A few days ago, Xiaobian saw that Youjiu Game issued an announcement, the content is due to the company's continuous losses in recent years, and the operating income in recent years is less than 100 million yuan, so it faces the risk of delisting. Many friends may not have heard of Youjiu Games, but this site should be no stranger to uuu9.
There are countless classic maps of warcraft RPG at that time, such as "Trolls and Elves", "Guarding the Sword Pavilion", "True Three Kingdoms", "Legion War" and so on. But if you want to play, you have to find a place to download it. At that time, the first thing that players thought of must be uuu9.
Even in the DOTA2 era, there was a professional player whose ID was called uuu9, because he was the moderator of the Dota section on uuu9 before he played professionally, and he used uuu9 as his ID in honor.
In June 2015, Youjiu Games reached 36.8 yuan per share, which doubled six times in just half a year, and the total market value exceeded 30 billion. Today, seven years later, its stock price has become 1.65 yuan, and its total market value has fallen to only 1.42 billion yuan, and it is facing the risk of delisting.
So in the past few years, what has Yujiu Game experienced? The origin of this story dates back to the early 21st century. At that time, there was a young man named Liu Liang, who had served as a soldier, made a second-class meritorious service in the army, and participated in the flood fight in Hunan for 98 years.
After retiring from the army, Liu Liang chose to enter the Internet industry that was just emerging at that time. Coincidentally, games such as the legend of Shanda Network were popular all over the country at that time.
Liu Liang, who saw this business opportunity, made a "grand game auxiliary tool" together with his friends, which is the so-called legendary private server plug-in. In 2002-2004, its highest market share reached 50%, which is almost a must-install software for Internet cafes. This allowed Liu Liang to accumulate some original capital, and in 2004, he established Youjiu Network and started a game media. At that time, the various RPG maps of Warcraft 3 became popular in China, and the Internet cafes were full of young people playing these RPG maps.
Liu Liang naturally also noticed this opportunity, and acquired war3rpg, the largest Warcraft RPG map forum at that time, making Youjiu.com one of the three major game information portals in China that year. At that time, Youjiu.com was the favorite website of all gamers, known by players as "China Warcraft RPG Official Website", and the string of characters uuu9 was also the key to the "game treasure house" for all Warcraft RPG players.
An unofficial website can make players crown the word "official", which shows the degree of recognition of it. Liu Liang was also named "2007 National Excellent Webmaster".
As early as 2010, the total registered player members of uuu9's game forum exceeded 4 million, and the daily visits of independent IP reached 2 million, with a maximum of more than 2.5 million, sitting firmly in the leading position of domestic game portals. You know, 3DM now has an average of 1.125 million daily IP visits, which is already the second largest in the country. In 2012, Qihoo 360 and Youjiu network cooperated to establish 360 Youjiu (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., which was also very pioneering at that time.
At that time, in the domestic game industry, the media was to do the portal with peace of mind, and the game was to do research and development with peace of mind, and 360 Youjiu was a rare company that did both. But with the help of Youjiu's huge user base, they have done it. In 2012, 360 Youjiu and Giant Network cooperated to launch an online game called "Thousand Armies", and the monthly turnover of the release exceeded 20 million yuan.
In 2013, Liu Liang chose to stand independent from 360, the company changed its name to Youjiu Times, and acquired Beijing Youlongteng Information Technology Co., Ltd., focusing on the distribution and research and development of online games.
Incidentally, he also recruited Dai Lin, then vice president of 360, as a partner and started a business together. In 2013, youjiu times cooperated with 360 games and other channels to operate the "Dota Goddess" mobile game, with a monthly flow of more than 10 million yuan;
In 2014, Youjiu Times developed a mobile game called "Cool Love Warcraft", which was the first 3D touchscreen combat mobile game in China at that time, and the flow of water exceeded one million on the second day after its release, and rose to 1.3 million on the third day. This kind of performance can be regarded as very good at the time, but at the same time, the Youjiu era also ushered in a major inflection point. This year, a company called Shanghai Aigua Co., Ltd. issued a major asset restructuring announcement, at a premium of more than 4,000%, spent 1.2 billion yuan to acquire Youjiu Times.
After Youjiu Times was acquired by Aiji, Liu Liang and Dai Lin, as co-founders, received 135 million yuan and 258 million yuan in cash respectively, plus 10.28% and 9.31% of youjiu games. It was one of the first companies to enter the SSE in the 1990s, and they were called "Old Eight Shares".
But the problem is that Ai ling shares is a company mainly engaged in coal, because of the change in industry policies in those years, the coal mining industry entered a period of overcapacity, and basically all the coal mining companies lost money.
In the 2013 financial report, the net profit of the entire company was only 4.474 million yuan, which was only a fraction of the previous ratio.
(2013 Annual Report of Aeron)
Seeing that their main business is not as good as a year, even the most stupid people know that they should transform their business. It just so happened that the game industry was an outlet in those years, and ai made the shares look at the youjiu era, and spent a lot of money on mergers and acquisitions. Of course, in order to obtain these shares, Liu Liang also signed a VAM agreement with Ai Ling Shares, and the profits of each year of the Youjiu era in the following three years must reach a certain amount. Fortunately, shortly after "Love Warcraft", the Yuku era released a game called "King's Landing".
"King's Landing" was distributed globally, and received a good response in the domestic and foreign markets, made a lot of money, and successfully allowed Liu Liang to complete the bet. But although the Youjiu era has made money, the parent company's main business coal is still bleak and dragging its feet.
On the one hand, there are "new employees" who have outstanding performance not long after they arrived, and on the other hand, the "elders" who drag the company's hind legs, compared with the two, the company is naturally easy to make a choice. In 2015, the company sold 56% of the equity of Taishan Energy to the major shareholder Tiantian Technology for 588 million yuan of cabbage, and the shares of Aijin were officially renamed Youjiu Games and became an online game company, with Liu Liang as ceo.
With the arrival of the bull market in 2015, the stock price of Youjiu Games in June also reached an all-time high, with a market value of 30 billion yuan, which is simply an outrageous mother to open the door - outrageous to home.
Seeing this, do you think that love to make the company an investment ghost, the industry light? After that, you have to lie down and make money? The funny thing is that since Aijin sold its coal business, the coal business has actually "taken off", and Youjiu Game, which chose to devote itself to the game outlet, has trapped itself in the mire. The glory of the Youjiu era is only three years from 2014 to 2016, although the company's net profit reached 144 million yuan in 2016, but at this time its main source of revenue is "King's Landing" three years ago.
The reason for the decline is also inseparable from Liu Liang himself. In addition to the identity of CEO, Liu Liang himself is a domestic number of "big R" players, he likes to play games, even the game equipment in his mansion is the most professional one.
And Liu Liang will not only spend money in the game, he will spend a lot of time to play the game and study the game content. From the perspective of research and development and the perspective of players, the game is completely different, and it is precisely because of this that Liu Liang can make those good games that players love. But Liu Liang himself revealed that after the company went public, the "shackles" on his body became more.
He can't focus on the development of games, but instead has to focus on stock prices, securities laws and so on. In addition, the mobile game industry has also begun to formalize in those years, and it is no longer the place where anyone can make money. As we all know, the life cycle of most mobile games is very short, and it is not easy for King's Landing to last for 3 years. Other games released by the company since then have no particularly good market response, which is already a very dangerous signal for Youjiu Games. Sure enough, in 2017, Youjiu Games turned a profit into a loss, losing 422 million yuan in the whole year.
2018 is even more heavyweight, due to the suspension of the version number, the company's revenue is less than 100 million yuan, the loss is 905 million yuan, not to mention the return to the cost, the two years have been lost for a long time.
What's even more bloody is that Liu Liang and Dai Lin developed feelings during their entrepreneurship and registered their marriage on January 18, 2015, but this marriage has become a well-known "sky-high marriage" in the capital market.
The reason is that both of them are the major shareholders of the listed company, but they did not fulfill their disclosure obligations in a timely manner when they got married, so they were investigated by the regulatory authorities for a year in March 2016. Coincidentally, this day also happened to be the day when Liu Liang fulfilled his gambling promise and lifted the ban on stocks.
According to the regulations, half a year after the end of the investigation, they can reduce their shares in the company, and in this short period of one and a half years, the market value of the shares in their hands has also fallen from the highest 6 billion yuan to 1.2 billion yuan, a loss of 4.8 billion.
(Liu Liang also complained about this matter in the WeChat circle of friends )
In order to keep the company running, the two of them had to pledge all their shares and carry nearly 100 million yuan of interest per year.
In 2019, the company continued to lose money, in order to keep its own listed company's "shell", You Jiu urgently sold eight suites in Pudong, Shanghai, and sold 150 million yuan to barely survive.
They are all game companies, people Sony sell construction waste is to engage in charity, and You Jiu is really hollowing out Lao Di in order to survive. On Valentine's Day that year, Liu Liang issued a statement, saying that if he knew about this result, he would definitely not take the ship of "capital".
After that, youjiu game made a big news. In January 2021, Youjiu Games' annual performance forecast initially said that it expected a net profit loss of about 14 million yuan, and then issued a "correction announcement" in April saying that the net profit loss attributable to the mother should actually be 27.46 million.
Three months, this annual performance is almost double? If you are an investor, would you be willing to invest in such a company that does not believe in words? The reason for this huge difference is actually because the employees of Youjiu Games' shareholding company are suspected of "opening a casino". The company in which it participates is called Hangzhou Weipei Network.
At that time, nine employees of The Web were individually arrested on suspicion of opening a casino, which led to a halt to the company's business. The investment valuation of Youjiu Games' 28 million yuan has also become only 14 million yuan, which has the difference in the above-mentioned annual results, and incidentally let the four executives of Youjiu Games be punished by the Regulatory Bureau, which is a senseless disaster.
Looking back, You Jiu fell to the way it is now, in addition to the intervention of capital, there are also reasons for the slow response. In the past ten years, warcraft RPGs have quickly been eliminated, and the IP of mobile games has also changed from the initial rubbing heat to a large number of high-quality originals, and the pattern of the times has long been different. But it cannot be denied that we can see many "gentleness" that belong to the Internet on the Youjiu Network at that time.
For example, those Warcraft RPG map authors. Most of them use love to generate electricity, but this love still allows them to create countless classic maps, not to mention the incomparably harmonious atmosphere on the forum. Today's games are becoming more and more exquisite, and the gameplay is becoming more and more abundant, but such a spirit is becoming more and more rare.