| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JUNE 14, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| INTERNATIONAL -- ASIAN COVER STORY
Masayoshi Son, CEO, Softbank, Japan (int'l edition) IT COULD BE ONE OF THE BEST VENTURE-CAPITAL BETS OF ALL TIME. During the past three years, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son has spent $2 billion to assemble an unrivaled array of stakes in the hottest names on the Internet, from Yahoo! to E*Trade to Buy.com. The holdings in some 100 high-tech, mostly American, phenoms gave his company $12 billion in paper gains as of early June, and made him a billionaire. To Son, that's just a beginning. The nonstop dealmaker and golfing buddy of high-tech luminaries such as Sony President Nobuyuki Idei and Microsoft's William H. Gates III is banking heavily on the Internet's growth. Son's goal is to be No. 1 in every major Internet category--from electronic commerce to online financial services. ''And we have to do it on a global scale,'' says the 41-year-old ethnic Korean entrepreneur who founded the company in the early 1980s. Softbank's profits are expected to grow 50%-plus over the next two years--as long as there's no meltdown in Internet stocks, that is. For now, Softbank is looking like the closest thing Japan has to a national champion of the Web. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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