Masayoshi Son: Growing up raising pigs, 40-year-old billionaire made Huawei empire shake

Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of SoftBank Group, is worth $21.1 billion, according to the Bloombergs Billionaires Index. He is the second richest person in Japan, after Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai.

However, to get the results like today, Masayoshi Son had to go through difficult times, there were times when he wandered around the neighborhood where he lived to ask for leftovers to raise chickens and pigs... It's the care. Only, striving hard for the set goal, Mr. Son has achieved success.

Here are the secrets of billionaire Masayoshi Son's life, career, and investments.

Work hard, do your best for the set goal

Mr. Masayoshi Son was born in 1957 in a family not very well off. His family earns a living by raising pigs and poultry. When he was young, he also helped his family by collecting leftovers from families in the neighborhood.

When he was 16 years old, Mr. Son was fortunate to meet the founder of McDonalds Japan - Den Fujita - one of the people he considered his idol. It was Den Fujita who encouraged Son to study abroad in the US. Following this advice, a year later, Son went to San Francisco (USA) to continue his high school program.

From a young age, Son soon built a firm belief in the ability that he later exploited fully in business. This was further reinforced by his father's encouragement and belief that Son would one day be the number one power and influence in Japan. "I started to think that I shouldn't be content with being a normal person and believing that I would become a genius," he said.

After graduating from high school, he studied computer science and economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Passionate about microchips since childhood, Son believes that computer technology will become the next commercial technology revolution.

Mr. Son shared: "When I was in school, I had a hobby of coming up with new ideas for products. For me, thinking about new business models is like inventing new products."

So while still a student, he founded his first company with a product that was a multilingual interpreter, then sold it to Sharp for $ 1 million.

In 1981, armed with nothing but inherent confidence and admiration for Soichiro Honda - the founder of Honda, Son left the US and returned to his hometown, setting up shop in Fukuoka, on the island. Kyushu.

From a base of a dilapidated two-story wooden house with two employees, Son's company, the predecessor of SoftBank, quickly expanded into a major personal computer and software distributor by taking advantage of the storm. computer consumer fever. Gradually, Son branched out into broadband and invested in a variety of companies from Yahoo! to TV Asahi, Aozora Bank and Nasdaq Japan.

Notably, in 1995, Mr. Son had the opportunity to meet two Yahoo co-founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo. Three people talk together about the future of the Internet in a small office in Mountain View, California. After the meeting, he decided to "bet everything on it". As a result, SoftBank invested in Yahoo, which later became one of America's most visited content sites.

Since becoming a public company in 1994, SoftBank has always been at the top of the business. With an ambitious strategy and acquisition of many domestic and foreign businesses, Mr. Son gradually turned SoftBank into the most powerful corporation in the cherry blossom market.

Dare to think, dare to do and never give up

In the early 2000s, when technology was booming, Masayoshi Son spent tens of billions of dollars investing in more than 800 startups with the desire to create a multi-industry digital era in the country of the Rising Sun.

However, at that time, most of these startups failed, causing his fortune to "evaporate" to more than $ 70 billion. This makes Masayoshi Son once nicknamed "the world's unluckiest billionaire" by the Japanese media.

Not stopping there, Mr. Son also went through a gloomy time when he witnessed the sharp fluctuations of the stock market. The wave of declines caused Softbank's market capitalization to drop from $180 billion to $2.5 billion. The group's investments of hundreds of millions of dollars in other companies such as Alibaba and Nippon by Mr. Son also "dropped in price" to several tens of millions of dollars.

Despite consecutive failures, with a strong will, Masayoshi Son started over from scratch and persevered with the new investment. Because he always thought that "This life is too short to do small things".

In 2006, SoftBank bought Vodafone's mobile phone division and set out to overtake Japanese giant DoCoMo within 10 years. A year later, with subscriber growth rapidly, SoftBank became the first company to sell iPhones in Japan.

With unremitting efforts, SoftBank gradually recovered. In September 2014, Alibaba was world-famous with its IPO that raised $25 billion. Thanks to an early investment in Alibaba, SoftBank made a profit of about $4.6 billion and gradually became one of the largest telecommunications and Internet groups in Japan.

In order to promote the Internet of Things plan, in July 2016, SoftBank surprised the technology world when it announced its plan to acquire British chip designer ARM Holdings for 31.4 billion USD.

A year later, in 2017, SoftBank launched a $100 billion Vision Fund. This fund has poured capital into a series of startups around the world such as Uber ride-hailing, shared office WeWork, food delivery platform DoorDash or Indian e-commerce startup Flipkart...

SoftBank's strategy is to put huge amounts of money — its smallest deals are $100 million or so, the largest are billions of dollars — into the most successful tech startups in a given category.

Many young startups have been "backed" by Masayoshi Son to develop, but there are also businesses that fall into scandals and lose business. Among them, the most notable is the case of WeWork. From a valuation of $47 billion at its peak, the coworking startup is now worth just $2.9 billion. After WeWork delayed its IPO in 2019 and Neumann stepped down as CEO, SoftBank took control of the company.

Besides WeWork, SoftBank poured nearly $ 10 billion and owns 15% of Uber shares. However, when the Covid-19 epidemic spread, the ride-hailing company conducted several rounds of layoffs, and Uber's stock price plummeted, causing SoftBank to lose $ 5.2 billion.

Ignoring the losses with Uber or WeWork, SoftBank in general and billionaire Masayoshi Son in particular are still more successful than ever.

One of Son's boldest decisions was to acquire a 70% stake in US carrier Sprint Nextel for $20 billion in 2012. The billionaire said that Softbank needed to attack a new market, the market with different cultures. "We have to start over from scratch after everything we've built, but not taking on this new challenge will be a bigger risk," said Son.

Many experts at that time said that pouring "tons of money" in association with Sprint would give Softbank an extra advantage when dealing with Apple, helping to strengthen its position in the local market and the number one telecommunications company DoCoMo.

The successful listing of Korean company Coupang in New York and a 92% increase in the delivery platform DoorDash during the initial public offering helped enhance Son's reputation as one of the most influential investors. of the Asian region.

With the philosophy "We only live once, so I want to think big", Mr. Son has gradually achieved success, becoming one of the richest billionaires in Japan and in the top 10 influential people. best globally.

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