Amazing Son

Masayoshi Son is a Korean-Japanese businessman - whose grandfather came from Korea to Japan - and the founder and current chief executive officer of SoftBank Capital, and the chief executive officer of SoftBank Mobile. According to the Forbes magazine, his net worth is 7 billion dollars and he is the richest man in Japan, despite being the single person who has lost the most money in history (approximately 70 billion dollars in the dot com crash of 2000).

The company was one of the first to invest in Yahoo.com before the dot com boom, then took the Yahoo! Brand to Japan and established it as the dominant internet service in the country. Purchasing Vodafone UK‘s mobile license in 2006 gave it access to Japan’s 100m+ mobile subscribers and since then the company has innovated in bringing iPhone and iPad to the market, promoted Twitter and recently invested in video streaming service uStream amongst other things.

A third-generation son of a Korean family in Japan, Son was not considered a Japanese citizen until his family adopted a Japanese surname. Son pursued his interests in business by securing a meeting with Japan McDonald's president Den Fujita. Taking his advice, Son began studying English and computer science.

At age 16, Son moved to California and finished high school while staying with friends and family in South San Francisco. He then enrolled at University of California, Berkeley in which he majored in economics and took some computer science courses. Enamored by a microchip featured in a magazine, Son at age 19 became confident that computer technology would ignite the next commercial revolution.

Convinced that anything related to microchips could yield a fortune, Son decided to produce at least one entrepreneurial idea a day. He patented a translating device that he eventually sold to Sharp Electronics for $1 million. Applications of the patent include the Wizard series of Sharp PDAs.

Flush with cash, Son imported Space Invaders video arcade systems and dispersed them about the UC Berkeley campus. Soon after graduating from Berkeley with a BA in economics in 1980, Son started Unison in Oakland, California, which has since been bought by Kyocera.

The charismatic president of Softbank Corp., has announced a decade-long search for someone worthy of stepping into his shoes. About 300 people will be enrolled in the Softbank Academia, which is tasked with grooming his successor. About 10 percent of the candidates will be drawn from outside the company. Son has said he will hand over the company's management when he is in his 60s. At an annual shareholders meeting in June, he described the issue of who would succeed him as "the biggest risk for the company."

The "Next 30-Year Vision" calls for the Softbank group to expand its market capitalization from 2.6 trillion yen to 200 trillion yen, earn a place among the world's top 10 companies and increase the number of its group companies by 5-6 times!!!

From Wikipedia and Asahi Shimbun.