Early backers in line for a rich payoff

A Japanese retail billionaire, not a Silicon Valley tech whizz, is poised to be the biggest beneficiary of Lyft’s impending initial public offering.

Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani’s e-commerce group Rakuten owns 13.1 per cent of the ride-hailing company’s Class A shares, offering documents show. That would be worth about US$2 billion ($2.9b) if Lyft goes public with a valuation in the middle of its anticipated range of US$20b to US$25b, according to calculations by Bloomberg.

Rakuten, Japan’s largest online retailer, owns an eclectic assortment of side businesses including a professional baseball team and a bus service. It first invested in Lyft in 2015, acquiring an 11.9 per cent stake for US$300 million.

“We have seen the future and this is it,” Mikitani, now 53, said at the time.

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, a Lyft investor since 2013, owns 6.3 per cent of the Class A shares.

The stake held by Lyft’s cofounders John Zimmer and Logan Green is relatively small after multiple funding rounds diluted their holdings. Green, Lyft’s chief executive, and Zimmer, its president, hold shares probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to calculations by Bloomberg.

By contrast, Travis Kalanick, who helped launch rival Uber, owns 7 per cent of that business even after selling almost a third of his stake last year. He and fellow co-founder Garrett Camp are both billionaires, given Uber’s US$72b private-market valuation.

It has already been a lucrative year for Mikitani, Japan’s sixth-richest person with a US$4.9b fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His net worth has climbed by US$680m this year.

Rakuten also owns a stake in Middle East ride-hailing firm Careem, which is in advanced talks to be acquired by Uber in a potential US$3b deal, people familiar with the matter said this week.