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Masayoshi Son

Foxconn May Be Backed By SoftBank In Making Major US Investments And Generating 50,000 Jobs:

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Foxconn, the top assembler for Apple’s products is slowly making its way into the US market, with the help of SoftBank, the Japanese investment giant. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son recently met with Trump in the US after he was elected president to discuss plans for US investment. Although very few sources have been able to gather information correctly about this confidential meeting, a couple of things have been discussed for sure.

In their meeting, Son and Trump discussed about Foxconn’s intentions of making investment in the US. This points at high chances for the fact that 50,000 US jobs can be created in the US.  Trump can use this as a slingshot to launch himself in the good books of non- supporters. Just like he had committed an investment value of $10 billion in India, it has decided to invest almost $50 billion in US alone. Such kind of money can be generated by SofBank only through its technology fund, which can currently has more than 100 billion US dollars in it. Out of this, 7 billion may be  the amount reserved by the firm for its investment into  Foxconn.

According to Foxconn, it is working to understand for sure how much of profit will be available to both parties so this can be worked upon. Asides, they refused to discuss any more details about the meeting with trump, stating that they could not disclose much about their confidential meeting with a ‘relevant US official. All pieces of the puzzle seem to fall back in place with this deal, as earlier Trump had already coaxed Apple to bring its production completely into US. At that point, everyone was busy forming views and voicing opinions about how expensive the iPhone 8 was going to be. Little did we know that with foreign money pouring into the country, Apple would not really face extreme losses here, as it had been projected.

 

SoftBank Continues To See India As A Lucrative B2C Business Opportunity – Aims Investment of Up To $10 Billion:

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SoftBank, the Japanese business investor, shows no signs of relent when it comes to investing in India, despite a major mark down in business. The investment giant had proceeded to invest in the Indian B2C business on a warfoot basis, its major investments being E-Commerce portal Snapdeal, grocery delivery application Grofers and the mega cab company, Ola. However, all three face stiff competition from their major competitors and have not been able to match the expectations in revenue. While Snapdeal has to compete with India’s largest E-Commerce giant, Flipkart, the Grofers mobile application is suffering at the hands of ‘Big Basket’, who attracts more users with both a mobile and a web interface and Ola is struggling to fight international cab hailing app Uber. Other investments include OYO, which is a hotel booking platform and ‘Housing’, a service that hosts real estate classifieds. Both these businesses have so far, not reported any major losses or write offs.

Masayoshi Son CEO of SoftBank Meets Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi

The battle has caused the investor to write off almost $550 million from these services earlier in November this year, particularly from Snapdeal and Ola, further causing their market value to plummet. To add to this, SoftBank lost a big support from the man who introduced it to the Indian market, Nikesh Arora, who jumped ship, moving into another big opportunity. Moreover, the company even mentioned making a loss of almost $557 million up to September 2016 alone, which is a stark difference to the $1.08 billion profit that it had reported last year.

Nikesh Arora of SoftBank with Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Nikkesh recently left SoftBank.

All this has not caused CEO of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, to flinch even for a moment. He believes that his plans of a $10 billion investment is bound to prove its worth, eventually and might even ‘surpass it’ as mentioned by Son at an event in Delhi. Son had previously met the Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi to discuss his plans and had promised to make investments in India. Had the Japanese Yen not received an appreciation, the value of the investments in India would not have gone down for SoftBank.