At the recent Startup India conference, SoftBank Chairman and Chief Executive Masayoshi Son announced that the company may scale up its planned investment of USD 10 billion it has pledged earlier to be invested in the country. The operator has invested USD 2 billion in Indian firms last year alone, focusing on two key sectors - telecoms and solar energy.
Softbank has formed a joint venture with India’s Bharti Group, Bharti SoftBank which includes investments in Hike Messenger. It has also invested in Indian e-commerce firms such as Snapdeal(e-commerce marketplace), Ola Cabs(taxi-booking service), Housing.com(online real estate platform), OYO Rooms(budget hotel aggregator) and ScoopWhoop(media start-up).
June last year, SoftBank entered India’s solar energy market with a venture with Bharti Enterprises and Foxconn Technology Group of Taiwan.
Masayoshi Son, Chaiman & CEO, Softbank
If I rescale, I will scale up. What will USD 10 billion become, I don’t know. If I have said that we will invest USD 10 billion in 10 years, we have invested USD 2 billion in a year. That’s over pacing and I think we will accelerate.
