Chapter 154

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Translated by Heavenly Cat

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

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“What. What’s going on? The Suez Canal is blocked again!”

Kim Du-young was rushing to the company after hearing the bolt-from-the-blue news.

“A Singaporean oil tanker ran aground while passing through the canal due to rudder malfunction.”

“If it was going to break down, it should have broken down in the middle of the ocean—why of all places does this crap happen in the canal again.”

Nightmares of the previous Evermore incident came flooding back.

Back then, Evermore had blocked the Suez Canal, causing an unprecedented situation where all ships were stuck.

“Fortunately, it doesn’t look like they’ll be blocking the passage for over 10 days like with Evermore. Having suffered greatly last time, the Egyptian government has been preparing for potential accidents, and they’re currently pulling out the grounded vessel with 5 ships.”

“Then when will the canal reopen?”

“They say it can be resolved within 6 hours.”

Kim Du-young let out a sigh of relief.

“Yesterday made my heart race, and now this commotion first thing Monday.”

“Yesterday? Did something happen?”

“That’s… ahem. There was something.”

The words Vice President Kang Ji-hwan said yesterday kept circling in his head, so he honestly hadn’t slept properly.

“Anyway, this will be resolved quickly?”

“Yes. Navigation time has been extended a bit, but it’s not enough to cause delays. The real problem is the ports.”

“Ports?”

“Yes. The port strike that started in America is turning out to be more serious than expected. The wave of strikes is spreading not just to American ports but to Asia and Europe as well.”

Kim Du-young furrowed his brow.

Suddenly, a strike fever had begun to sweep through ports everywhere.

Honestly, it was understandable.

In the early days of COVID, shipping work decreased, so ports that receive, store, and move goods also had no work.

But after that, shipping volume exploded and port work piled up enormously.

“That grueling labor finally made the port unions snap. Work has increased much more than before, but they’re paying the same.”

“Well, I understand, but….. even so, isn’t a full stop a bit much?”

When ports stopped working, shipping couldn’t do anything.

They couldn’t unload goods and just had to kill time until the strike ended.

Then they couldn’t move elsewhere either, creating a total disaster.

“Only a few places have strikes for now, but looking at the current trend, it seems strikes will break out almost everywhere soon.”

“This is serious. Is there anything we can do here?”

“This isn’t a strike in shipping but a strike at the ports. To resolve it, the relevant countries and companies holding port concessions need to handle it.”

That was frustrating.

If it had happened in shipping, they could have quickly put out the fire somehow, but since it was a port strike, there was little Kim Du-young could do.

“For now, make sure the ports we have concession rights to don’t get swept up in this current. Keep them in check.”

“Should we raise wages?”

“Wages should match each country’s standard. Raise them a bit more than that. The semiconductor cycle is turning right now, so parts need to move quickly.”

Semiconductors are usually transported by air.

But the parts that make semiconductors are mass transported by sea for manufacturing.

If sea transport is delayed, semiconductor production gets delayed, and then companies that need semiconductors are the ones scrambling.

“Semiconductor parts cannot be late. No matter what, they must arrive on time. Send employees if you have to—make sure our goods get out properly.”

“Yes. We’ll definitely resolve the semiconductor situation. But President, the real problem isn’t semiconductors.”

“Hm? Then?”

“Pirates are apparently causing trouble again. Recently, there have been pirates approaching our company’s ships.”

“Really? How many got hit?”

“5 ships just this week. 3 of them are our company’s.”

Pirates these days are clever too.

In the past, they’d take over entire ships and demand ransom, but with countries now regularly conducting joint maritime exercises and shooting dead any pirates who hijack ships,

“So pirates, rather than hijacking ships, are now looting goods from ships and escaping. If they tried hijacking, special forces would be deployed en masse to wipe them out.”

Before, they approached carefully so hostages wouldn’t die, but now eliminating pirates was the top priority over protecting hostages.

They had to instill fear that hostages or not, they’d shoot first, so that pirates would change their behavior.

And that strategy worked well.

The problem was that while pirates weren’t hijacking ships, looting and quickly escaping was happening frequently.

“We’ll need to hire escort ships.”

“Yes, it’ll cost a lot, but if this continues, we’ll be cleaned out by pirates.”

“Sigh. Now even pirates………. What’s the condition of the attacked ships?”

“Those guys fired guns wildly as they approached, so there are holes all over the ships. They need to move to the nearest port for safety inspections.”

“These bastards deserve to be beaten to death. Coordinate with countries in that region to catch those pirates first. And greatly increase escort ships. Spread them throughout our routes. So pirates can’t even get close.”

“Yes. But this incident is more serious because the attacked ships happened to be ones requested by Bluezone.”

At the mention of Bluezone, his already frowning face frowned even more.

“Bluezone? Wait. That large contract we signed before?”

“Yes. Hundreds of millions of items are now stuck at sea.”

Bluezone was a massive dinosaur with a market cap of $1 trillion.

They’d created Bluezone Prime in America, practicing very fast delivery and achieving huge success with their online store.

And they were currently gathering various products from Europe and Asia to hold a major discount event.

“What happens if this doesn’t arrive on time?”

“We’ll have to pay penalties. It needs to arrive in time for the discount event, but that’s not happening right now.”

“Any solution?”

“None. We just have to wait.”

“This is maddening.”

Kim Du-young scratched his head furiously.

If not for those pirate bastards, these goods would have arrived with time to spare.

“If this happens…….”

With semiconductors already precarious, the large contract with Bluezone was about to fall through too. This would be reported to the higher-ups.

Where would that be at Gwangwoon?

Gwangwoon Securities.

“…….”

Already, Jeong Jin-ho’s kind face was painting itself in his head.

He would surely say it couldn’t be helped, so it’s okay.

But if what Vice President Kang Ji-hwan said yesterday was true, “okay” might not really mean okay.

***

“Pirates?”

“Yes. Shipping volume has increased enormously, so pirates have increased too. Several pirates targeted and attacked our ships this time.”

“No one was hurt?”

“Fortunately not, but goods were looted and ships were damaged, so they’re docked at ports for inspection.”

Thank goodness no one was hurt.

Having goods looted was painful, but how could those be more precious than human lives?

“Bluezone is preparing a big event, and these ships’ goods were all supposed to go to Bluezone.”

“Oh no. Bluezone will be in trouble because of us.”

“Yes. Even though it’s because of pirates, goods can’t arrive on time, so we’ll probably have to pay the penalty.”

It was unfortunate, but couldn’t be helped.

How could we have known pirates would attack and prevented it?

“Tell them to greatly increase escort ships. Don’t spare the costs. And convey that this incident couldn’t be helped, so don’t blame themselves too much. Ah, and the port strike situation can’t go on long either, so tell them we should step in and try to resolve it quickly.”

“Yes, President.”

“What’s the next item?”

“This time semiconductors are causing some trouble.”

I knew semiconductors would come up.

“Production issues?”

“Yes. Demand is surging due to COVID and the Bitcoin craze, and even though we’ve greatly increased production capacity, we can’t keep up.”

COVID and Bitcoin.

The synergy of these two had driven semiconductor demand insanely high.

It’s good for us that we’re selling lots of semiconductors, but orders were pouring in so much that we’d reached a level where we couldn’t handle all the volume.

“And this time, server replacement timing has coincided, so we can’t give semiconductors to everyone. The most urgent right now is our Gwangwoon side. We need not just server maintenance but expansion.”

Usually companies use cloud services.

Rather than building their own servers, they use Bluezone or other cloud server companies.

But we were building and operating our own servers around the world.

At first we used cloud services too, but as scale grew and we had to handle more sensitive information, we created our own data centers.

“But those servers are reportedly not enough either. Traffic is too high, and server overload is a concern.”

“We’re continuously building data centers, aren’t we?”

“Yes. But we need to build more beyond those data centers. The Faceweb we acquired this time had a big impact.”

That meant we needed to adjust the semiconductors we were supposed to supply.

“Shouldn’t Gwangwoon use semiconductors first? Even if we pay some penalties, we need to hold as many semiconductors as possible for current server replacement, maintenance, and expansion.”

“Then how much do we need to reduce the semiconductors supplied to companies?”

“I brought the data here.”

The documents the department head handed me showed how many semiconductors currently supplied by Kangsung and our Gwangwoon were going to which companies.

I quickly scanned the document, running my finger down. If my intuition gave a signal somewhere, I planned to reduce semiconductors going there.

“……?”

But while examining that long list, my intuition caught on only one place.

‘Does that mean we don’t need to reduce semiconductors elsewhere, but we need to reduce them here?’

The problem was the company name.

‘Bluezone………….’

Bluezone, operating the world’s greatest cloud server through BWS services.

While they record over $40 billion in annual revenue from domestic and overseas deliveries, BWS revenue isn’t even $100 billion.

But in terms of net profit, BWS exceeds the net profit from delivery revenue.

In other words, the cloud service they’re operating is a very efficient business.

“Bluezone would need a lot of semiconductors, right?”

“Yes. As shown in the document, BWS also needs to do server replacement this time. They’re operating the world’s best cloud service, so they need quite a lot of semiconductors. If something goes wrong with Bluezone’s servers, there’ll be lots of affected companies worldwide, including in our country.”

I know from experiencing it once before. Back then, semiconductor supply was delayed, servers stopped, and the games we were running also stopped.

“………”

But my intuition was giving signals only for this Bluezone. How much semiconductors am I supposed to take away from here?

I tried writing numbers next to it. I kept lowering the number until a feeling came.

“……?”

Even after writing numbers for a while, my intuition wasn’t responding. Only when the number finally reached 0 did a tingling current flow through my body via the pen.

“0?”

If we just cut the currently outgoing semiconductors in half, Bluezone would take a big hit.

But the number my intuition was showing was 0.

Zero.

***

Carol Jesse was the CEO who had been running this massive company called Bluezone since last year.

Originally, founder Lainjov was CEO, but he handed over the position last year and became Chairman of the Board, currently focusing on the space industry.

“Seeing Mylon Tusk expand to Mars to build a base and run the first space colony, he got a proper space high. Today he poured more money into that useless place again?”

Jesse clicked her tongue and shook her head.

Bluezone was already in crisis even without this.

Launching Prime service and dominating the market was good, but the problem was that even with revenue rising, operating profit was falling.

Overseas was actually in the negative.

What was keeping them afloat was BWS.

The prime funds coming from there were what kept the company running.

So Lainjov should use funds for the struggling Bluezone, but he was pouring astronomical money into the space industry.

“CEO. Gwangwoon contacted us again, and it seems the ships won’t arrive within the deadline.”

“What? They can’t do anything about it?”

“Yes. Apparently the ships attacked by pirates are in somewhat dangerous condition.”

“Then what do we do? We marketed so massively this time!”

“They said they’ll pay all penalties.”

“Is the penalty the problem now? Our entire prepared event is about to go up in smoke! How are they going to compensate for this!”

It was awkward to even sue over this.

Gwangwoon didn’t deliberately not send ships—pirates attacked them.

“And this time Kangsung and Gwangwoon failed to secure semiconductors and won’t make a contract with us.”

“What!?”

Hearing that, Jesse jumped out of her seat before she even realized it.

“Th-they can’t give us semiconductors? We have to proceed with server replacement this time, and we’re pushing forward with data center construction too!?”

“Yes. They say they have no spare semiconductors right now…………”

“N-no! We have to get semiconductors no matter what! Did we properly convey our situation!?”

“Yes. But they still say they can’t contract. Even if we pay any amount.”

Bluezone, which had been in the $1 trillion club, had seen its stock price drop to $800 billion due to performance falling below expectations.

So they were planning aggressive marketing and discount events to break through the crisis, and furthermore expand servers to firmly establish BWS.

But all those plans were about to collapse.

Because of Gwangwoon!

“Wait.”

Jesse, who had been fuming, suddenly felt her head go cold.

“Not content with ruining our big event through shipping, now they won’t supply semiconductors? If this gets out, our stock price will drop significantly again—Gwangwoon can’t be unaware of this.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t Faceweb also drop from the $1 trillion club under Gwangwoon’s pressure and keep falling until Gwangwoon eventually ate them?”

As that thought connected, Jesse was scared out of her wits.

“Q-quick, call the Chairman!”

“Huh? The Chairman?”

“You still don’t get it?”

Jesse could instinctively sense the situation flowing similarly to Faceweb.

“Gwangwoon is targeting our Bluezone right now!”

<End of Chapter 154>