SoftBank Corp. - Company History

Updated: Author:

Financial history 2002–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1986
Origin 日本国有鉄道
Founding location 東京都
Core business at founding Telephone and leased-line services over the trunk communications network of the former Japanese National Railways
Listed 1994
President & CEO Miyakawa Junichi President & CEO since 2021 (age 60, as of 2026)
Current priority AI adoption · IT investment Building AI data centres and expanding payments and advertising
Founding
In December 1986, ahead of the break-up and privatisation of Japanese National Railways, Tetsudo Tsushin was established with capital of $19M (¥3bn) to provide telephone and leased-line services. In April 1987 it took over the trunk communications network of the former JNR and began trading as a Type I telecommunications carrier. While the other new common carriers were laying long-distance lines from scratch, it could use the existing network strung along the railway tracks, so the burden of capital investment stayed light. In May 1989 it absorbed the (old) Japan Telecom and changed its corporate name to Japan Telecom, and in July 1991 it set up Tokyo Digital Phone to enter mobile and car telephony. It listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in September 1994. In October 2001 Vodafone of Britain acquired 66.7 per cent of the shares through a tender offer and became its parent. The shape of its assets — a fixed physical network held together with a mobile subsidiary — invited both the foreign takeover of control and the buyer who came after it.
The Decision
Each time, the years needed to enter a business were replaced with the price of an acquisition. In March 2006 SoftBank withdrew its plan to enter mobile on a licence of its own and acquired Vodafone's Japanese arm for about $15.0B (¥1.75tn) in a leveraged buy-out. It took the base-station network, some 15 million subscriptions and the spectrum in a single transaction, and in October that year changed the company's name to SoftBank Mobile. It cut prices with the White Plan at $8 (¥980) a month, and in July 2008 became the first in Japan to sell the iPhone 3G. In October 2012 the parent acquired Sprint of the United States and eAccess in quick succession, taking in the 1.7GHz band and the forerunner of Ymobile. In April 2015 it absorbed SoftBank BB, SoftBank Telecom and Ymobile, and that July it became SoftBank Corp. Fixed-line, mobile, broadband and a low-cost brand were gathered into one legal entity that had changed its corporate name five times since Tetsudo Tsushin.
Today
AI and payments draw the attention, but half of operating profit still comes from mobile lines. Revenue of $44.5B (¥7.04tn) in the year to March 2026 was made up of Consumer $18.9B (¥3tn), Media & EC $10.4B (¥1.64tn), Enterprise $6.1B (¥970bn), Distribution $5.8B (¥924bn) and Finance $2.4B (¥379bn). Of segment profit of $7.0B (¥1.11tn), Consumer accounted for $3.5B (¥551bn), close to half. In December 2018 the telecoms subsidiary listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and raised about $23.6B (¥2.6tn) for its parent; the market's valuation of steady telecoms earnings was what backed the money that brought Yahoo, LINE and PayPay into the group. In March 2025 it bought Sharp's Sakai plant for about $668.2M (¥100bn) and converted it into a 150-megawatt-class AI data centre. The cash earned by selling lines is being put into building the computing base that runs on top of those lines.
Competition
Placing the low-price tier inside the company first was what prepared it for demands to cut tariffs. The business acquired in 2006 was third by subscriber numbers, a late entrant against DoCoMo and KDDI. Taking in eAccess in 2012 and gaining Ymobile let it absorb the cheap end of the market in-house while holding the unit price of its main brand. When Rakuten entered in 2017 as the fourth mobile network operator with base stations of its own, and full service from 2020 reignited price competition, it kept its subscribers by moving them to Ymobile and LINEMO. NTT, by contrast, took DoCoMo and its data group into full ownership in 2025, doing away with listed subsidiaries and returning to unified management. SoftBank has done the reverse: it has kept the listing of 2018 in place, so that the parent's investment decisions and its own capital spending sit in separate accounts.

Timeline

1986–2000From railway infrastructure to J-Phone: the eve of Vodafone ownership

  1. 1984The (old) Japan Telecom is established
  2. 1986Tetsudo Tsushin incorporated with ¥3.2bn capital, ahead of JNR privatisation
  3. 1987Takes over the former JNR trunk network as a Type I carrier
  4. 1989Absorbs the (old) Japan Telecom and renames itself Japan Telecom
  5. 1991Tokyo Digital Phone established; entry into mobile on the PDC standard
  6. 1994Listed on the second sections of the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges
  7. 1996Promoted to the first sections of both exchanges
  8. 1997Absorbs International Telecom Japan
  9. 1999The nine Digital Phone and Digital Tu-Ka companies become J-Phone
  10. 2000J-SH04, the world's first camera phone, launches Sha-mail

2001–2006The Vodafone years: a global handset strategy that failed

  1. 2001Vodafone Group takes 66.7% of Japan Telecom and becomes its parent
  2. 2002Move to a holding company; renamed Japan Telecom Holdings
  3. 2003The holding company is renamed Vodafone Holdings
  4. 2004Head office raises its stake to 96.1% through further purchases
  5. 2004Absorbs the operating company and becomes Vodafone K.K.
  6. 2005Delisted from the first sections of the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges
  7. 2006Son Masayoshi announces a ¥1.75tn purchase of Vodafone K.K.
  8. 2006BB Mobile takes 97.6% by tender offer; full ownership completed in August
  9. 2006Renamed SoftBank Mobile; the brand switches to SoftBank

2007–2024From breaking prices to building a platform: SoftBank after Vodafone

  1. 2008First carrier in Japan to sell Apple's iPhone 3G
  2. 2011Consolidated operating revenue reaches ¥1,971.1bn in the year to March
  3. 2012Parent SoftBank agrees to acquire Sprint Nextel
  4. 2015Absorbs SoftBank BB, SoftBank Telecom and Ymobile
  5. 2015Renamed SoftBank Corp. as the parent becomes SoftBank Group
  6. 2018Relisted on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
  7. 2019Yahoo made a subsidiary
  8. 2019ZOZO made a subsidiary under Z Holdings
  9. 2021LINE made a subsidiary
  10. 2021Miyakawa Junichi becomes president
  11. 2022PayPay made a subsidiary
  12. 2023Z Holdings, LINE and Yahoo merge to form LINE Yahoo
  13. 2024Cubic Telecom Ltd. made a subsidiary

Founding Story

1986–2000From railway infrastructure to J-Phone: the eve of Vodafone ownership

This is one of the few Japanese carriers that never had to lay its own trunk line. It was created in December 1986 to receive the communications network Japanese National Railways had strung along its tracks, and it entered the liberalised market with a national backbone already in place. What it built on top of that inheritance — a mobile arm founded in 1991 that became J-Phone and put the world's first camera phone on sale — turned out to be the asset that made the whole company worth buying.

From Tetsudo Tsushin to Japan Telecom: the third carrier that inherited the national railway network

In December 1986, with the break-up and privatisation of Japanese National Railways approaching, Tetsudo Tsushin (鉄道通信) was incorporated with capital of $19M (¥3bn) to provide telephone and leased-line services[1]. In April 1987 it took over the trunk communications network the former JNR had laid across the country and began trading as a Type I telecommunications carrier[2]. Inheriting a physical asset — the optical-fibre network strung along the railway lines — gave it a locational advantage no other new entrant had. It was a separate legal entity from the (old) Japan Telecom, which had already obtained a Type I licence of its own[3]; the two firms came into the liberalised market from quite different origins. In the market that opened immediately after the monopoly of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation was broken, several new entrants put their names forward, mostly in long-distance service, and the industry was in the middle of a reshuffle.

In May 1989 Tetsudo Tsushin absorbed the (old) Japan Telecom as the surviving company and renamed itself Japan Telecom[4]. That merger fixed its position in the industry as the third fixed-line carrier, behind NTT and KDD (now KDDI)[5]. It listed on the second sections of the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchanges in September 1994, was moved up to the first sections in September 1996[6], and absorbed International Telecom Japan (日本国際通信) in October 1997[7], setting about building scale in fixed-line telecoms. As a new entrant after the privatisation of the public corporation, Tetsudo Tsushin was unusual in both its origins and its assets. Taking on NTT's national network did not require it to lay new cable, and being able to use the existing trackside network held down the burden of capital investment. In long-distance service, competition began among the three new common carriers — Japan Telecom, DDI and Teleway Japan (日本高速通信) — and full liberalisation including local calls was still some way off.

Fixed-line telecoms on its own, however, offered limited room to grow. NTT's dominant share and a plateau in demand for leased lines were a structural constraint on the long-distance carriers. The new axis of growth that came into view was mobile telephony, deregulated from the end of the 1980s. In July 1991 Japan Telecom established Tokyo Digital Phone Co. as an affiliate and committed itself to mobile communications[8]. That structure — a fixed-line company owning a mobile operator — was later the reason Vodafone fixed on Japan Telecom as its point of entry into the Japanese market. The mobile market was still driven mainly by corporate demand, on the eve of consumer take-up; for entrants it was a growth market that demanded heavy investment up front but promised a future. Carrying both fixed and mobile would come to matter greatly when the market expanded.

Tokyo Digital Phone: passing the ceiling of fixed-line telecoms by entering mobile

In July 1991 Japan Telecom set up Tokyo Digital Phone and entered the mobile business on the PDC (Personal Digital Cellular) standard[9]. Between 1991 and 1994 it covered the country through a nine-company regional structure: the three Digital Phone companies (Tokyo, Kansai and Tokai) and the six Digital Tu-Ka companies. As the third force behind NTT DoCoMo and IDO/Cellular (now au), it built share largely on business demand. A fixed network plus a cluster of mobile subsidiaries became the two pillars of Japan Telecom's corporate value. The mobile market of the day was one of shrinking handsets and falling tariffs, a growth field in which subscriber numbers rose quickly through the 1990s. The carriers competed for customers by cutting subscription charges and handset prices.

In the late 1990s the mobile market entered a phase of explosive subscriber growth. Mobile overtook fixed-line in rate of growth, and the lead role in the revenue mix reversed. The earnings of the Japan Telecom group shifted into a shape in which fixed-line contracted and mobile expanded at the same time. The dispersed governance of nine separate mobile subsidiaries made a unified brand and a single national operation increasingly necessary. To answer the competition in value-added services — DoCoMo's i-mode, au's ringtone downloads — a federation of three companies had a structural weakness: it could not unify its product strategy. Tariff plans and handset line-ups differed from one regional subsidiary to the next, which was hard to follow for corporate and consumer customers alike and eroded brand recognition. In the shops the promotional material had no common look, and the gap against a nationwide service such as DoCoMo's i-mode widened to a point that could not be ignored.

In October 1999 the nine Digital Phone and Digital Tu-Ka companies were unified under the J-Phone brand[10]. Their corporate names were consolidated into three — J-Phone East, J-Phone Tokai and J-Phone West — and services, handsets and tariff structures were harmonised. The result was a two-tier structure: Japan Telecom in fixed-line, and the J-Phone group in mobile. Fixed-line, a mature business, produced steady cash flow, and that money cross-subsidised the capital investment of the mobile business. When J-Phone caught the rising tide, overseas mobile groups took note of the value of these assets. Vertical integration — using the fixed-line backbone to carry mobile traffic — was both a source of competitive strength inside Japan and, seen from foreign capital, an attractive short cut into the market.

J-Phone and Sha-mail: the high-water mark of Japan's own evolution

In November 2000 J-Phone launched the J-SH04, made by Sharp — the world's first camera phone. Sha-mail (写メール), the service name for sending a photograph by e-mail, spread with its advertising and took hold among younger users. NTT DoCoMo's i-mode and au's EZweb were already up and running, and Japan's feature-phone culture had begun to walk a path of its own, ahead of the rest of the world. J-Phone carried one wing of that movement and built a distinctive position in the Japanese mobile market. A handset with a 300,000-pixel CCD camera, bought casually for a few thousand yen a month, was a market formation that existed nowhere else in the world at the time. Sha-mail thickened J-Phone's subscriber base among teenagers and people in their twenties, and became the force that underpinned its contract base in the 3G era to come.

The success of Sha-mail was not simply a hit product; it was the point at which the mobile phone turned from a communications terminal into a device for visual communication. Against a mobile culture in Europe centred on the short message service (SMS), the Japanese market moved to mail carrying rich expression, including images and pictograms. What sustained this domestic evolution was carrier-led control of handset specifications and competition among the manufacturers to optimise compact handsets for the home market. It became a point of differentiation that an open overseas handset market could not copy. It was also the origin of the structure later criticised as 'Galapagos syndrome', but at the time the carriers were placing detailed specifications with the handset makers and putting devices of unmatched sophistication into the market. J-Phone's Sha-mail was the symbol of it.

Through the early 2000s the three national J-Phone companies went through a process of consolidation into a single company. As a mobile operator run as one with a fixed network, it was, to the mobile groups of the world, an ideal acquisition target. At a time when Vodafone Group of the United Kingdom was looking for a point of entry into the Japanese market, J-Phone's Sha-mail culture, its subscriber base and its position as the third force behind NTT and KDDI meant not merely the acquisition of a business but a foothold in Japan. The next owner would try to fold these assets into a global strategy. For Vodafone, which was adding subscribers across the major mobile markets of the world, entering Japan carried the sense of the finishing touch to that global strategy. Acquiring the shares of Japan Telecom and J-Phone was the best available way in.

2001–2006The Vodafone years: a global handset strategy that failed

For five years the company belonged to the largest mobile group in the world, and lost ground in every one of them. Vodafone bought 66.7 per cent of Japan Telecom to complete a global strategy, changed the corporate name three times in three years, took the company private and delisted it — then sold the whole of it to SoftBank for $15.0B (¥1.75tn) and left Japan. Consolidated operating revenue fell from $13.6B (¥1.7tn) in the year to March 2002 to $13.3B (¥1.47tn) in the year to March 2005 while it was in charge.

The 66.7 per cent takeover: absorbed into the world's largest mobile group

In October 2001 Vodafone International Holdings, a subsidiary of Britain's Vodafone Group, acquired 66.7 per cent of the shares of Japan Telecom through a tender offer. Vodafone at the time had more than 100 million subscribers and mobile operations in over 25 countries, the largest operator in the world, and entry into Japan was cast as the last piece that would complete its global strategy. The growth strategy drawn up after the acquisition was the introduction of global handsets, fuller international roaming, and services common worldwide under a single brand. Seen from the major European carriers, Japan was distant and difficult, a market with standards and a culture of its own, but the scale of its subscriber base and the high revenue per user made it impossible to leave out of a global strategy.

In August 2002 a corporate split separated out the operating company, Japan Telecom, and the group moved to a holding-company structure under Japan Telecom Holdings. In December 2003 the holding company was renamed Vodafone Holdings, and in October 2004 it absorbed the operating company, the (old) Vodafone K.K. (the J-Phone group), to become Vodafone K.K. Three changes of corporate name in three years brought the whole group under the Vodafone brand. The legal entity that had begun in 1986 as Tetsudo Tsushin had arrived at the form of the Japanese arm of the world's largest mobile group. The fixed-line business — the former Japan Telecom — was subsequently sold to SoftBank (now SoftBank Group); the years after the acquisition were ones of repeated carving-out and consolidation of businesses.

The symbolic measure was the retirement of the J-Phone brand and unification under Vodafone. The red V of the global mark and the Vodafone logo went up in shops across Japan, and the introduction of the global Vodafone 3G handsets was announced in advance. The J-Phone inheritance, which had carried forward Japan's own evolution, began to be swallowed by the wave of global standardisation. Vodafone's head office in Britain treated the Japanese company as one of 25 national subsidiaries and gave priority to pushing a common worldwide platform over local optimisation. The difference in temperature with the operation on the ground in Japan was a distant cause of the loss of share that followed. Head office expected a common platform to cut the cost of procuring handsets and to improve international roaming, while the Japanese operation feared a break with the distinct evolution that Sha-mail represented, and conflict grew inside the organisation.

Three changes of name in three years, and the drift they revealed

What came to symbolise management under Vodafone was the struggle of the global Vodafone 3G handsets. The 3G range rolled out in earnest from 2004 was optimised for European standards and specifications, and put off the things the Japanese feature-phone market valued: Sha-mail, pictograms, a compact shape, a clamshell design. The capability to develop handsets for the Japanese market, built up in the J-Phone years, was weakened in the name of global standardisation. The inferiority of the product against NTT DoCoMo's FOMA and au's CDMA 1X became decisive. In Japanese shops, customers said again and again that Vodafone handsets were hard to use and did not fit Japanese hands, and subscribers continued to leave. The ideal of a common worldwide platform collided with the reality of the Japanese market.

Months of net subscriber loss followed, and by fiscal 2005 even third place behind DoCoMo and au was in doubt. Net additions in fiscal 2004 came to barely 40,000, and from 2005 there were five consecutive months of net decline. Consolidated operating revenue shrank from $13.6B (¥1.7tn) in FY01 (the year to March 2002) to $13.3B (¥1.47tn) in FY04 (the year to March 2005). The structural contraction of the fixed-line business and the stalling of the mobile business came together. The three changes of name in three years were the product of tidying up governance after the acquisition and of integration into head office, but to the market and to customers they looked like instability of brand. The pattern in which the cost of advertising a global strategy ate into earnings in Japan came to the surface. With subscriber growth failing to keep pace with rising advertising spend, Vodafone's head office had to revise down its earnings outlook for the Japanese market, and the management of the Japanese company was caught between what it reported to head office and the reality in front of it.

In July 2004 Vodafone's head office raised its holding in the Japanese company to 96.1 per cent through further purchases, a move made with full ownership in view. In August 2005 the listings on the first sections of the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges were cancelled. Eleven years after the second-section listing of 1994 and the promotion to the first section in 1996, the history as a listed company that ran back to the Japan Telecom era came to an end. What was left was the fixed network, the mobile base stations, a subscriber base of about 15 million — and, as a liability, the divergence from the global strategy. With the scrutiny of the market removed, the intentions of head office fed more directly into management, and the gap between the needs of the Japanese market and British strategy widened further. The Japanese company had neither the time nor the strength left to rethink its business structure from the ground up.

The ¥1.75 trillion sale: delisting as the full stop

In March 2006 Son Masayoshi (孫正義), president of SoftBank (now SoftBank Group), announced that he would buy Vodafone's Japanese arm for $15.0B (¥1.75tn). Most of the money was raised through a leveraged buy-out. The judgement was that rather than enter the mobile business from nothing, it was better to acquire an existing network and a subscriber base of about 15 million in a single transaction. For Vodafone's head office it was a deal that settled a withdrawal from Japan in the course of a review of its global strategy, and the negotiations reached agreement in about six months. It was among the largest acquisitions in Japanese history at the time, and it drew the attention of the market to Son's method of expansion and to his capacity to raise money.

In April 2006 BB Mobile, a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank, acquired 97.6 per cent of Vodafone K.K.'s shares through a tender offer, and full ownership was completed in August. In October the company was renamed SoftBank Mobile Corp. and the Vodafone brand was switched to SoftBank. The company that had started as Tetsudo Tsushin and changed its sign four times, to Japan Telecom, Japan Telecom Holdings, Vodafone Holdings and then Vodafone K.K., gained with its fifth change of name its first owner holding a clear strategy for what to do with a telecoms business. The legal entity stayed the same while the name and the substance of its management were replaced. The brand logos that had changed so often in the Vodafone years gave way to SoftBank's black-on-white wordmark, and the feel of the shops changed with them. The product line-up, too, was rebuilt for the Japanese market.

The history of the company as Vodafone closed with that change of name in October 2006. Only the ticker, 9434, remains as a trace of the Vodafone years. As the Japanese base of the world's largest mobile group it lasted just five years, and into that time were packed, one after another, a move to a holding company, three changes of name, delisting, the struggle of the global handsets and a falling share. As a case in which global standardisation collided with Japan's own evolution and the acquirer withdrew, unable to absorb the peculiarities of the market, the five years of Vodafone K.K. are one of the lessons in the history of the industry. For the major overseas carriers too it is remembered as evidence of how hard the Japanese market is to enter, and entry by foreign operators effectively ceased.

2007–2024From breaking prices to building a platform: SoftBank after Vodafone

Under its new owner the same assets were turned round quickly, first on price and then on the iPhone, and the company delisted in 2005 came back to the market in December 2018. Operating revenue went from $12.6B (¥1.47tn) in the year to March 2006 to $40.2B (¥6.08tn) in the year to March 2024 — growth that came less from selling lines than from what the group bought to run on top of them.

The White Plan and the iPhone: out of third place on price and handset

Immediately after the change of brand in October 2006, SoftBank Mobile launched the White Plan — $8 (¥980) a month with free calls between SoftBank subscribers. At a time when the tariffs of NTT DoCoMo and au ran to ¥4,000–5,000 a month, the price was a shock to the market. Son Masayoshi had already broken prices in the Japanese broadband market with the Yahoo! BB ADSL service, and he brought the same method into mobile. A customer-acquisition strategy armed with low prices fed directly into the recovery of a subscriber base that had shrunk in the Vodafone years. Making calls between SoftBank users free induced whole families and groups of friends to switch together, and lifted net additions. In the shops, customers porting their numbers in from other carriers under mobile number portability arrived day after day.

In July 2008 SoftBank Mobile became the first carrier in Japan to obtain exclusive rights to sell Apple's iPhone 3G. In responding to the smartphone, a new category of device, it was several years ahead of DoCoMo and au. Where NTT DoCoMo held to a feature-phone line centred on i-mode, SoftBank switched its course to smartphones early. From fiscal 2007 its net additions ran at or near the top of the industry, and the mobile business that had sunk to third place in the Vodafone years recovered its presence with two weapons, price and handset. It was reported that DoCoMo's president at the time would not accept Apple's sales conditions and gave up the negotiations; SoftBank moved into the gap. As the starting point of smartphone adoption in Japan, SoftBank's iPhone sales redrew the structure of the telecoms industry.

Consolidated operating revenue grew from $12.6B (¥1.47tn) in FY05 (the year to March 2006) to $24.7B (¥1.97tn) in FY10 (the year to March 2011). In April 2015 the company absorbed SoftBank BB, SoftBank Telecom and Ymobile, moving to a structure that ran fixed-line, mobile and MVNO as one. That July it changed its corporate name to SoftBank Corp. When the parent, SoftBank, renamed itself SoftBank Group, the telecoms subsidiary took over the SoftBank name. For the legal entity it was the sixth change of name since Tetsudo Tsushin. Sharing network equipment and integrating sales channels made the cost structure more efficient, and gave the company a base from which fixed and mobile could be offered end to end. The foundation of the later integrated digital platform concept was shaped by this merger.

The 2018 relisting: back to the market after 13 years

In December 2018 SoftBank relisted on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It was a return to the market 13 years after the delisting of August 2005 in the Vodafone era, and it was carried out as part of SoftBank Group's funding strategy. Market capitalisation at listing was about $63.4B (¥7tn), an unusual scale for a Japanese telecoms operator. In FY18 (the year to March 2019) revenue was $42.7B (¥4.66tn), operating profit $5.9B (¥638bn) and the operating margin 13.7 per cent. Its position in the stock market was settled as one corner of the trio of telecoms companies alongside NTT DoCoMo and KDDI. The structure — the parent releasing its telecoms subsidiary to the market in order to create the means for its next investment — together with an offer price set on the high side, left retail investors divided in their judgement, but market capitalisation on the first day reached the scale planned.

Around the relisting, SoftBank set about widening its business base beyond telecoms. In May 2017 it made the IT distribution business SoftBank Commerce & Service (now SB C&S) a subsidiary; in March 2018, Wireless City Planning, to strengthen its network base; in April, SB Media Holdings and SB Players among others; and in May, IDC Frontier. Its reach extended into data centres, IT distribution and network infrastructure, an attempt to shed the skin of a mere seller of lines. That April it also made LINE Mobile a subsidiary and moved into the low-cost smartphone market. With three brands — SoftBank, Ymobile and LINE Mobile — it built a structure covering customers from the high-price to the low-price end.

The market valued the structure in which a mobile subscriber base generates stable earnings on a monthly billing model. A telecoms business throwing off steady cash flow becomes the means for M&A in the next phase. The access to capital markets gained by relisting was the precondition for the acquisitions of Yahoo, LINE and PayPay from 2019 onwards. The path of a company delisted in the Vodafone years returning, after 12 years under SoftBank, to being a listed company was in its way a demonstration of the value-creation scenario Son Masayoshi had drawn at the time of the acquisition. The ticker 9434 reappeared on the market as the number of a listed company carrying new corporate value while keeping its trace of the Vodafone years. It is a rare instance of a relisting under the same code by a company with an entirely different business and market valuation.

Yahoo, LINE and PayPay: vertical integration beyond telecoms

In June 2019 SoftBank made Yahoo (now LINE Yahoo) a subsidiary — the first case in Japan of a telecoms carrier taking an internet platform company under its wing. The stated aim was closer co-operation in fields including FinTech, but it was a response to a structural problem: growth from selling lines alone had reached a ceiling. That November, ZOZO was made a subsidiary under Z Holdings, bringing Japan's largest fashion e-commerce business into the group. The outline of a vertical integration that lays a service layer on top of the network came into view. Behind it lay the growing presence in world markets of giant platform companies such as Amazon in the United States and Alibaba in China, and a judgement that Japan needed a platform company of the same kind.

In March 2021 Z Holdings made LINE, part of South Korea's NAVER group, a subsidiary. Integration with LINE and its user base of about 95 million brought communication, search, e-commerce and payment together within one group. In October 2022 PayPay was made a subsidiary, and in October 2023 Z Holdings, LINE and Yahoo merged to form LINE Yahoo Corporation. The vertically integrated model — holding within the group the whole service layer running on top of the network — was complete. Combining LINE's communication base, Yahoo's search and e-commerce, and PayPay's payments produced a structure that took in both the waking hours of customers and the flow of their money. It was an integrated platform company with no equal in Japan.

In FY23 (the year to March 2024) revenue was $40.2B (¥6.08tn) and operating profit $7.0B (¥1.06tn); against FY18, before Yahoo was made a subsidiary, revenue had grown 1.3 times. With the telecoms business growing at only a few per cent a year, the businesses taken in from outside telecoms became the driver of consolidated results. The legal entity that began as Tetsudo Tsushin and changed its name through Japan Telecom, Japan Telecom Holdings, Vodafone Holdings, Vodafone K.K. and SoftBank Mobile took the SoftBank name at its sixth change of name, and became a platform company binding together telecoms, search, payment and communication. Miyakawa Junichi (宮川潤一), the president, has carried on this line of vertical integration since he took office.

Read the full history in Japanese →

Notes

  1. SoftBank Corp., annual securities report, corporate-history section (then trading as Tetsudo Tsushin)↩
  2. SoftBank Corp., annual securities report, corporate-history section (then trading as Tetsudo Tsushin)↩
  3. SoftBank Corp., annual securities report, corporate-history section (then trading as the (old) Japan Telecom)↩
  4. SoftBank Corp., annual securities report, corporate-history section (then trading as Japan Telecom)↩
  5. SoftBank Corp., annual securities report, corporate-history section (then trading as Japan Telecom)↩
  6. SoftBank Corp., annual securities report, corporate-history section (then trading as Japan Telecom)↩
  7. SoftBank Corp., annual securities report, corporate-history section (then trading as Japan Telecom)↩
  8. SoftBank Corp., annual securities report, corporate-history section (then trading as Japan Telecom)↩
  9. SoftBank Corp., annual securities report, corporate-history section (then trading as Japan Telecom)↩
  10. SoftBank Corp., annual securities report, corporate-history section (then trading as J-Phone)↩

References & sources

  1. SoftBank Corp. (annual securities reports), including the corporate-history and segment sections.
  2. Japan Telecom / Vodafone K.K., FY2002–FY2005 (consolidated operating revenue and subscriber trends).
  3. Vodafone Group Plc — annual reports, 2001–2006 (the Japanese acquisition and the withdrawal).
  4. The full Japanese edition of this history, with paragraph-level sourcing: the-shashi.com/tse/9434.

Yen amounts are converted at the average rate of each figure’s own year — not today’s rate; revenue charts are shown in yen. Exchange rates & sources — the full ¥/US$ table →

Data API

SoftBank Corp.’s history, presidents and financials are published as static JSON — no key, plain GET. One API per public page, and one per section where a page carries several tables. Full specification →

/api/9434/company.json ·/api/9434/history.json ·/api/9434/ceo.json ·/api/9434/financials.json ·/api/9434/financials/segment.json ·/api/9434/financials/pl.json ·/api/9434/financials/cf.json ·/api/9434/financials/bs.json ·/api/9434/financials/employee.json ·/api/9434/financials/stock.json ·/api/9434/financials.csv ·/api/9434/financials_history.csv

/api/companies.json ·/api/decisions.json ·/api/api-manifest.json