America’s Road To Fame - Chapter 453

Vodafone is a multinational mobile phone operator, established in 1984, and by 1987, has become the world’s largest mobile communication company.

If it is to write a history of growth, there are many brilliant achievements to write, but its experience in Japan is unbearable.

The British-born telecommunications giant entered Japan in early 2001 with ambitious ambitions to grab a share of the fast-growing Japanese telecommunications market, but unfortunately hit a rock. The company’s profits continued to decline, and in 2006 it fell into a huge deficit.

Vodafone Japan is a subsidiary of Vodafone Group in Japan, but it does not understand the interests and preferences of Japanese people, and is not willing to cater to Japanese tastes, so its brand image has been poor.

To make matters worse, as Japan’s third largest telecommunications operator, its network quality is really poor.

In addition, Japan was about to launch the number portability system at that time, and the outside world believed that Vodafone users would definitely flow to Japan’s other two major operators, NTT and KDDI, which were also waiting for Vodafone users to “drop”. .

It was under such circumstances that Sun Zhengyi “snatched” Vodafone Japan from Cerberus Fund, and spent as much as $11.87 billion.

Not only that, Vodafone also owes a huge debt of 1.9 trillion yen outside, and now these debts fall on Sun Zhengyi, the pressure can be imagined.

In response to Sun Zhengyi’s acquisition, the outside world, and even within the SoftBank Group, objected one after another.

The capital market believed that Sun Zhengyi’s money would definitely go to waste. How difficult was the situation at that time? SoftBank Group’s shares plunged 60 percent after Son’s 2006 acquisition of Vodafone.

However, like many of Sun Zhengyi’s previous investments, those projects that were not optimistic eventually became his masterpieces that opened up the era. Sometimes, seeing these experiences of Sun Zhengyi, Chen William couldn’t help but sigh, this little old man really has a unique vision. people.

On October 24, 2006, just a few months after Sun Zhengyi replaced Vodafone Japan’s signboard with SoftBank Mobile, Japan officially implemented the number portability system.

Just the day before, SoftBank Mobile flooded the media with promoting their “golden package”.

All SoftBank users who join the Gold Package can make calls and send text messages for free.

Therefore, after the network switching system was launched the next day, a large number of users switched to SoftBank Mobile.

During the launch of the golden package, Softbank also simultaneously launched the orange package and the blue package. These three packages were launched ingeniously in combination with the time point of portability, which made Sun Zhengyi make a fortune.

However, he did not stop. In January 2007, Japan’s found that Softbank launched the most powerful monthly mobile phone package in history, which only costs 980 yen per month, which is the white package.

In order to prevent the loss of users, NTT and KDDI also had to follow closely and significantly reduce their monthly rent levels, which were previously as high as 4,000 yen. Therefore, the white package opened the era of low-cost mobile phones in Japan.

The more important feature of the white package is that the tariff is not only cheap, but also optimized in structure. Users can easily understand the free plan in the package, and the charging standard is clear at a glance.

This strategy has put Sun Zhengyi ahead of his competitors, but he still has no intention of letting him go.

Just two months later, Sun Zhengyi attacked again and launched an “upgraded version” based on the white package. If users are willing to pay double the monthly rent, they can enjoy a discount of 10.5 yen for 30 seconds during the charging period.

After another two months, Sun Zhengyi once again expanded the user base of white package users and launched the “family version” of the white package. All family members who use the white package are free of charge, so that relatives and friends around the user are also included in SoftBank Mobile.

Since the release of the package, Sun Zhengyi attracted 500,000 users within 10 days, and this number doubled after half a month.

Since then, the number of users of the white package has soared at a rate of 1 million per month, which is undoubtedly a miracle in Japan, where the communication market has been saturated.

After Sun Zhengyi reorganized the Japanese business of “Vodafone”, which was renamed “SoftBank Mobile”, SoftBank Mobile’s monthly net growth has reached the first in the industry.

In the following years, the number of users of SoftBank Mobile has increased from 15 million to more than 30 million. SoftBank Mobile has become the number one mobile operator in Japan, and half of the new mobile phone users choose it.

It can be said that Sun Zhengyi’s investment has always followed his unique investment philosophy, which is called the “time machine” theory.

The so-called “time machine” refers to the different development stages of the IT industry in the United States, Japan, and China.

When the development of countries such as Japan and China is still immature, first start business in more developed markets such as the United States, and then go back to Japan when the time is ripe, and enter China and India, as if sitting on a time machine and returning to America a few years ago.

Sun Zhengyi is a person with a very international perspective. His ancestral home is South Korea, he was born in Japan, and studied in high school and university in the United States. He also believes that his ancestors and grandsons of Huaguo are the same branch, so he highly respects Huaguo in his business. Sun Tzu’s Art of War. This unique life experience created Sun Zhengyi’s “time machine” theory.

In 1996, the Internet wave in the Silicon Valley of the United States began to ferment. Sun Zhengyi invested 100 million US dollars in Yahoo. After Yahoo went public, Sun Zhengyi only sold 5% of the shares and made a profit of 450 million US dollars.

Since the United States is the birthplace of this wave of Internet waves, and Japan is relatively backward, Sun Zhengyi went to the United States to invest in a large number of Internet companies with foresight, and the amount of company wealth he held even exceeded Bill Gates for a time. .

After making money in the United States, Sun Zhengyi returned to Japan again and established Yahoo Japan, with Softbank holding 51%, and Yahoo Japan became Japan’s largest search engine and portal.

Since then, Sun Zhengyi has invested heavily in Internet companies in China and India, which are more backward than Japan. Classic cases include Alibaba, Shanda, and Renren.com.

Sun Zhengyi also invested in companies such as inmobi in India.

Sun Zhengyi has a very deep insight into the mobile Internet. He foresaw early on that the mobile Internet would become the hegemon of the future.

Before the birth of the iPhone, Sun Zhengyi once met with Jobs. Sun Zhengyi told Jobs that the era of mobile communications will definitely come. In any case, we must acquire mobile companies or obtain licenses.

Jobs said to Sun Zhengyi: “I understand, very good, but you still have to get the license and come back.”

Sun Zhengyi said to Jobs: “Sooner or later, I will get the license, or I may acquire other companies. When I get it, or I successfully acquire it, don’t forget it.”

Then the two broke up with a smile.

Then, as mentioned above, in 2006, Sun Zhengyi acquired Japan’s third-largest operator Vodafone Japan for $11.8 billion and renamed it SoftBank Mobile.

Sun Zhengyi launched a crazy price war in Japan~www.mtlnovel.com~, which made SoftBank Mobile’s users rapidly increase from 15 million to 30 million. It experimented with a classic case of how backward operators turned their backs into victory in the Japanese market.

This time, he aimed his eyes at Spriel, apparently using his “time machine” theory again.

Japan is the most developed country in the global telecommunications industry. Japan’s three major operators, NTTDoo, KDDI, and Softbank, all have very strong competitiveness.

Japanese operators are much stronger than operators in most other countries in terms of service level, traffic management, value-added service development, and terminal customization.

The competition in the telecommunications market in the United States is far less intense than that in Japan.

Sun Zhengyi wanted to buy Spriel because he wanted to transfer SoftBank’s experience in Japan to the United States, and fought a price war with Verizon and AT&T, the two major American operators.

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