Masayoshi Son

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Masayoshi Son (2008)

Masayoshi Son ( Japanese 孫正義 Son Masayoshi , kor. 손정의 Son Jeong-ui ; born August 11, 1957 in Tosu , Saga Prefecture , Japan ) is a Japanese entrepreneur. His parents are of Korean descent . He is the founder and CEO of SoftBank Capital , and CEO of SoftBank Mobile . According to Forbes Magazine's 2018 list, he is the richest man in Japan with total assets estimated at $ 23.8 billion.

biography

Son grew up in Tosu, the third generation of South Korean immigrants . The city with around 70,000 inhabitants is best known as a railway junction , where he grew up directly on the main line, in an illegally built wooden shack with a tin roof. Because of its origins, Son often used the Japanese name Yasumoto - 安 本 , in order not to be the target of xenophobic attacks.

Following advice from the Japanese McDonald’s president Den Fujita , Son wanted to study English and computer science. When he was 15, his father fell ill and his older brother had to drop out of school and go to work. Against the opposition of his parents and teachers, Son moved to San Francisco at the age of 16 , learned English, graduated from high school and went to college. He took the inspiration for this step from a book about the samurai hero Ryoma Sakamoto , who wanted to arm Japan against the great Western powers.

At the University of California, Berkeley , he studied economics, attended computer science lectures and learned to develop software. He was convinced that information technology would trigger the next economic revolution.

Son patented a translation device that he sold to Sharp Electronics for $ 1.7 million . With the money he earned, Son imported the arcade game Space Invaders and distributed it on the Berkeley campus. After graduating with a BA in Economics in 1980, Son founded Unison in Oakland , which was later bought by Kyocera .

SoftBank

In 1981, Son returned to Japan and founded the software company SoftBank Capital with a million dollar loan from Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank . At first he was sometimes more, sometimes less successful. After some scandals, the bank canceled the loan, after which Son received a new loan from the Industrial Bank of Japan . During this time he tied up with Microsoft Japan and acquired a 25% stake in Novell Japan.

After his marriage to a Japanese woman, Son became a Japanese citizen. In 1994 Son lost the bidding dispute over Ziff-Davis , but was able to buy the company a year later for 2.1 billion dollars - about half a billion more than he had bid in 1994.

In 1995, SoftBank owned 37 percent of Yahoo , in 1996 COMDEX was bought for $ 900 million and Kingston Technology for $ 2.1 billion. In 1997, SoftBank invested in many Internet companies. This made SoftBank one of the main winners of the New Economy . At the zenith of the dot-com bubble , SoftBank was worth about $ 140 billion. At the time, Son owned 53 percent of SoftBank.

SoftBank incorporated other companies, even if they were completely overvalued at the time. The numerous purchases were financed by reducing the stake in Yahoo to 22.58 percent. One of the most spectacular companies acquired was Nippon Credit Bank , later Aozora Bank . Son also wanted to promote the expansion of broadband Internet access and thus become the market leader. The companies founded for this purpose, Softbank Networks and BB Technologies , soon became successful competitors to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), which had taken too much time to expand broadband connections.

After the New Economy and with it SoftBank fell sharply in the following years, Son concentrated on Yahoo BB and BB Phone . Yahoo BB had 4.3 million ADSL customers but posted losses. SoftBank now had more than a billion dollars in debt. Following the acquisition of Japan Telecom , Yahoo BB is Japan's leading broadband Internet provider.

On March 17, 2006, SoftBank acquired Vodafone Japan for approximately $ 15 billion, with Masayoshi Son as CEO. In addition, SoftBank secured the iPhone rights from Apple exclusively for the Japanese market . In 2012 SoftBank acquired 78.5% of the shares in the French developer Aldebaran Robotics . In 2013, the US wireless operator Sprint was taken over for around $ 20 billion .

On December 6, 2016, he and Donald Trump announced to the media that they were investing 50 billion dollars in American start-ups and thereby creating 50,000 new jobs.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Handelsblatt : “Smartphones stir up the mobile phone market in Japan”, Author: Jan Keuchel, issue of September 28, 2011, p. 30
  2. ↑ Wieland Wagner: Billionaire Masayoshi Son wants to create the most powerful IT groups in the world. In: Spiegel Online . June 7, 2017, accessed April 30, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b c Martin Kölling: Sprint owner Masayochi Son. Visionary with feeling , in: Handelsblatt , No. 108 from June 6th to 9th, 2014, p. 22f.
  4. ↑ Softbank plans to invest 50 billion US dollars in the USA. December 7, 2016, accessed December 7, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Son, Masayoshi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 孫正義 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Tosu , Saga Prefecture , Japan