We want to be No. 1 in Asia on the Internet, said Masayoshi Son, the chief of Softbank, who founded the company in 1981.
The company, Softbank, already trumps Google in Japan, where it has the countrys most popular search engine and e-commerce site. It also runs the fastest-growing mobile phone carrier in Japan and operates its largest broadband network. Softbank is also the sole Japanese carrier for the Apple iPhone; in addition it is the only company providing data service for the iPad, which went on sale Friday to much fanfare.
But Softbanks most promising ventures are in China, where it has made a series of strategic investments in some of the countrys most prominent Internet companies.
It invested in the Chinese Web retailer Alibaba in 2000, pushing its founder, Jack Ma, to start Taobao, now the biggest e-commerce site in the country. Softbank remains one of Alibabas leading investors, with a 34 percent stake in the company.
This year, Softbank will introduce a service that connects Taobao to its Yahoo portal in Japan.
Softbank, based here in Tokyo, also has a 35 percent stake in Oak Pacific Interactive, which owns the hugely popular social networking and game-playing sites RenRen and Kaixin.com.
We want to be No. 1 in Asia on the Internet, Masayoshi Son, Softbanks charismatic chief executive who founded the company in 1981, said in mid-May at an event where he unveiled new cellphones. Before anyone knows it, Softbank will be a step ahead.
At the same time, Softbank has established itself as a bridge between Silicon Valley innovations and the growing Asian market, investing in American start-ups in exchange for rights to bring their services to Asia.
In the year to March, Softbank more than doubled its net profit to 96.72 billion yen ($1.04 billion), driven by strong performance in its mobile business, while operating profit soared 20 percent to a record 465.9 billion yen. This year, Softbank forecasts operating profit of 500 billion yen, and plans to raise capital spending by 180 billion yen, to 400 billion yen.
China has been a notoriously difficult market to crack for overseas Web companies. Google, eBay and Yahoo, not to mention social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, have all struggled there, because of strong domestic competition as well as government blocking and censorship.
American companies also complain that the country is not a level playing field; foreign companies must operate through locally owned firms, creating a cumbersome ownership structure that limits their flexibility. And some critics say foreign companies have failed to grasp the needs of local Internet users.
But in its push into China, Softbank has avoided many of these headaches by focusing on e-commerce, local social networking sites and online games sidestepping the difficulties of government censorship. For now, Softbank is betting that it will be commerce and entertainment, not the search for information, that drives Internet growth in China.
Softbank has also dodged, so far, the animosity that foreign businesses and, particularly, Japanese companies sometimes face in China, rooted in the troubled historical relationship between the two countries.
