Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Zozo executive steps down ahead of $3.7B deal with Yahoo Japan
Yusaku Maezawa, the flamboyant Japanese entrepreneur who’s set to become the first paying passenger aboard Elon Musk’s SpaceX ride around the moon, is cashing out of the business that made him a billionaire.
Maezawa stepped down last week as chief executive officer of Zozo Inc. and plans to sell a chunk of his shares as part of a $3.7 billion takeover by Yahoo Japan Corp. Wearing a white T-shirt declaring “Let’s Start Today” atop a peace symbol, he said he was leaving his company behind to create a new business, without specifics. He’ll need to train for Musk’s mission and may even embark on another space project, he said again without elaborating.
At times fighting back tears, Maezawa thanked his supporters and reflected on his entrepreneurial career.
“I don’t have an MBA or experience working at a company, but next thing I know I became a president, we got many customers and went public,” he told reporters. “The past 21 years were like a dream.”
SoftBank Group Corp.’s Masayoshi Son made a surprise appearance, wearing a matching T-shirt in black. Son said Maezawa had approached him seeking advice ahead of the Yahoo Japan deal. He praised the younger man’s boldness, but joked that he passed on an invitation to fly to the moon.
“That’s too scary,” Son said.
Announced late last week, the deal immediately sent stock prices for both companies up. Yahoo Japan is paying a 21% premium to take control of a valuable online fashion store, which strengthens its challenge against Amazon. com Inc. and Rakuten Inc. in one of Asia’s largest e-commerce arenas. Zozo director Kotaro Sawada will take the helm, while Maezawa has tweeted “I myself will be setting off on a new path” after the sale’s announcement.
“It’s a plus for Yahoo Japan and would help expand their e-commerce operations,” said Mitsushige Akino, an executive officer with Ichiyoshi Asset Management Co. in Tokyo. “Zozo gets the financial backup it needs for its new venture and overseas expansion.”
Maezawa is departing the company he founded, which was instrumental to amassing his fortune and building up his name. But he’s unlikely to stop defying the norms of Japanese society — the other winning aspect to his unconventional approach to business.
Before Zozo, he skipped
college and moved to California to play in a rock band. Returning to Japan, he started his own e-commerce company and built the shopping website Zozotown into a popular destination for younger consumers, starting from the humble beginnings of a mail-order music album business. Maezawa now has a net worth of $1.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, but he has tweeted claiming to “have no money. I spend it so quickly.”
Maezawa had been directing Zozo investment toward developing a custom clothing brand, seeking to attract customers through innovative ways of taking individual measurements. His company shipped about 3 million socalled Zozosuits, polka-dot spandex outfits for taking body measurements with the help of a smartphone. But the business
was shut down in March. He also said the company plans to offer a foot-measuring device called Zozomat in the fall.
Yahoo Japan, whose biggest shareholder is the telecommunications arm of Son’s SoftBank Group Corp., saw its shares rise 2.4% in Tokyo, while Zozo surged 13.4%. Among the online retail competition, Rakuten and Mercari Inc. slid. Investors in those companies feared the Yahoo Japan deal would intensify competition, said Masayuki Otani, chief market strategist at Securities Japan Inc. in Tokyo.
The cost of the acquisition could go as high as $3.7 billion, according to the two companies’ announcement, giving Yahoo Japan a 50.1% slice of Zozo.
“Together with Zozo, getting to No. 1 in domestic ecommerce comes realistically within striking distance,” Yahoo Japan’s CEO Kentaro Kawabe said at the Tokyo briefing, adding that the company may capture top share within five to six years.