Once the heads of every department had finished their annual reports and Kennard had delivered his summary, everyone turned their eyes to Xu Yi.
Although Xu Yi had largely stopped involving himself in the guild's day-to-day affairs several years earlier, focusing instead on its overall direction, he remained the irreplaceable Xinfei Merchant Guild President in everyone's eyes. Each year's year-end review meeting could only truly conclude after he had delivered his closing remarks.
Moreover, at the end of every annual meeting, Xu Yi would use his year-end summary to offer guidance-or rather, set the direction-for the Xinfei Merchant Guild's development in the coming year, establishing its next objectives and some strategies for achieving them.
Thus, to the guild's entire senior leadership, Xu Yi's speech at the year-end review meeting always held tremendous significance.
This time, however, Xu Yi did not begin by reviewing the guild's work that year as he usually did. Instead, he exchanged a glance with Kennard, swept his gaze over everyone present, and said slowly, "The guild's development has now reached the level I anticipated, and even exceeded my expectations. So I believe it's time for us to restructure."
The moment the word "restructure" left his mouth, the meeting room fell silent.
Only after a long while did everyone seem to recover. They exchanged glances and began murmuring among themselves.
Xu Yi waited patiently for a moment before tapping the table to draw their attention back to him.
"I raised this issue two years ago, so I don't think you need to be quite so surprised." Xu Yi smiled. "Restructuring the guild was always inevitable. There's nothing strange about it."
"But..." Although Ankato was not yet forty, he already counted as a veteran among the middle and senior managers in the room. He was the first to