it’s the only option for them to reduce the labor cost with technology, given the fact that wokers’ salary had jumped from 4000 to 7000 RMB. Aside from that, e-commerce businesses such as 58 To Home and Chuchujie are also using Easemob’s cloud customer service software to enhance user experience.

The mobile Internet and social networking economy also stimulated the process. As people grow accustomed to using the mobile Internet, user behaviors are also transforming. Such transformations have a tremendous impact on e-commerce, O2O, Internet financing, education and tourism sectors, making them more mobile than ever. App developers and enterprise owners are now working to build an in-app close-loop trade, starting from displaying merchandise and services to pre-sales consultancy, payment, logistics, refund, and after-sales service, making everything achievable in-app.

Cloud services are also turning mobile. Consulting firm Gartner estimated that in the customer service sector alone 70% of service requests were made on mobile clients by clients annually. During the 2014 Double Eleven Shopping Festival hosted by Alibaba, 24.3 billion RMB purchase volume out of 5.71 billion was completed on the mobile client. It appears that mobile clients have the tendency to surpass PC clients.

Aside from that, Gartner’s report also showed that in 2014 the total IT cost of the globe was about 3.8 trillion dollars, meaning that the enterprise service market was about 20 times larger that the entire Internet market. There’s no doubt that a market such big will nurture a number of startup unicorns in the future.

Entrepreneurs from the 70s are dominating power

“Compared to the To C sector, the To B sector is dominated by entrepreneurs born in the 70s since this sector is more complex to manage,” Zuo Lingye said.

In the past 12 years, Zhang Ximeng had worked for major companies like eBay, Petco, Epson and LinkedIn etc. with jobs such as analyzing data, marketing, sales, manage websites and other positions related to data. And in the past 5 years, he founded and had been leading the only revenue data analysis team in LinkedIn until February, 2015, when he eventually left LinkedIn.

Zhao Ximeng carefully researched on the markets in the US and China and he found that the American market had already reached a mature state where every specific sector all had different competitors battling each other for the traditional enterprise service market share. The business rules are clearer in comparison to that of China and there’s no much chance to make it big like SAP and Oracle. However, in China, the market is an enormous blank space.

Years of experience analyzing data allows Zhang Ximeng to realize that even though SaaS-based cloud services are booming in the US, problems still exist and the situation lead to tons of data islands. “This is definitely a major problem for the diversity of data source and the number of big data,” Zhang Ximeng said, comparing to purifying a polluted river. “In the past few years, 90% of jobs that are related to big data are all about cleaning and filtering data. The truth is only 10% of big data is useful. We want our products to be able to make 90% of those work automatic someday.” At present, Zhang Ximeng is the CEO of the big data analyzing firm GrowingIO.

Also born in the 70s, Ji Weiguo now runs Beisen which was founded 13 years ago. But it wasn’t until 2010 that Beisen received the very first investment from Shenzhen Capital. But Shenzhen Capital didn’t invest in Beisen for SaaS products, but the advanced talents management techniques. Beisen then entered the field of SaaS in 2012. “We didn’t start with the goal to enter the emerging SaaS software market,” Ji Weiguo explained. “We first entered the talents management software market, but we made our products SasS. And, SasS started to get popular.”

The CEO of Xiaoshouyi Shi Yanze, one of those forerunners in Chinese Internet industry, has 17 years of experience working in the enterprise software industry and was an early employee of Yin Haiwei. In 2011, Shi Yanze founded his CRM firm which’s based on mobile, cloud, and social networking technologies, whose products range from name card scanning, visitor check-in, and sales opportunity etc., serving as an assistance to helping companies run better. Unlike the SaaS pioneer Salesforce, XiaoshouyiCRM was mobile-based at first.

In 2014, XiaoshouyiCRM’s annual performance grew 11 times bigger, making the valuation of the company jump 9 times. Shi Yanze still remembered the fact that in 2012 most VCs would’t really looked into To B projects. It was a hard time to for To B projects to find investment and usually they failed to do so. Luckily, Sequoia Capital was ahead of its time. In early 2013, Sequoia Capital invested in Xiaoshouyiin its Series A round of funding and continued to make investment in its Series B round of funding in 2014. In 2015, the firm followed the lead of Matrix Partners China and invested another 15 million dollars in Xiaoshouyi.

Before founding Xiaoshouyi in 2005, Wen Rong used to make major ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) for giants such as Haier and Hisense. As for Fraudmetrix, its founding team consisted of corporate technology executives and professionals from top Internet companies such as PayPal, SAS, and ThreatMetrix etc., with plenty of leading patents at their disposal.

However, Li Hui, CEO of MikeCRM which focuses on managing contacts, was an exception among many interviewees. Though young as 26, she also had experience working for giants such as Baidu.

“In the field of To C, as long as you love what you are making, then you will probably make it a great product manager. But in the To B sector, you are catering to enterprises, businesses, which makes it more complex. More factors have to be taken into consideration,” Zuo Lingye stated. “For instance, you have to know how employees feel when using your products in different working situation and you need to make your products compatible to your client enterprises’ protocols. This is not something you can achieve in one or two days.” Zuo Lingye also added that compared to the To C sector, the To B sector required entrepreneurs and industry worker to accumulate more relevant experience, and that what To B companies really needed were professional experts.

“We see clients’ needs in software. If we can’t satisfy their needs, all kinds of problems would come up, among which technological issues rank the first,” He Xiaoyang, founder of OneAPM further explained, also saying that he knew many APM experts. OneAPM started to do promotion since 2004 and got to know Matrix Partners China in 2013. For 10 years APM hadn’t been making much progress in China and there weren’t any successful case at all, which made people regard APM as worthless.

OneAPM is an APM solution provider that caters to enterprises and developers. Ever since launching its products in 2013, this company has by far completed three rounds of financing. In March this year, OneARM received a 165 million dollars investment in its Series C round of financing, led by Chengwei Capital and co-invested by Matrix Partners China and Qiming Ventures.

It’s too early to think about making profits now

Before transforming to SaaS model, Beisen had an annual revenue of at least tens of millions of RMB. But since 2010, when it completed its transformation, the company rolled out several recruitment software that later turned out to be disappointments. In 2012, Beisen’s performance hit the bottom, losing almost 20 million RMB.

In May, 2015, Beisen recruitment management system was updated to V5.0, becoming the hottest recruitment software in the market with the most market share. And it’s also that very year Beisen started to make money again.

However, Zuo Lingye suggested them really thinking about the phase. “SaaS businesses shouldn’t be making money during this phase. If there’s profit then it means we are not investing enough. If so we are probably leaving space for competitors to grow bigger.” Ji Weiguo explained. To confirm his idea, Zuo Lingye and Ji Weiguo went to the US in 2014 to see what it’s the market like there.

The trip to the US confirmed his thought: making money right after the launch is actually a really bad sign. It’s not like there’s no profit for SasS to make, it’s just not the right time to do so.

Different from traditional software providers who sell their products entirely out, enterprise service software are cloud-based, meaning they charge users for subscription fee instead of license fee. Subscription fee model means the company can make money continuously but slowly, and therefore before making it big the company will not make any money.

“For example, traditional software service provider Yonyou charges each client 500,000 RMB and that’s it while Beisen charges its clients 100 thousand RMB every year. So if Yonyou has a 20% profit rate then Beisen’s performance in the first year would be terrible since the other 400 thousand RMB are still out there. This is the logic. ” said Ji Weiguo. According to him, the capital market evaluates SaaS companies based more on the contract rate.

“In 2013, Tiger Fund asked us not to worry about making money,” Wen Rong of JinGoal said. To put it into context, the company was aiming to achieve a value of about ten thousand RMB every year and if JinGoal could amassed a client base of over ten million, then the social value would be a hundred billion RMB. In this case, the next step for social value is to figure out how to make social value into real cash, which is, commercial value.

Salesforce and Workday are generally regarded as the most successful cases of SaaS mode, with a total market value of about 48 billion dollars. The 2016 first quarter financial report（till April 30th, 2015） showed that the total revenue in the first quarter was 1.51 billion dollars, with a year-on-year growth of 23%. As more big companies start to use the company’s products, Salesforce once again increases its revenue expectations of 2016.

Workday, Inc. is an on‑demand (cloud-based) financial management and human capital management software vendor. When getting its IPO in October, 2012, Workday wasn’t making any money still. Its prospectus showed that from 2007 to 2011, Workday lost 2.478 million dollars, 5.148 million dollars, 4.994 million dollars, 5.621 million dollars, and 7.962 million dollars respectively in each year. But in the same time, the company’s revenue also rose. From 2007 to 2011, Workday earned 455 thousand dollars, 6.398 million dollars, 25.245 million dollars, 68.055 million dollars and 134.4 million dollars respectively in each year, showing that Workday’s profitability was indeed improving. From 2007 to 2011, Workday’s deficiency ratio went up from -5446% to -59.24%. On the very day Workday launched its IPO, it market value hit 9.5 billion dollars. And Workday’s 2015 first quarter financial report showed that the company made about 245 million dollars in the first quarter with a 70% growth.

“A healthy To B project can have a 2 to 3 times growth on its sales volume every year even though it can’t achieve a several tens of times of growth like To C projects,” Xiong Fei stated. “To B projects’ advantage lies in the fact that they can keep their users more efficiently and are able to continuously charge their clients. And 5 to 7 years later, they can become giant companies with several hundred millions of RMB.”

Before reaching the phase where companies start to consider ways of making money, major challenges and temptations also await them. When Qiniu first took off there had already been many potential clients that wanted Qiniu to help them develop and maintain their private cloud storage system and they were willing to pay Qiniu tons of money for that. “At that time public cloud was still a new thing. To be honest, those opportunities were very tempting to us since they could get us big cash instantly. But after discussing about it, we realized that startup teams like us had one option only. If we were really to make storage applications, then we need to give up on public clouds. ” said Lv Guihua CEO of Qiniu.

The former experience of executing major ERP projects for Haier and Hisense made the founder of JinGoal determined that he would only make standardized products. “Users’ demands are always changing, leaving the team no other options but prolong the project period. But when the team finally meets all the demands on customizations, users won’t buy the product still. It really frustrates the team.” he explained.

Ji Weiguo，CEO of Beisen, has one principle, that is, only developing SaaS products and never making install versions of any kind. “Install versions are a trap. Sometimes clients would ask us to independently develop an install version of our cloud service” Ji Weiguo said. At one time a telecommunications infrastructure provider in China approached him and told him that they found the foreign HR management system they were using that cost 6 million dollars annually was not suitable for them, and that they wanted Beisen to make an install version for them with a budget of 20 million RMB. My product manager didn’t like this idea while the technological staff wanted me to take this job, take the 20 million cash. In the end, Ji Weiguo turned down the offer. “If we took this job, then it would mean wasting a lot of time and energy on something unpredictable.” he explained. “Yonyou took some similar jobs with the same budget and 8 years has passed nothing has come out yet.”

Zuo Lingye stated that there’s only one long-term standard to assess a enterprise service company, which is, the revenue. In the US, the fastest growing listed companies in this sector can earn about ten times more than their market valuation. “However, to make it in the enterprise service industry, one must be patient enough.”

[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @Judy Business&Life, please note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

Translated by Garrett Lee (Senior Translator at ECHO), working for TMTpost.