SoftBank: Japan’s largest-ever IPO

Japanese tech giant SoftBank is spinning off its mobile unit to raise cash for more tech investments, reports Marina Gerner. Who could benefit?

922_MW_P09_Shares

Son: building a tech empire

"Japan's SoftBank is famous for paying sky-high prices for its overseas acquisitions," says Jacky Wong in The Wall Street Journal. In 2016, for example, the technology conglomerate paid almost £24bn for the largest British tech company, chip designer ARM Holdings. Now it is hoping investors will return the favour and pay up for its domestic mobile telecoms unit, Softbank Corp Japan's third-largest mobile phone carrier. The Tokyo Stock Exchange has approved an initial public offering (IPO) of 35% of the unit for as much as $23bn. That would make it Japan's biggest-ever IPO, and globally second only to Chinese internet giant Alibaba's $25bn New York listing in 2014. The stock will start trading on 19 December.

Subscribe to MoneyWeek

Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Get 6 issues free
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/mw70aro6gl1676370748.jpg

Sign up to Money Morning

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Sign up

Marina Gerner is an award-winning journalist and columnist who has written for the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, The Guardian and Standpoint magazine in the UK; the New York Observer in the US; and die Bild and Frankfurter Rundschau in Germany.

Marina is also an adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business at their London campus, and has a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Her first book, The Vagina Business, deals with the potential of “femtech” to transform women’s lives, and will be published by Icon Books in September 2024.

Marina is trilingual and lives in London.