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Posts Tagged ‘softbank’

SoftBank’s Deal for Sprint Is One for the Books

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Economy, International Business, International Finance, Investments, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

Japanese companies have made a string of deals in the United States this year, but the pact announced on Monday is one for the record books.

The agreement by SoftBank to take control of Sprint Nextel is the biggest deal by a Japanese company in the United States since at least 1980, according to Thomson Reuters, which values the deal at $23.3 billion.

That far exceeds the next-largest deal, the $9.8 billion stake that NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank’s rival, took in AT&T Wireless in 2000.

The SoftBank deal is also worth more than some recent takeovers, including Takeda Pharmaceutical’s 2008 purchase of Millennium Pharmaceuticals for $8.1 billion. It also tops the $7.8 billion agreement the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group struck with Morgan Stanley in the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, according to Thomson Reuters data.

It also ranks as the biggest foreign deal involving an investment in an American company so far this year, according to Thomson Reuters.

The deal on Monday is a welcome development for the financial advisers involved, in a year starved for deal activity.

The agreement has lifted Citigroup, an adviser to Sprint, to sixth from seventh place in the Thomson Reuters global league table this year. Sprint’s other advisers, UBS and Rothschild, each moved up one spot as well.

One of SoftBank’s advisers, the Raine Group, entered this year’s league table in 30th place after the deal. (The deal is the group’s biggest, according to Thomson Reuters.) The Mizuho Financial Group, another SoftBank adviser, rose to 17th place from 22nd.

For American consumers, SoftBank is set to be the latest Japanese company to make its mark on daily life in this country.

In 1989, the Mitsubishi Estate Company made headlines with a deal to buy a 51 percent stake in the Rockefeller Group in New York. (The stake eventually grew to 100 percent, after Rockefeller went through bankruptcy.)

Craig Moffett, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, drew a comparison to that deal last week, when Sprint confirmed it was in talks with SoftBank.

“This is tantamount to Japanese buyers buying Rockefeller Center,” he said.

The year 1989 was also when the Japanese electronics giant Sony took a foothold in Hollywood. Its roughly $4.7 billion purchase of Columbia Pictures Entertainment was a blockbuster at the time.

SoftBank’s shares fell 5.3 percent in Tokyo on Monday, with investors concerned over the company’s ability to turn around the ailing Sprint.

Read more here.

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Intel invests in social media incubator Betaworks

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 15, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is an article from SF Gate.

Intel invested an undisclosed amount in social media incubator Betaworks to gain insight into real-time user behavior on social networks, the chip maker said on Thursday.

The investment could help Intel develop better hardware for mobile devices or servers that either access or provide real-time social media services, said Mike Buckley, managing director of Intel Capital. Buckley declined to comment on how much Intel invested in Betaworks.

Intel joined other companies, including Aol, that invested in Betaworks on Thursday. An Aol spokeswoman confirmed the investment in Betaworks but declined to comment on the amount.

Betaworks is best known as an investor in social media companies that include Twitter, Tumblr, Bit.ly and TweetDeck.

Betaworks received a total of US$20 million in investments from companies that included The New York Times and SoftBank, said Josh Auerbach, senior vice president at Betaworks. The company will use that money to continue investing in social media networks, Auerbach said.

Intel is known primarily as a hardware company, but the investment in Betaworks isn’t directly tied to its hardware operations, Buckley said. But real-time Web services where users exchange messages instantly are gaining popularity and offer the potential to create additional demand for products ranging from mobile phones to servers, Buckley said.

“Twitter is the one that jumps out, and a lot of companies Betaworks is involved with are in the Twitter ecosystem,” Buckley said. “This is more of an eyes-and-ears investment to gain more and deeper insights into how this segment evolves.”

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