Co-investing with SoftBank in Supercell — and selling out a year later (2013)

A year absorbed into the parent’s investment strategy

The significance of this episode is that while GungHo tasted a scale of global investment beyond what its own will could reach, the initiative in deciding it appears to have sat with the parent, SoftBank. GungHo’s stake stopped at 20%, and the speed of the decisions — from acquiring the shares to selling them — was beyond what a mid-tier company grown large on a single title could have managed on its own. The brief ten-month holding period shows that the deal was treated less as GungHo’s own business strategy than as one part of the parent’s investment portfolio.

Indeed, the capital relationship with SoftBank stayed fluid thereafter. In June 2015 the parent became merely an "other affiliate," and by August 2016 the tie was severed entirely, leaving GungHo to set out again as an independent company. The Supercell investment and its swift reversal, in that sense, capture a passage in which GungHo swung between the opportunities of sitting under a parent’s umbrella and the value of keeping its capital independent.