Chapter 763.2: IPO?
Chapter 763.2: IPO?
In other words, the New Alliance would not transform Port Gallon into its seventh or eighth settlement, while the Xilande Empire would neither demand its return nor surrender its right to make such a demand in the future.
The New Alliance had never intended to turn Port Gallon into its territory in the first place. Doing so would conform neither to the New Alliance’s interests nor to its principles. Therefore, Cheng Yan, the New Alliance’s foreign minister, agreed to the proposal.
Once the ceasefire agreement came into effect, Port Gallon would formally release all prisoners of war. Besides that, the Xilande Empire would also receive compensation totaling 150,000,000 Dinars.
However, that compensation was not included in the ceasefire agreement. It came from another agreement. It was the Military Pension Act recently passed at a meeting of the Mutant Slime Mold Research Committee.
The compensation would primarily come from the Mutant Slime Mold Research Committee and be paid out of the joint military funds contributed by its members. It was intended to compensate soldiers who fought for the fate of humanity and were killed or disabled as a result.
Recipients could decide how to use the compensation according to their individual circumstances, but they were required to ensure that at least 30% of the payment was spent directly or indirectly on the individuals concerned.
That was exactly the New Alliance’s intentions.
No matter how low the power and status of the ratfolk were in Poro Province, they were still recognized by the Mutant Slime Mold Research Committee as persons possessing a unified identity. Furthermore, they came from a province that had been relatively lightly affected by the Slime Mold, so they were entitled to full compensation.
As for why the compensation was denominated in Dinars rather than Silver, the currency covered by the greatest number of swap agreements, was mainly due to Duke Garawa’s strong insistence.
Chu Guang found it strange, but after considering that the Xilande Empire was, after all, a close friend of the Wislander, he did not say much and readily agreed.
What he did not know was that Duke Garawa had not been thinking along those lines at all. He was merely afraid that if the Mutant Slime Mold Research Committee paid in Silver, the New Alliance would directly deduct the payment from their compensation.
Had Chu Guang known, he would certainly have laughed out loud at the fool.
In addition, because most of the assets in the vaults of Port Gallon Bank had been obtained through the slave trade, they would not be returned to the Xilande Empire. Instead, they would belong to Port Gallon’s local residents, be used for local development, and be administered by the reorganized Port Gallon Bank.
Duke Garawa, who had already consulted the emperor on the matter, raised no objection. He merely proposed an additional clause allowing both sides to establish embassies in each other’s territory, which New Alliance Foreign Minister Cheng Yan gladly accepted.
In short, with the formal signing of the ceasefire agreement, the New Alliance’s military operations in Port Gallon were officially declared concluded.
Port Gallon still had several problems, including low labor income, rampant smuggling, and rising crime caused by an influx of immigrants. However, compared with the settlement it had once been, where people either ate dirt or ate other people, it had already improved enormously.
Problems had to be resolved one at a time. Problems born from development needed to be solved through further development. The local survivors could not expect the players to solve everything for them. Besides, the New Alliance’s players had already left them with several excellent tools and methods.
Examples included a representative assembly selected from among the citizens, as well as courts and police institutions in which judicial authority and law-enforcement authority had been separated.
The second major event was the establishment of the Dawn City Stock Exchange and the public listing of the Baiyue Strait Development Company.
After more than a month of audits and investigations, the New Alliance Bank and the economic authorities approved Baiyue Strait Development Company’s listing plan. Economic experts from Camp 101 supervised the listing and designed the trading system, while an Ideal City listing advisory firm provided Baiyue Strait Development Company with guidance throughout the process.
According to the listing plan approved by Baiyue Strait Development Company’s board of directors, the initial issuance would consist of 50,000,000 shares priced at 10 Silver each. The shares represented 8% of the company’s total equity, and the company pledged to allocate no less than 10% of its annual profits to shareholder dividends.
All funds raised would be invested in expanding Baiyue Strait Development Company’s core businesses, with the goal of making the company larger and stronger.
Based on the offering price, Baiyue Strait Development Company’s total valuation had already reached 6,250,000,000 Silver! That figure was even higher than the New Alliance’s entire fiscal expenditure for the previous year!
However, anyone familiar with Baiyue Strait Development Company’s development knew that this valuation was still an underestimate.
Baiyue Province’s operations in Port Gallon alone would be worth more than 6 billion silver coins even at the most conservative price-to-earnings ratio of twenty. An offering price of 40 Silver per share would still have been conservative. The reason the shares were being issued at a relatively low price was, to some extent, to allow the New Alliance’s residents to share in the dividends brought by its development.
After all, without the New Alliance’s workers laboring away in its factories and creating value, the New Alliance could never have become an economic miracle of the wasteland, much less used its surplus resources to incubate frontier settlements such as French Fry Harbor.
The best way to reward those people was simply to give them money directly.
Of the shares, 30,000,000 were non-tradable shares. Some had already been subscribed to by insurance funds in the New Alliance’s social sector, including pension and unemployment insurance funds, while the remainder had been purchased by insurance funds in the public sector, including railway and property insurance funds.
The principal beneficiaries would be lower and middle-income residents who paid into social insurance and made the greatest use of public services.
The remaining 20,000,000 shares would be issued as freely tradable shares to the New Alliance’s middle and high-income residents.
Anyone holding a New Alliance identity card who could provide proof of bank deposits or transaction records within New Alliance territory could open an account with the stock exchange. Each individual could subscribe to no more than 100,000 shares, although there would be no restrictions on buying and selling in the secondary market.
Players could also trade Baiyue Strait Development Company shares, but for the time being, transactions were only available through the Silver Exchange. There were no restrictions on the proportion of shares that could be traded there. As with other ongoing equity transactions, only large share transfers would be subject to review.
There were two reasons for the arrangement. First, the Silver Exchange already possessed a relatively mature trading system. Second, players’ mission earnings were already an order of magnitude higher than the income of ordinary NPCs. There was no need for them to compete with NPCs over that small amount of dividends. They could simply close the doors and play with themselves.[ref]among themselves*[\ref]
Moreover, given the savings of most NPCs, they would probably struggle to provide enough liquidity for players who wanted to cash out and leave the market.
The Silver Exchange did not have that problem. A vast number of mysterious clients were waiting there ravenously, ready at any moment to spend real-world currency on shares.
To accommodate the schedules of the majority, the issuance date was deliberately set on a rest day.
Not only that, banks in every New Alliance settlement had opened service counters to assist residents with account registration. Even so, an enormous line formed outside the Dawn City Stock Exchange that day, nearly bringing traffic on the neighboring streets to a standstill.
Although most residents of Dawn City still associated Baiyue Strait Development Company primarily with the seafood market in the city’s northern suburbs and knew little about its specific operations, a headline in Goblin Observation ignited a fire in everyone’s hearts.
[Subscribing to Baiyue Strait Development Company shares means supporting the New Alliance’s overseas expansion!]
The moment they saw those words, everyone acted though they had been injected with stimulants.
Wasn’t supporting the New Alliance’s overseas expansion the same as offering their loyalty to the administrator?
The administrator had never said anything of the sort, but that did not stop the young men from imagining it themselves.
Of course, the most important factor was that they had money in their pockets.
After Boulder Town joined the New Alliance, the New Alliance absorbed more than merely its technology. It also absorbed Boulder Town’s Bore the Awakener and its Workers’ Association. Merchants had their own Merchants Guild, while workers had their own organization. With the two forces checking and balancing one another, the median hourly wage in most factories had risen from five Silver before Boulder Town joined the New Alliance to eight Silver today.
At an offering price of 10 Silver per share, even someone washing dishes in a tavern could afford 100 shares, provided he was not an alcoholic who spent his entire income on liquor.
Most of the people opening accounts had never even considered making money from the shares. They merely held the simple desire to contribute their own strength to the administrator.
1,000 Silver could purchase 5 assault rifles.
Boulder Town alone had increased their hourly wages by 60%. If donating 5 rifles could help the New Alliance liberate several more “Boulder Towns,” then it would not matter even if they lost all their Silver!
“... Have these people lost their minds?!” Looking at the vast crowd outside the stock exchange, Niyan, who had slipped away from Embassy Street to join the excitement, stared in astonishment. His expression was as though he had encountered a sea monster in the Poro Sea.
A security guard maintaining order in the line glanced at him. Thinking that his face did not look local, the guard politely said, “Hello, sir. Equity trading requires an original New Alliance identity card... Would it be convenient for you to show me yours?”