Buying Sprint and absorbing eAccess — the “world campaign” (2012)

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.