Bill Gates' entrepreneurial story has inspired generations of enthusiastic young people. The talented young Man of the United States started from scratch and built a business empire that attracted the world's attention with a set of software systems, and once became the richest person in the world. Like all young people, Song Ruhua took Bill Gates as his entrepreneurial goal when he started his business, but when he was approaching this goal, the end of the story went in the opposite direction.
【One】
Song Ruhua was born in April 1962 in a remote mountain village in Shaoxing County, Zhejiang Province. From a poor family, he was very sensible from an early age, and he studied especially hard.
After the college entrance examination, he was admitted to the Department of Physics of Chengdu Institute of Electronic Engineering. Strictly self-disciplined, he also formulated the "Eight No's Principle" for his life plan: one does not smoke, two does not drink, three does not sing, four does not dance, five does not watch movies, six does not visit the park, seven does not do business, and eight does not go abroad. With this momentum, he stayed on to teach after graduation because of his excellent grades. In 1991, the 29-year-old Song Ruhua got the title of deputy senior, and when everyone thought he was a winner, Song Ruhua decided to go to the sea to start a business.
In 1992, Song Ruhua and two colleagues "went to the sea", and they pooled 5,000 yuan to prepare for computer business. The company's name is "Top", which is a transliteration of the English TOP, with the meaning of "top", and Song Ruhua also claims to be "China's Bill Gates".
Soon, Song Ruhua, who studied astrophysics, found that the knowledge he learned and commercial operations seemed to have little to do with each other, and he stared at tricycles all day long, running around the city of Chengdu, selling computers and earning the difference.
In the early nineties, a university associate professor, for the sake of his dream, was willing to go to the sea to pedal a tricycle.
Until one day, a big pie fell from the sky and really hit Song Ruhua's head.
In 1993, the Sichuan Construction Trust and Investment Company wanted to purchase a LED display equipment worth 320,000 yuan, Song Ruhua learned about it through a colleague at his alma mater, when he and the team knew nothing about the technology, and the customer gave a delivery time of only 15 days, but he confidently promised it.
In the next few days, Song Ruhua only slept 2 hours a day, from raw material procurement to printed board processing to installation and commissioning, he only took 12 days to complete the delivery.
This incident made Top famous in the industry, and Song Ruhua hit the iron while it was hot, saying that he wanted to "push a thing to a career."
At the end of 1994, the Chengdu Jinniu District Taxation Bureau wanted to purchase a software that could automatically print invoices, which was not available in China at that time. Song Ruhua felt that this was a great opportunity, because the State Administration of Taxation also required local governments to computerize taxation, so he boldly signed a contract without knowing anything about the tax system and software development. Then, turning around and returning to his alma mater to recruit, after 3 months of day and night development, the TOP computer automatic tax system version 1.0 was born.
With version 1.0, Song Ruhua quickly won the order of jinniu district tax bureau, and then led the development team to upgrade the software, while leading the sales team to expand the business territory to the province, and Shaanxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, Zhejiang, Anhui, Liaoning and other provinces, creating more than 40 million yuan in one year.
【2nd】
Song Ruhua, who was proud of the spring breeze, described himself as a "genius" with a universe in his heart, claiming to build Top into a "Top economic empire".
However, in the spring of 1996, the national tax system launched a unified "golden tax project" and stopped the computer system of local tax bureaus on their own. Song Ruhua's Top Company was in trouble, and due to pressure from all sides, Top also had to withdraw from the business.
But in 1997, Song Ruhua found another business opportunity in an expedition, he first bought 100 acres of land in Hongguang Town, Chengdu, and prepared to build a software park, called "Western Software Park", which was also listed as one of the four "first batch of national torch plan software industry bases" in the country after the fire. In the following three years, Song Ruhua built more than 20 software industrial parks in more than a dozen provinces and cities across the country.
By around 2000, Top dominated the IT industry because of the ability of this enclosure and was the largest "landlord" in the industry.
In the process of land enclosure, Song Ruhua controlled the cost by relying on the ability to transfer and transfer, on the one hand, the price of land transferred by local governments was very low, and some were even given away for free; on the other hand, Song Ruhua went to the bank to apply for a loan as soon as he got the land, and if the bank did not lend, he would not develop. In addition, he took advantage of the government's eagerness to achieve results and asked the government for various large-scale software projects.
In September 2000, TOP Group acquired 26.83% of Changzhou Golden Lion shares, becoming the largest shareholder, and subsequently, the stock was renamed "Yanhuang Online", becoming the first listed company on the Chinese stock market to be named after the website name. This year, Song Ruhua was ranked 45th in the List of Forbes Chinese mainland Rich with a value of 50 million US dollars. This is definitely the highlight moment of Song Ruhua's life, dazzling and dazzling.
But what exactly does TOP do? Whether Top's economic conditions are sufficient to support the expansion activities that have been going on, and whether Top is just a shell subsidiary, put a question mark on everyone's heart.
In August 2002, a lengthy story called "Top Bubble" made headlines. The article said that Top's software park is "empty", "the training center has been contracted into a hotel", the recruited "software engineers" are either playing computer games or chatting online, and the annual revenue of the Long March Network under the listed company is only 32.27 million yuan, but the net profit is as high as 20.69 million yuan. This news opened Up's "Emperor's New Clothes" and was the last straw that crushed Top's Empire.
In the following year, Song Ruhua tried to survive the crisis in various ways, but there was no way back.
On March 18, 2004, TOP Software issued an announcement claiming that Song Ruhua resigned from all positions in the group due to illness, and the next day, another announcement was issued saying that Song Ruhua had transferred the 18 million shares he held to his two compatriots for 1 yuan each. He went to the United States on his own.
In May 2005, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) announced a "permanent market ban" on Song Ruhua.
Until 2013, the court tried Song Ruhua for 9 years in prison for embezzling funds, amounting to 286 million yuan, and the legend of a generation officially ended.
Ten years of "Top" dream, from a university professor to a prisoner, I don't know if Song Ruhua, who is in prison, will regret his original choice at some point, but history cannot be assumed, and life cannot be repeated.