SoftBank: empire-building, capital formation & power in Asian digital capitalism

Abstract

Venture capital (VC) firms in Silicon Valley have long enabled digital enterprises from Meta to Google. This article investigates SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate whose Softbank Vision Fund (SVF1) is the world's largest tech investment fund since its initiation in 2017. Led by Masayoshi Son, SoftBank has profoundly shaped AI-powered platform economies the world over, especially ‘unicorns’ such as Uber and Alibaba. With capital from East Asia and Middle East, SoftBank has disrupted the high-tech VC business globally. How to understand Softbank as a peculiar instance of Asian platform capitalism and a new form of Japan's keiretsu system? What are the patterns of expansion and contraction, business alliances and competition, corporate discourse, and evolving power relations therein? Drawing from news archives, corporate documents, and primary materials, this study examines and historicises SoftBank through a critical political economy perspective. After reviewing the contemporary trajectories of SoftBank's empire-building, we trace back to Japan's mobile internet boom around the turn of the century, to the developmental state model of the 1950–80s, and to Japanese settler colonialism and war-economy ‘planning’ in the 1930s Manchukuo, to deepen our analysis concerning the varieties of digital empire-building and their historical origins.

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