7Japanese investment bank SoftBank Group Corp has announced a major reorganisation of its businesses. The firm has said that it would separate its profitable domestic mobile business from its global business, which includes a majority stake in US mobile operator Sprint Corp.
SoftBank’s President Nikesh Arora will now head the overseas management company, whose holdings also include a 32 per cent share of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and a range of other Internet and technology firms.
SoftBank’s Japanese telecom business and shares in domestic Internet firms such as Yahoo Japan will be managed by a separate company led by Ken Miyauchi, who now heads SoftBank’s Japanese mobile operations, the company said in a statement.
However, Indian analysts are unsure of how this reorganisation will impact Softbank’s investments in the country. The company has been betting big in the Indian start-up ecosystem over the last two years, investing in companies like Oyo Rooms, Housing.com, Ola and Snapdeal among others.
SoftBank, which began as a distributor of packaged software, branched out into telecom, media and tech investm-ents. SoftBank’s domestic mobile business, acquired from Vodafone in 2006, drove growth for much of the last decade, helped by its status as the first seller of iPhones in Japan