Word: softbank
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...Softbank's basic plan is simple: invest early and often. By buying more tickets in the e-commerce game than anyone else, the company improves its chances of winning the lottery--even if there is a massive shakeout. In effect, Citizen Son is establishing the world's first virtual conglomerate. He wants to be the patriarch of a loose but fiercely loyal network of companies that span the globe, feeding each other and starving the competition...
...them. He aims to gain implicit control with a 20%-to-30% stake in each and to build a web of mutual cross-investments with sales, marketing and supply ties. "I want us to be No. 1 in every area," says Son. In five years he expects the global Softbank family to grow to 780 companies...
...perhaps the only--reason to believe in Son's ambitious plan is that it already seems to be working. Yahoo, E*Trade and GeoCities, among others, are not only dominant among U.S. customers but lead a long list of Softbank companies that Son and his lieutenants say account for more than 90% of all Internet commerce in Japan. As the world's second largest economy has caught on to the power of the Net in the past year, Softbank's stock, which is traded on the Tokyo exchange, has soared. The company's market capitalization is a stunning $79 billion...
...made his first million by selling a design for an electronic translator to Sharp Corp. He was so absorbed in the process that he forgot to wheel his Porsche over to Berkeley city hall for his own wedding. He founded Softbank Corp. in Tokyo in 1981. Legend has it that after he stood atop a crate and ranted about the company's future domination of the PC industry, his first two employees quit on the spot. Despite that vote of no confidence, Softbank went on to become Japan's leading software distributor...
...Silicon Valley Rolodex in 1995, when he returned to the States. But he did have nearly a billion dollars to spend, money practically handed to him by Japanese bankers desperate to breathe life into their country's sagging economy. Son lured a couple of Silicon Valley veterans to run Softbank Technology Ventures, the San Jose partnership that has become the heart of his Internet empire. And so the shopping spree began, as Softbank scooped up the trade-show group that organizes Comdex, the computer industry's biggest convention, and Kingston Technology, a memory-board maker. Son bought all of Ziff...