Trump announces SoftBank investing $50 billion in U.S.
President- elec t Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Japanese telecom and internet conglomerate SoftBank would invest $50 billion in the United States and create 50,000 new jobs, saying that the decision wouldn’t have been made without Trump’s election win.
Trump appeared in the lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday with Masayoshi Son, the chief executive of SoftBank, to announce the news, and later on Twitter claimed credit.
SoftBank is one of Japan’s largest technology outfits and owns the U.S. mobile carrier Sprint.
Trump wrote: “Masa said he would never do this had we (Trump) not won the election!”
S o n t o l d r e p o r t e r s a t T r u m p To w e r t h a t t h e funds would be invested in American startups. It was not immediately clear how much of the investment was new and how much was previously committed.
Son told The Wall Street Journal that the money will come from a $100 billion joint investment by SoftBank and the Saudi Arabian government.
SoftBank announced in October that it would create the “SoftBank Vision Fund” to invest in the global technology sector. SoftBank said it would provide at least $25 billion in the next five years, while Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund pledged up to $45 billion in the same time period.
During a trip to India last week, Son said he was close to securing investors to provide the additional funds.
“I think it’s making hay out of something that was there already,” said Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics. “In all likelihood, this comes out of the $100 billion fund. Considering the extremely large part that the U.S. has in the high-tech economy, (Son) would have probably invested something in the neighborhood anyway.”
As he spoke to reporters in the Trump Tower, Son held up a piece of paper with the same figures Trump had announced, but which also specified that the investment would be made in the next four years.
The paper also contained the logo of Foxconn, a major supplier for Apple’s iPhones. Foxconn could not immediately be reached for comment, and it was not clear what role Foxconn would play in the deal, or if the company would be responsible for the additional $7 billion in investment and 50,000 new jobs mentioned on the paper.
T h e a n n o u n c e m e n t sparked speculation that Son might be seeking to curry favor for his U.S. business interests.
Sprint and SoftBank abandoned an effort to purchase rival telecom carrier T-Mobile in 2014 after U.S. regulators signaled the deal might violate antitrust laws. But in August, Bloomberg News quoted people familiar with Son’s thinking as saying that Son still held out hope for the merger.
A Trump administration may consider a potential merger between Sprint and T-Mobile differently, ana- lysts said.
Speaking from the lobby of the Trump tower, Son said that he wanted to celebrate Trump’s election “because he would do a lot of deregulation.”
J e f f K a g a n , a n A t l a n - ta-based telecom industry analyst, said that was a possibility, but described Son as an ambitious entrepreneur who was likely looking for opportunities beyond the merger.
“Maybe he sees there’s a different possibility for a Sprint and T-mobile partnership. But that’s only one slice of the pie. I don’t think Masayoshi Son is that small of a thinker,” said Kagan. “He sees opportunities, based on what we’ve all seen happen in the last few weeks. And he wants to be a player.”
A self-made billionaire, Son has earned a reputation as an entrepreneurial thinker and a maverick. Since founding SoftBank in 1981, he has built the company into a telecom, internet, and financial leviathan with purchases including an early investment in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and the acquisition of the Japanese unit of British mobile phone company Vodafone.