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SoftBank Proceeds From Alibaba Selldown Rise to $10 Billion

SoftBank Group Corp. has lifted the amount of money it will raise from selling down its stake in China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to $10 billion, after exercising an option to sell more shares through a trust.
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  • Bloomberg

TOKYO, Japan — SoftBank Group Corp. lifted the amount of money it will raise from selling down its stake in China's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to $10 billion, after exercising an option to sell more shares through a trust.

That is up from a previous figure of $8.9 billion, which was itself raised by $1 billion from an initial announcement earlier this week. SoftBank is selling shares in China’s largest e-commerce company for the first time since making an initial investment in 2000, as it looks for new investments in promising startups and strengthens a balance sheet that carries a debt load of 11.9 trillion yen ($109 billion).

The cash infusion will allow SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son to whittle down that debt and grant his company the flexibility to pursue acquisitions, offsetting the burden imposed by a costly but underperforming investment in loss-making US wireless carrier Sprint Corp.

“The balance sheet of Softbank has deteriorated since the purchase of Sprint,” said Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Research Institute in Tokyo. “Even if Son wants to do a huge M&A deal, he won’t be able to until he’s done with Sprint’s turnaround.”

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“Also, it wouldn’t be a good idea to divert resources to somewhere else.”

More Deals to Come

SoftBank is raising $10 billion selling shares through a trust as well as offloading stock to Alibaba and other investors.

An option to buy up to an additional 20 percent, or $1.1 billion, of trust securities exchangeable for Alibaba shares has been exercised in full, the Japanese company said in a statement Friday. That brings the total raised via the sale of such securities to $6.6 billion.

Alibaba is also paying $74 a share to buy back $2 billion of its own stock from SoftBank, which will also sell stakes worth $500 million apiece to two state-owned investment firms in Singapore at the same per-share price, Alibaba and SoftBank said. Another $400 million of shares will go to the Alibaba Partnership of senior executives.

President Nikesh Arora is now leading an effort to re-examine the company’s portfolio that will probably include further asset sales, a person familiar with the matter has said. It is in talks to shed its investment in Finnish game-maker Supercell Oy, people familiar with the matter have said. SoftBank has also decided that games are not a core business and may consider selling its stake in Japan’s GungHo Online Entertainment Inc., a person familiar with the situation has said.

Son has split SoftBank into domestic and overseas units, entrusting Arora with operations abroad and the search for the next Alibaba. Son started his investment in Alibaba with $20 million in 2000 and now owns 32 percent of the Chinese company, although that will decline following the share sale.

Debt Wariness

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But SoftBank’s move to sell assets and reduce debt has some bondholders wary of the risk that founder Son will use the cash for another acquisition.

The Japanese wireless carrier’s total debt has soared 5.6 times in the past four years following its purchase of Sprint, which has suffered seven straight years of losses and has $10 billion of liabilities coming due in the next three years. While SoftBank’s 2020 dollar bonds rallied Friday to a three-year high and its bond risk has more than halved in the past four months, it still has about a 0.4 percent chance of non-payment in the coming year, based on the Bloomberg Default-Risk Model, which considers factors such as share prices and debt.

SoftBank shares slipped 0.4 percent to 6,020 yen Friday. Hiroe Kotera, a spokeswoman for the company in Tokyo, reiterated that proceeds from the deal will be used for the repayment of interest-bearing debt as well as other general corporate purposes, declining to comment further.

By Takashi Amano and Reed Stevenson; editors: Robert Fenner and Edwin Chan.

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