Cable & Wireless Japan staged what it said was one of the first “hostile” takeovers in Japan, but then proved to be unable to manage the company they had acquired
On October 26, 2004, Softbank announced the acquisition of Cable & Wireless IDC for YEN 12.3 billion (= US$ 110 million)
Cable & Wireless Japan: Today’s top article in Nikkei is about Cable and Wireless-Japan: the article reports that Cable and Wireless is in discussion with Softbank and a private equity firm to sell their Japan operations. Apparently this news article is not confirmed, and it already mentions a purchase prize on the order of US$ 100 million. This article appeared in the top position in Nikkei – but there are several things a bit mysterious about it.
Cable & Wireless Japan – why did they fail in Japan?
I did not follow Cable and Wireless recently in Japan, but it seems that C&W made a loss of YEN 61.6 OKU on sales of YEN 713 OKU, i.e. almost 10% loss.
Since we are insiders in Japan’s telecom sector, we know most of the details. To out it into short words, Cable & Wireless did not have the knowhow to manage a Japanese company. They tried but failed, and alienated a lot of people.
Spent all morning discussing with one of the innovation managers of a big European telco. Interesting. Spent afternoon with a US bio-tech company which which is thinking of asking us to build their business in Japan, and in the evening listened to a talk by Tadashi Onodera, the CEO of KDDI. Expected him to talk mainly about mobile – but he did not. His focus was a national VOIP network they are building, attacking the fixed line income of NTT. Got hold of him after his talk and discussed with him for about 10 minutes.
UPDATE: on October 26, 2004, Softbank announced the acquisition of Cable & Wireless IDC. Total cost of the acquistion is announced as YEN 12.3 billion (= US$ 110 million)
SoftBank today and 300 year vision report:
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