"1.9 million? Is that all we have?" Elisabeth fretted upon hearing about it.
If that were the case, they would have to sell part of their position!
Even though the profit from this would probably be exciting, none wanted to get rid of their positions.
"My family has always invested most of our savings in our business." One of them said, trying to make these people understand his dilemma. "We generally keep less than 15% of our profits... That's why I only have a few hundred thousand gold coins."
"Same for me." Another of them commented in a sighing tone.
"So what are we going to do?" Elisabeth asked. "The way I see it, we have two alternatives here."
"Two? What are they?"
"One, we sell half of our position. That sale would give us enough coin to make the mandatory investment that the Ritter Motor Company will soon require of us. But that would mean we would lose a lot of our position.
The other alternative would be for us to sell part of our properties, businesses, and valuable resources."
They all looked at her with wide eyes but said nothing immediately.
Meanwhile, Gomeric was worried about this investment as well.
His family owned 7% of the Ritter Motor Company, so he would have to invest more than 12 million gold coins!
"Honey, how much will we be able to put into the company?" Hilda asked her husband.
Gomeric was silent for a moment, doing some calculations. "We have 5 million gold coins, considering everything we have raised in the last few months from the trade of Lothur's gloves and our crystals."
The Ritter Motor Company had hardly distributed its profits so far.
They had done so only once when Viktoria had gathered coins to build the Ritter family military group and its headquarters.
But for that, she had distributed only little over 40 million bronze coins, or just over 400,000 gold coins.
The Becker family had earned only a little over 28,000 gold coins, nothing significant for this moment.
So even though the company had made a large profit in the last month, since it received half the value of the car sales upon purchase, even without delivering the vehicles, none of the partners had received any significant amount of these profits.
"Then what will we do?" Hilda looked at her husband seriously. "Are we going to sell some of what we have?"
"No. Let's talk to him." He looked into her eyes, indicating who he was saying. "Let's try to get the Ritter Motor Company to distribute some of its profits before discussing sales."
"Oh? Would that work? As far as I know, the amount customers pay when ordering their cars does not make a significant profit. Most of that first payment serves to pay the cost of production.
Our profits only really come in at the time of delivery of those vehicles."
ƥandasnovel.com "I know." He said. "But over 400 vehicles have already been delivered to their owners. And we have a small profit margin from paying for the orders in advance.
I believe we could collect almost 1 million gold coins if he agrees to distribute the company's profits."
"It would still be a long way from reaching the amount we need." She sighed.
While the Becker family group was considering this, the coroner Klossner's group had come to an alternative conclusion of the problem.
One of the traders in that group then said to his concerned colleagues as new bids came in. "Why don't we sell a fraction of our position? We need less than 2 million gold coins to pay for our obligations, but we would profit more than that if we sold 1% whole."
"Are you suggesting we sell a fraction less than 1%?" August Klossner asked.
"That's right. How about this, instead of having 4%, we could have 400 parts of the Ritter Motor Company. And we could sell 1 part at a time of our position.
However, our obligations would decrease for every part we sold of our position. So we can sell 80 fewer parts, meet our obligations, take some profit, and protect as much as possible of what we have in this company." That merchant said.
Meanwhile, Lothur's other partners were finding different methods to achieve the obligations they would soon have.
"What if we simply find people to join our partnership?" Someone in a group of local merchants suggested.
Their group had only 1%, but even so, they would not be able to hour their position, and if they had to sell it, they might lose their share in this company.
Then they need to consider an alternative.
The people in his group looked at him intently, and he explained. "According to company rules, we cannot sell our position to others. However, we can find people to join our society."
"How would that be different from selling our position?" One of the three men in that group asked, not understanding.
"Let me explain it another way. In theory, our 1% belongs to Marvin." This black-haired man with a beard and mustache said, pointing to one of them. "In any meeting or business of the Ritter Motor Company, you and I, Frank, have no right to participate because it is Marvin who has the agreement with Lothur.
So Marvin cannot pass his position to others without the approval of the company's controllers. However, there is a loophole here." He smiled and explained. "In the same way that we have made agreements with Marvin for the right to profits relative to his 1% share, we can add more people to our group.
Then Marvin would still be Lothur's partner, but we could have more partners in our group. They would have no relationship with Lothur and the Ritter Motor Company. They would only be entitled to the profits and obligations with us."
"Oh?" Those two men understood what this local merchant wanted.
They all saw a great alternative in this and soon went back to drinking in glee.
...
Meanwhile, Lothur was laughing from his house, watching the many thoughts of his associates who were trying to find ways out of this problem.
'The minds of these people really work best under pressure...' Lothur laughed. 'They practically developed the foundations of the monetary market on Earth without any prior knowledge due to the stress of not having enough coins to honor their positions.
That's really magnificent to see!'
He was not against the ideas of those people, so he was not going to tell Viktoria to try to get in the way of these men.
His old partners deserved some ease, so as long as they didn't break the rules of their contracts, he wouldn't act against them.
'I will allow them to dilute their positions by reaching out to new partners, and I will try to prevent them from selling their positions in the short term. We'd better open our stores outside the empire before a new auction occurs.' He imagined as he watched another fraction of his company being sold, this time for 5.3 million gold coins.
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