SoftBank: from a 24-year-old's software shop to the boldest gambler in tech
Masayoshi Son was 24 when he founded SoftBank on 3 September 1981 to distribute software. Its greatest bet came in 2000: $20 million in a fledgling Chinese venture called Alibaba, worth $60 billion when that company went public in 2014. Other wagers, such as the memory maker Kingston, went far less smoothly.
Publishing came first. In May 1982 the company launched Oh! PC and Oh! MZ, magazines for NEC and Sharp computer owners, and Oh! PC reached 140,000 copies by 1989 as SoftBank became Japan's biggest technology publisher. It floated in 1994 at a $3 billion valuation, bought the COMDEX trade show for $800 million in 1995 and agreed to buy Ziff Davis for $2.1 billion, and in 1996 teamed up with Yahoo! to create Yahoo! Japan. That year it also took 80% of Kingston Technology, whose founders famously shared $100,000,000 of their $1.5B windfall with staff; SoftBank sold it back in 1999 for about a third of the price.
Telecoms became the core. After turning into a holding company in October 1999, it bought the Fukuoka Hawks baseball team on 28 January 2005 and agreed on 17 March 2006 to acquire Vodafone Japan, renamed SoftBank Mobile that October. A 2008 Tiffany collaboration produced a phone studded with more than 400 diamonds totalling over 20 carats, priced above 100,000,000 yen. American regulators approved a $22.2 billion deal for 78% of Sprint on 6 July 2013, and the spun-off SoftBank Corp had 45.621 million subscribers by March 2021.
The investing then accelerated. SoftBank took 51% of Supercell for a reported $2.1 billion in October 2013, co-designed the humanoid robot Pepper in 2014 and renamed itself SoftBank Group in July 2015. Its biggest purchase, Arm Holdings for more than US$32 billion, closed on 5 September 2016. With Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund it formed the $93 billion Vision Fund on 27 May 2017, contributing $28 billion, $8.2 billion of it raised by selling about 25% of Arm. A second fund aiming at roughly $108 billion was announced in July 2019, though the Wall Street Journal reported in February 2020 it would raise under half.
Headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, and leaning on Mizuho as its main lender, the group ranked 130th on the 2025 Forbes Global 2000. Its logo borrows the flag of the Kaientai, a trading company Sakamoto Ryōma founded in 1865. On January 21, 2025 it joined OpenAI, Oracle and MGX in Stargate, an AI infrastructure project estimated at $500 billion over four years.
Source: SoftBank Group
