Softbank founder undeterred
REUTERS
A year ago, Masayoshi Son bought a bank and launched a stock market for his Internet empire. It seemed like the perfect formula for the Softbank founder and one of the world's richest men: invest in a startup, fund it with a bank, build it and then take it public.
While Mr Son shows no signs of abandoning his vision of an Internet future, dot-coms are crumbling around him in Japan and the United States as they struggle to prove they can be viable, profitable businesses.
His net worth has been cut to US$4.6 billion from US$60 billion a year ago, based on his 38 per cent stake in Softbank.
Just this week, financial unit Softbank Finance pulled the plug on a 750 million yen (about HK$47 million) online bond trading venture with US investment bank Lehman Brothers.
Still, Mr Son is surging forward to invest in even more businesses, planning to take the number of his investments to 800 from 600.
In January he set up a US$1.05 billion investment fund with Cisco Systems to invest in high-speed and wireless Internet technology and services.
"If there is any single person who could stand up in front of a huge audience and sell an idea, that would be Son. He is good at it, he is really good at it," said Thomas Rodes, Internet analyst at Nikko Salomon Smith Barney.
Although a brash approach and perpetual optimism are nothing new for the 43-year-old Mr Son, he has also suffered criticism for not keeping managerial control over the ventures he funds. Analysts say this could snowball if the investments go sour.
Though soft-spoken, he mixes no words when saying he wants to create an Internet "Zaibatsu" - the huge industrial conglomerates that dominated Japan's economy for a century until the end of World War II.
"I want to be Number 1 in every area," he once said.
Mr Son's motivation to rise to the top started early. An ethnic Korean, he moved to California at the age of 16, apparently motivated by bullying at school because of his race.
After making his first million at the University of California, Berkeley, by importing arcade video games, he invented a pocket translator and sold it to Sharp for US$1 million.
With that money in his pocket, he returned home and founded Softbank in 1981.
So far, his Internet successes still outweigh any recent setbacks. Softbank still owns 22 per cent of premium Web portal Yahoo! and more than half of Yahoo! Japan. Nasdaq Japan, launched in the middle of the last year, has met with moderate success and now lists 17 companies.
Only two weeks after Nippon Credit Bank, the failed bank that was resuscitated by a Softbank-led consortium, reopened for business in September, its first president Tadayo Honma killed himself. The bank has reopened under the name Aozora - or Blue Sky - Bank, targeting lending to small businesses and improving its asset quality by selling non-performing loans.
But the bank faces an uphill battle with severe competition for corporate lending, where it previously earned most of its revenue. Analysts say it may find it difficult to recover its client base.
Still, Mr Son could have the energy to make the most of the hard situation.
"He gets in the back of your mind and makes you worried that he knows something that you don't," said Mr Rodes.
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