Softbank Billionaire Masayoshi Son Takes on Mikitani’s Rakuten in E-Commerce War

October 8, 2013 Leave a comment

Billionaire Son Takes on Mikitani’s Rakuten in E-Commerce War

Billionaire Masayoshi Son, who’s vowed to build the world’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has added another target: Japan’s e-commerce market. Son, chairman of Yahoo Japan Corp. (4689), said yesterday the Internet search and e-commerce business will eliminate fees and make it easier for shops to open on its online shopping service in a direct challenge to Rakuten Inc. (4755), operator of the country’s largest Internet shopping mall. The new strategy threatens another billionaire, Hiroshi Mikitani, founder and president of Rakuten. Investors bet the earnings of both companies will suffer, sending Rakuten down a record 20 percent in Tokyo trading. Yahoo Japan plunged a record 11 percent. “Yahoo’s new policy poses a potential threat to Rakuten’s position,” said Tomoaki Kawasaki, an analyst at Iwai Cosmo Holdings Inc. (8707) in Tokyo. “The fact that Son appeared and talked means they are serious about this.

To contact the reporter on this story: Yuki Yamaguchi in Tokyo at yyamaguchi10@bloomberg.net

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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