How Masayoshi Son managed to gain exclusive rights to sell iPhone in Japan
‘The iPhone is a huge ordeal’ is an understatement in Japan. As per Statista, at the beginning of 2020, 3 out of every 5 smartphones sold in Japan were iPhone.
However, breaking into the Japanese market was no cheap trick. To get there, Steve Jobs took a chance on a self-made Japanese billionaire, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son.
Son had already established himself as a savvy technology entrepreneur, selling two companies by the age of 19 that netted him more than USD 3 million. He was also a successful investor, with a lucrative stake in Yahoo! Japan.
Two years before Apple officially acknowledged the iPhone’s existence, Son called Jobs and arranged for a meeting. Son showed up with a rough skeuomorph of what he thought an Apple phone will look like. At the time, the Apple co-founder had his reasons to be skeptical and thought that this guy was crazy. Jobs casually stated that he would give exclusive iPhone selling rights to his company in Japan. Son insisted a formal agreement, which Jobs declined because Son didn’t own a mobile carrier company at the time.
In order to grab and seal that deal, Son went ahead and bought Vodafone’s Japan unit in 2006 for USD 15 billion. The company was later renamed to SoftBank Mobile. This acquisition helped Son and SoftBank Mobile enter an exclusive deal with Apple in 2008 to sell the iPhone in Japan. It was a major coup for the company as it started eating DoCoMo’s market share, a competitor mobile phone operator in Japan.
The meeting between the two magnates gave Son an inside edge to understand Apple’s phone and what he needed to accomplish to gain exclusive selling rights for the iPhone. With his farsighted vision, he astutely acquired Vodafone Japan, which later got exclusive rights to sell the iPhone in Japan.
Son’s foresight, persistence and negotiation skills not only helped his company receive exclusive rights but also become a multi-billion dollar company in Japan.
The only thing certain about any negotiation is that it will lead to another negotiation.
― Leigh Steinberg
Sources:
https://mashable.com/2014/03/14/steve-jobs-iphone-japan/
