2023-09-14 14:00:06
Masayoshi Son, Japanese founder of the SoftBank conglomerate, during a press conference in Tokyo, July 28, 2016. KAZUHIRO NOGI / AFP
Masayoshi Son, the Japanese founder of the SoftBank conglomerate, can rub his hands. Thursday, September 14, the British company ARM, a central player in the semiconductor sector, which it bought in 2016 for 32 billion dollars (30 billion euros), should be listed on the stock market for a valuation of around 50 billions of dollars. By selling 10% of the capital, his group should recover around $5 billion.
A great victory for this investor who was the laughing stock of the markets just a few months ago, for having invested in six years more than 20 billion dollars in WeWork, a shared workspace brand, which is now only worth 160 million of dollars on the stock market (compared to 47 billion envisaged for an IPO initially planned for 2019), and whose managers did not exclude, in August, going bankrupt.
Invest massively in start-ups
If ARM’s IPO proves to be a success, it would restore credibility to SoftBank’s bet. Initially specializing in software distribution, the company, founded in 1981, then diversified wildly, launching Yahoo! Japan in 1996, then entering the telecoms and banking sector. Masayoshi Son made his best move in 2000, when he invested $20 million in online commerce champion Alibaba and held up to 25% of the capital. A stake which was once worth $100 billion – but which he gradually had to divest.
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A convinced technophile, Masayoshi Son struck another big blow in 2017, by launching, at the age of 60, the largest private investment fund on the planet, Vision Fund, with more than 100 billion dollars, thanks to support in particular from the Saudi (PIF) and Emirati (Mubadala) sovereign funds. Then, two years later, Vision Fund 2 ($40 billion). His project: invest massively in start-ups in the hope that this financial advantage will allow them to accelerate their growth and kill the competition while waiting to reach profitability.
SoftBank is venturing into all areas: entertainment (ByteDance, Sorare), business (Slack), finance (Revolut, Klarna), mobility (Didi, Uber), logistics (Grab, DoorDash). Today, the two Vision Funds are present in nearly 500 companies, with very contrasting successes.
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In addition to the resounding failure of WeWork, SoftBank also lost, at the end of 2022, around $100 million in the sinking of FTX, which was once the champion of cryptocurrencies before collapsing due to fraudulent maneuvers. Uber’s IPO in May 2019 was also not the expected success, even if the company’s stock barely managed to exceed its original listing. The same goes for Slack, which, in four months, saw its capitalization drop by 50% in the fall of 2019. The company has since been bought by Salesforce.
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