As of the end of September, SoftBank had around 18 trillion yen, or about $158.8 billion of current and non-current interest-bearing debt. The bigger number though is sitting on the liabilities side of the company’s balance sheet. As Arman and I wrote about a few weeks ago: There’s just one problem: SoftBank is sitting on piles of debt. Masayoshi Son has for years wanted to transform SoftBank from a mature telco player into a leading investment house for funding the next-generation of technology companies. Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesĪt its core, SoftBank Group is fundamentally a telecom, and the third-largest player in the Japanese market. Ken Miyauchi, president and chief executive officer of SoftBank Corp., strikes the trading bell during the company’s listing ceremony at the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, Dec. Its IPO did what it had to do (raising money), but bad early performance will be a challenge for 2019 Today, Arman and I wanted to look back at SoftBank’s year, and so we’ve compiled ten areas for analysis around the group’s telco business, its Vision Fund, and its other major investments (Sprint, Nvidia, Arm, and Alibaba). Highs and lows come with any ambitious project, and certainly for Masayoshi Son, the founder and chairman of SoftBank Group, nothing - not even piles of debt - will stand in his way. That’s the second worst IPO performance this decade for a Japanese company. But after weeks of pushing the stock to Japanese retail stock investors, those same consumers dumped the stock upon its debut, dropping by 15% from its debut at ¥1,463 to its close at ¥1,282. The company’s mobile unit started trading today on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (ticker: 9434), the second largest IPO of all time after Alibaba, raising $23.6 billion. Saudi Arabia is the largest investor in the Vision Fund.īut the Vision Fund is only part of the SoftBank story this year. It was a year of highs as its Flipkart transaction produced billions in returns, as well as a year of incredible lows, what with the crisis over Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The Japanese telecom conglomerate’s Vision Fund pushed out a prodigious amount of capital this year - quite literally billions of dollars - into companies as diverse as a molecular manufacturer (Zymergen) and a robotic pizza delivery business (Zume Pizza). If there was a word that dominated startup and tech news coverage this year, it was SoftBank.
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