タグ: Soft Bank

                       (Photo: M. Son/Facebook)

                           by David Parmer

Is Softbank’s CEO and founder a pioneer or a visionary? Recent tech history gives us the answer: he is both. Son is a pioneer—since 1980 he has been a key player in the worldwide information revolution. Son is also a visionary—realizing back in the 1980s that the future lay with digital technology. At that time he began to think strategically in terms of decades. The company’s  current 30-year goal, according to their website is “to be a corporate group needed by most people around the world.” At the rate that SoftBank is going, the world’s population might not have much of a choice.

 SoftBank is nothing, if not connected. It  is now comprised of 1300 companies around the world. Iran, North Korea and the polar regions seem to be the only places on the planet where SoftBank is not. China’s own Jack Ma, Chair of Alibaba, sits on the SoftBank board and Yahoo Japan and PayPal have long been members of the fold. Sprint (=SoftBank) has now set its eyes on acquiring U.S. carrier T-Mobile, and making some big waves in the U.S. telecom market.

Masayoshi Son is currently CEO of Softbank, CEO of Softbank Mobile, and Chairman of Sprint Corporation. Forbes magazine estimates his personal net worth to be $9.1 billion. ( “Billion” is the word most associated with Son. “Million” is about as outdated as the rotary dial phone when talking about him personally or his businesses.) When the tech bubble burst in 2000, he personally lost…billions. Son was born on August 11, 1957  in Japan to a poor Korean family. As a teenager he realized that opportunity for him lay overseas. Overcoming initial family resistance he went to the U.S. for high school, and in college studied economics and computer science at U.C. Berkeley. Following some promising business success in the U.S., he returned to Japan where he founded SoftBank, a company specializing in the sale of various types of software. After more than a decade of funding startups, SoftBank went public in 1994. The company continued to expand, was hit hard in 2000 when the bubble burst, recovered, continued to expand, and in 2008 was the first and only provider of the Apple IPhone in Japan.

SoftBank’s latest move, the T-Mobile acquisition is facing opposition from U.S. regulators. There are now four carriers in the U.S. : ATT, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. If Sprint gets control of T-Mobile, Son predicts a price war, and one that will benefit consumers, by reducing prices. Analysts say the mobile phone market has reached a saturation point, and that the only way for one company to get subscribers is to poach them from another carrier. And Son’s price war would certainly encourage users to defect from the number one and number two carriers. Speaking about this question on an American TV show Son declared “I wanna’ be number one! ”  In many ways he already is, and is showing no signs of slowing down.