SoftBank Corp.: long-term performance & turning pointsSales (revenue) and profit-margin ratio
Sales (¥ bn)Net margin (%)
1986A network inherited, not built
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
1986Railway Telecommunication incorporated; capital ¥3.2bn
1987Takes over the JNR trunk network as a Type I carrier
1989Merges with Japan Telecom and adopts the name
1991Tokyo Digital Phone — entry into mobile
1994Listed on the TSE second section
1999Nine regional carriers unified as J-Phone
2000J-SH04 — the world’s first camera phone
The company now called SoftBank Corp. was incorporated in December 1986, with capital of ¥3.2 billion, as Railway Telecommunication — a vehicle created because the soon-to-be-privatized Japanese National Railways needed somewhere to put the trunk communications network it had strung along its own tracks. It took that network over in April 1987 and began operating as a Type I carrier. Every other new entrant into the newly liberalized market had to lay long-distance capacity from scratch; this one started with fibre already in the ground beside the rails, and the capital relief that implied. In May 1989 it absorbed the older Japan Telecom and took its name, settling into the position of third fixed-line carrier behind NTT and KDD. It listed on the second sections of the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges in September 1994 and moved up to the first section in 1996.
Fixed-line alone had a ceiling: NTT’s share was overwhelming and leased-line demand was flattening. The growth came from mobile. In July 1991 Japan Telecom set up Tokyo Digital Phone and entered cellular on the PDC standard, building out through nine regional companies — three Digital Phone and six Digital Tu-Ka operators — to cover the country as the third force behind NTT DoCoMo and IDO/Cellular. That structure, a fixed backbone with mobile subsidiaries stacked on top, was exactly what would later make the company attractive to a foreign buyer. But nine separately governed regional carriers could not run one product strategy: tariffs and handset line-ups differed by region, and against DoCoMo’s nationwide i-mode the fragmentation showed. In October 1999 all nine were unified under the J-Phone brand and consolidated into three companies.
In November 2000 J-Phone launched the J-SH04, made by Sharp — the world’s first camera phone — and the service name Sha-mail put photographs into everyday messaging. Where European mobile culture ran on plain SMS, Japan went to picture mail and pictograms, driven by carriers that dictated handset specifications to domestic manufacturers. It was the origin of what would later be criticized as “Galapagos” isolation, and at the time it was a genuine lead. Young subscribers came to J-Phone in numbers, and the combination of that base, the third-place position and an integrated fixed backbone made the group an ideal entry point for any global operator that wanted Japan.
2004Vodafone 3G global handsets falter; stake raised to 96.1%
2005Delisted from the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges
2006SoftBank buys the business for ~¥1.75tn; renamed SoftBank Mobile
In October 2001 Vodafone International Holdings took 66.7% of Japan Telecom through a tender offer. Vodafone then had more than 100 million subscribers across twenty-five countries, and Japan — large, high-ARPU, and stubbornly its own market — was framed as the last piece of a global strategy. The plan was global handsets, international roaming and one worldwide brand. The corporate form was rebuilt to match: a holding-company split in August 2002, renamed Vodafone Holdings in December 2003, and merged with the operating company in October 2004 to become simply Vodafone K.K. Three name changes in three years.
The strategy collided with the market it had bought. The Vodafone 3G handsets rolled out from 2004 were built to European specifications and deprioritized precisely what Japanese users wanted — picture mail, pictograms, small clamshell bodies. The handset development capability built up in the J-Phone years was weakened in the name of global standardization, and against DoCoMo’s FOMA and au’s CDMA 1X the product line simply lost. Net additions in FY2004 were under 40,000; by 2005 the company was posting net subscriber losses five months running. Consolidated operating revenue fell from ¥1,704.0 billion in the year to March 2002 to ¥1,470.0 billion in the year to March 2005.
Vodafone raised its stake to 96.1% in July 2004, and in August 2005 the shares were delisted — ending eleven years as a listed company. What remained was a fixed network, a base-station footprint, roughly 15 million subscribers, and a strategy at odds with the market. In March 2006 Son Masayoshi of SoftBank agreed to buy the Japanese business for about $15.0B (¥1.75tn), funded largely by a leveraged buyout; BB Mobile took 97.6% in April and completed the acquisition in August. In October the company was renamed SoftBank Mobile and the red V came down. Vodafone’s Japanese chapter lasted five years; the securities code 9434 is what it left behind.
2015Three group carriers merged; renamed SoftBank Corp.
2018Relisted on the TSE first section at ~¥7tn
The new owner moved on price first. Immediately after the rebrand, SoftBank Mobile launched the White Plan at $8 (¥980) a month with free calls between SoftBank subscribers, against DoCoMo and au tariffs then running ¥4,000–5,000. Son had already broken pricing in broadband with Yahoo! BB and brought the same method to mobile; because the free-calling design rewarded whole families and friend groups for switching together, number portability worked in SoftBank’s favour month after month.
The second weapon was the handset. In July 2008 SoftBank became the first carrier in Japan to sell Apple’s iPhone 3G, several years ahead of DoCoMo and au — DoCoMo having walked away from Apple’s commercial terms. While DoCoMo held to its i-mode feature-phone line, SoftBank turned early to smartphones, and from FY2007 its net additions ran at or near the top of the industry. The business that had been sinking in third place under Vodafone was, with price and one exclusive device, back in contention. Consolidated operating revenue rose from ¥1,467.5 billion in the year to March 2006 to ¥1,971.1 billion in the year to March 2011. In April 2015 SoftBank BB, SoftBank Telecom and Ymobile were absorbed, putting fixed, mobile and MVNO under one roof, and in July the company took the name SoftBank Corp. — the fifth name in its corporate life.
In December 2018 it returned to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, thirteen years after being delisted, at a market capitalization of about ¥7 trillion. The parent, SoftBank Group, was carving out roughly forty per cent of a wholly owned subsidiary to raise about $23.6B (¥2.6tn) for its own transformation into an investment company. In the year to March 2019 the carrier reported ¥4,656.8 billion of revenue and ¥637.9 billion of operating profit, a 13.7% margin. Around the listing it also bought its way out of being a pure line reseller — SB C&S in IT distribution, Wireless City Planning, IDC Frontier in data centres, LINE Mobile in low-cost service — and ran a three-brand structure covering the market from premium to budget.
2023LINE Yahoo formed from Z Holdings, LINE and Yahoo
2025Sharp Sakai plant bought for an AI data centre; SB OAI Japan with OpenAI
Selling connectivity had stopped growing at more than a few per cent a year, so SoftBank bought the layer above it. Yahoo Japan became a subsidiary in June 2019 — the first time a Japanese carrier had taken control of an internet platform company — followed by ZOZO later that year. In March 2021 Z Holdings absorbed LINE and its roughly 95 million users; PayPay was consolidated in October 2022; and in October 2023 Z Holdings, LINE and Yahoo merged into LINE Yahoo. Communication, search, commerce and payments now sat inside one group sitting on its own network. Revenue for the year to March 2024 reached ¥6,084.0 billion with ¥1,060.1 billion of operating profit — 1.3 times the pre-Yahoo figure — with the non-telecom businesses supplying the growth.
The next layer up is compute. Under Miyakawa Junichi, the company concluded that whoever supplies AI must own everything from the infrastructure to the service. In March 2025 it bought the land and buildings of Sharp’s Sakai plant for about $668.2M (¥100bn) and began converting them into a 150-megawatt AI data centre, and broke ground on a site of more than 300 megawatts at Tomakomai in Hokkaido. In November 2025 it set up SB OAI Japan as a fifty-fifty venture with OpenAI, committing to bring the enterprise AI service “Crystal Intelligence” to Japan in 2026 — putting AI on top of the network, with SoftBank itself as the first customer. It is the same move the company has made since 1987: acquire the asset, then build the business on top of it.
What is interesting about this acquisition is that the largest mobile capital in the world, spending freely, swallowed Japan’s fixed and mobile businesses in a single gulp and yet never mastered the manners of the market it had bought. With mark-to-market accounting and the unwinding of cross-shareholdings releasing shares into the market, and heavily indebted European players turning seller, Vodafone seized the moment and paid more than ¥1 trillion for control. But the distinctively Japanese evolution symbolized by picture mail and pictograms would not fit inside the logic of a common global handset and a common global brand.
The other thing visible here is how nearly continuous the completion of foreign control and the retreat from it turned out to be. From taking 66.7% to full ownership and then to withdrawal was less than five years. The fixed and mobile businesses Vodafone could not handle were both taken over by Son Masayoshi’s SoftBank, rebuilt for the Japanese market, and turned around with price and the iPhone. Where exactly the difference lay between capital that imports a global standard and capital that turns local peculiarity to advantage remains, even after the upheavals since, an open question.
At the centre of this decision is that SoftBank, already holding the licence that is the ticket to entry, treated the time it would take to build from zero as itself a cost. Base stations, spectrum, fifteen million subscribers, a sales network — assets that would have taken years to assemble alone were obtained in a single transaction. The LBO structure, moving a ¥1.75 trillion company on ¥200 billion of its own equity, was a landmark in Japanese M&A; but it worked only because of the nature of a mobile business that keeps generating stable cash flow even while losing share. A price widely called impossible to recover was a level that could be justified only on the assumption that the buyer could actually execute a turnaround.
Looking back from the 9434 page as it stands today, this acquisition was also the moment ownership of the company passed from British to Japanese capital. Foreign money that had landed in Japan as one corner of a global strategy withdrew, and a domestic challenger took the assets over and revived them — the mirror image of the 2001 takeover. That net additions swung to first place within a year of the purchase shows that the same assets change in value according to the will of the management running them. How far a decision to “buy time” can be permitted in an industry as capital-intensive as telecommunications: for thinking about the conditions that justify an enormous price and enormous borrowings, this case remains a reference point.
Did the ambition to be number one in the world bear fruit?
The heart of this decision was to take the cash flow earned at home, and a credible path to repayment, and move the field of growth outside a maturing Japanese market. The reading that the sales and marketing methods honed in rebuilding Vodafone Japan could be used once more in a United States converging on LTE was, in itself, coherent. But the stage was a country with a different culture and different commercial customs, and without the dealer network that had carried the advance in Japan. Even with a stated limit against throwing good money after bad, committing some ¥1.8 trillion to a market with two entrenched leaders shows the weight of the decision.
Sprint did not reach the V-shaped recovery Son had sketched, and matters were finally settled by the 2020 merger with T-Mobile. It is hard to say the American venture, launched under the banner of becoming number one in the world, bore fruit as originally intended. That said, the flow by which SoftBank changed after this acquisition from a domestic telecoms operator into a global-scale investment company led on to the Arm purchase and the SoftBank Vision Fund. The great gamble of 2012 is not easily sorted into win or loss, and its verdict appears unsettled to this day.
At the centre of this decision was a choice: whether to regard a domestic telecoms business with little growth left as an asset to keep holding, or as the funding for the next investment. SBG took the latter, carving roughly forty per cent of a wholly owned subsidiary out to the market and directing ¥2.6 trillion toward its conversion into an investment company. The high payout ratio of 85% was designed as an answer to the conflicts of interest that attach to listing a parent and a subsidiary together, giving ordinary shareholders and the parent a structure in which they share the same fruit. It can be read as a design seeking a balance between rationality and criticism.
Even so, the first-day break below the offering price suggests the market was cautious about a high-dividend stock offering stability rather than growth. The arrangement by which a parent retains control while progressively monetizing a mature business leaves open the question of which way the interests of minority shareholders point. In recent years the Tokyo Stock Exchange has been pressing for parent-subsidiary listings to be unwound, and the capital policy this listing demonstrated stands as one concrete instance of a question still with us: how to reconcile control with returns to shareholders.
Each heading links to the full Japanese analysis — background, decision and outcome, with sources.
This is a condensed English edition. The full, source-by-source history — with the detailed narrative, financial tables, shareholders and executives — is maintained in Japanese: 日本語版（詳細）— SoftBank Corp. full history in Japanese →
SoftBank Corp. — 有価証券報告書 (annual securities reports), including the corporate-history and segment sections.
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