BARCELONA—Listening to SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son during a keynote at Mobile World Congress (MWC) today, you might get pretty depressed. That is, until he starts sharing some of his secrets to success, like thinking out hundreds of years ahead instead of just to the next few quarters.
Masayoshi Son garnered quite a few chuckles from the audience attending a keynote that also featured luminaries such as Cisco CES John Chambers, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini.
Head of Japan's third largest carrier, he apparently is often described as a "crazy guy" who led the charge to buy Vodafone Japan in 2006 for more than $20 billion and then proceeded to lose a billion dollars every year for four years. "We took a crazy bet," he said, adding that the company at the time also had a lot of debt.
Nowadays, mobile penetration is already near saturation worldwide, ARPU is going down, and the math points to zero growth, he said. And if that doesn't depress an operator, the reality is Apple and Google take all the upside, and the mobile carriers are becoming the dumb pipe, he added.
The only two solutions are to increase market share by taking it away from competitors or increasing ARPU somehow. As it turns out, Softbank did both. Now its data ARPU more than offsets the decline in voice. "Sometimes craziness gives a good return," he said, generating applause.
In 2009, SoftBank surpassed the 20 million subscriber mark. SoftBank now has 100 percent of its subscribers on 3G and zero percent on2G. All of its 20,000 employees carry an iPhone or iPad and Wi-Fi is distributed all over the campus; 96 percent of them have Twitter accounts.
He also boasted that he has more followers on Twitter than anyone else in Japan, and as someone who was a big computer user going back decades, he confessed that 12 months ago he switched to a tablet-only mode of operation – he won't use a PC keyboard at all now, and he uses the tablet everywhere he goes – including the bathroom. If his customers share that kind of enthusiasm, it looks like he'll have the last laugh.