As a Japanese, Son Zhengyi is also very well-known in China, because he has invested in Ali with great success, spending only $80 million and achieving hundreds of billions of dollars in returns. For now, SoftBank still holds a 24% stake in Alibaba and is its largest shareholder.
Although Son Zhengyi is not as famous as Buffett in the investment industry, he can also be called an investment master. When the Internet rose in the 1990s, Son invested wildly, spending billions of dollars and finally betting on Yahoo and Ali.
In fact, in the Chinese market, in addition to Alibaba, Son Zhengyi has also invested in hundreds of companies, including the well-known Shanda Group, Sina, NetEase, Shell and other companies, and has also obtained good returns.
Ma Yun commented that Sun Zhengyi was a wise and foolish person, quick to make decisions, and able to do things according to his own ideas. Therefore, after talking with Ma Yun for 6 minutes, he decided to invest in Ali. However, Son Zhengyi is very delicate in his work, and when starting a business, he listed 25 criteria for 40 projects, and made a 10-year expected income statement, capital turnover statement and organizational chart.
The successful investment has brought great returns to Son Zhengyi, who has become the richest man in Japan many times, and his wealth was once close to bill Gates. However, investment is risky, and there are many failures behind the success. Didi, which invested in China, made it lose a lot.
Didi is the largest online ride-hailing platform in the mainland, which was originally supported by Tencent. But then it was favored by SoftBank and invested heavily in many times in a row. According to the data, Didi raised a total of $24 billion, and SoftBank invested $12 billion. As a result, SoftBank has also become Didi's largest shareholder.
At the end of June 2021, Didi secretly went public in the United States, with a market value of nearly $80 billion, and SoftBank also made billions of dollars. If Didi does not have an accident and continues to maintain good growth, the market value is expected to continue to rise, and it is not impossible to break through the 100 billion US dollars, then Didi may become the most successful investment of SoftBank in China after Ali.
However, all this was already doomed when the decision to go public was made, because Didi's listing was not reviewed and there were irregularities. After announcing the investigation and taking down the app, Didi suffered a heavy blow, and its market value plummeted, and there is only about $18 billion left, and the market value has evaporated by $62 billion (about 400 billion yuan).
Today's Didi is full of crises, 25 app shelves for more than half a year, still not on the shelves. T3, Cao Cao travel, Meituan taxi, Gaode taxi and other opponents frantically besieged and seized the market. Didi lost tens of billions of dollars last year and its market share declined.
Affected by Didi's investment, SoftBank Group's net profit in the third quarter of fiscal 2021 was 29.05 billion yen, down 99.9% from 1.1720 trillion yen in the same period last year.
Invested $12 billion, Didi's market value is only $18 billion, it must be a loss. Didi is currently starting to delist from the United States and expects to list in Hong Kong, but that is also a long process. Therefore, SoftBank wants to get a high return on Didi, unless there is any turnaround, it can only continue to wait.
SoftBank suffered heavy losses and remembered Ali again. In fact, in recent years, SoftBank has used Ali as a "cash machine". Encountered financial difficulties, I thought of cashing out from Ali's reduction. In 2020, SoftBank lost a lot of money and cashed out $13.7 billion from Ali. Now, SoftBank has moved the idea of selling Ali's shares, which caused Ali's US stocks to fall by more than 6% on Monday.
For softbank and other capitals, of course, they hope that the more market share of the companies they invest in, the better, but for the country, they do not want a single one. In the online ride-hailing market, Didi has been the only one for many years before it dares to run so boldly to the market, thinking that it can be too big to fall.
Faced with an increasingly stringent regulatory environment, Didi must first rectify itself before it can set off again.