Ye Chen's words caused Song Wanting's heart to surge instantly.
She had always wanted to make her business of trading and auctioning collectibles bigger and stronger, but had never found the right breakthrough point.
It was precisely because she attached great importance to this business that she had immediately befriended Ye Chen after seeing with her own eyes at Jiqing Hall that he could restore her family's antiques using the lost heritage restoration techniques.
She had originally hoped to recruit Ye Chen to work for the Song family at Jiqing Hall, but little did she know that Ye Chen, who was only a superfluous son-in-law at the beginning, was actually the young master of the Ye family in Yanjing and was even more powerful.
So, Song Wanting's wish to revitalise Jiqing Hall through Ye Chen had long since come to naught.
Since then, Jiqing Hall had not been able to find a better opportunity for development.
Although the collectibles industry may seem too distant from ordinary people and we rarely hear of any big moves, it is an uncompromisingly profitable industry with a huge market size.
The turnover of a single auction at a major auction house can be in the billions of dollars, and even higher if there is a superb sale.
Sometimes, just one painting can bring in hundreds of millions of dollars to the auction house.
Auctions are also very lucrative, and the way in which they are profitable is broadly divided into self-employment or commission.
Self-employment means buying low and selling high, based on the traditional antiques market model of picking up a lot.
Commissions, on the other hand, are the main source of revenue for auctions.
Generally speaking, auction houses charge a commission ranging from 5% to 15% on lots, and the more prestigious the auction house, the higher the percentage of commission.
Under normal circumstances, if a famous painting sells for $100 million, the auction house will receive $15 million just from the commission.
Converted into RMB, this is almost 100 million dollars.
So, the bigger the auction house, the more geometrically the money-making capacity increases.
If an auction fetches tens of billions of dollars, the brokerage alone will generate more than a billion dollars in cash.
With two auctions a year, billions in net profit can be made.
Moreover, once an auction is bigger and stronger, it can bring in far more than just commission, but an overall increase in the entire industry chain.
Generally speaking, a large auction house will also have several collectors' shops under its umbrella, and because the auction house is famous enough, these shops of theirs, too, have a very high patronage.
Such collectors' shops will not only deal in general collectibles, but also offer a fee-based appraisal service and paid in-store consignment sales to individual sellers and collectors.
Many collectibles that are not eligible for auction but have some value are sold privately in these shops.
As the shop is open all year round, the volume of sales accumulated in a year is sky-high, and the profit from the commission is no less than that of an auction.
However, this powerful ability to draw money is limited to the top few large companies in the industry. When it comes to Song Wanting's Jiqing Tang, the net profit at the end of the year is not even a couple of hundred million.
The reason why Jiqingtang could not make it was not that she, Song Wanting, did not work hard enough, but that Jiqingtang could not get good things in the true sense of the word.
Without enough good stuff, it has absolutely no capital to compete with the top auction houses.
When the top auction houses are selling Van Gogh, Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Qi Baishi and Zhang Daqian, the world's leading masters, Jiqingtang cannot even get a painting that sells for more than ten million dollars.
The reason for this is that they are not well known enough, and it is impossible for the big collectors to give something to Jiqingtang for auction.
Song Wanting, who was struggling to find a good opportunity, was suddenly pulled by Ye Chen with the Spring Return Pill, which made her inwardly grateful to Ye Chen and at the same time, she could not help but feel a surge of emotions.