Chapter 671: Subversive

"Welcome, Your Highness."

The Devonshire landed at Tokyo Yokota Airport. Barron chose Japan as the first stop of his Asian trip.

This time, he was relatively low-key and visited in a private capacity, but someone still came to the airport to greet him, that is, the founder of SoftBank Group, Sun Zhengyi.

Basically speaking, entrepreneurs are divided into two types of people. One type is relatively high-profile and good at building their own image, so as to gain the public's favor and support, and thus extend this favor and support to their own companies and products; the other type is very low-key and almost never appears in the public eye, let alone frequently accepting interviews and facing the camera.

In the early stage of Barron's "entrepreneurship", he was more like the first type of people. "The youngest British Duke" and "investment genius" can be said to be Barron's external image. After all, at that time, he needed to rely on these images to obtain funds and expand the scale of investment.

At that time, he not only accepted interviews, but also took the initiative to participate in some reality show variety shows.

But now, Barron no longer needs to build his personal brand image in this way, and as the scale of his assets expands, he even does not want his name to appear on the rich list, so he has become more and more low-key. He has not been interviewed for a long time, and all the relevant interviews are conducted by his spokesperson.

As for Sun Zhengyi, it is obvious that he also belongs to the first type of people. He can often be seen in various reports, and his image has also gained great benefits for SoftBank Group. For example, after the subprime mortgage crisis, although SoftBank Group did not receive as much investment as the US$50 billion from the Middle East as in the original time and space, it also received part of the funds withdrawn from the United States by the Middle East, which is always one or two billion US dollars.

Barron and Sun Zhengyi have known each other for a long time, after all, both of them are shareholders of Alibaba.

In addition to this relationship, Sun Zhengyi's SoftBank Group has a lot of cooperation with Barron's related industries, and both sides have received a lot of investment from Middle Eastern funds. Therefore, this time when he came to Japan, Sun Zhengyi welcomed him very warmly and entertained him.

"Congratulations, Mr. Sun Zhengyi, your transformation of Vodafone Japan is very successful, and thank you for bringing the Honor Mate series of mobile phones to the Japanese market..."

"It can be said that we are a win-win situation, Your Highness. The functions and quality of Honor mobile phones are not the same as those of Apple iPhones, which is the main reason for their success here."

The mutual flattery between Barron and Sun Zhengyi easily made the atmosphere between the two sides harmonious.

However, Barron was not exaggerating too much. Honor mobile phones can enter the Japanese market thanks to SoftBank Group.

In fact, the mobile phone market in Japan is somewhat special. When Nokia, Samsung, and Motorola were popular around the world in the era of feature phones, the most popular mobile phone brands in Japan were Sharp, NEC, and Panasonic.

This is not because the Japanese are patriotic, nor do they think Nokia, Samsung, and Motorola are not easy to use. The main reason is that the Japanese are rich and afraid of trouble. Therefore, the way they buy mobile phones is not to compare prices by themselves and then go to the mall to buy, but to buy mobile phones directly from mobile phone operators.

Therefore, even if there are foreign brands of mobile phones such as Nokia for sale in shopping malls, the local people are mainly used to buying mobile phones through operators, and these operators are closely related to their domestic conglomerates, which also control local mobile phone brands such as Sharp, NEC, and Panasonic.

In this case, they will definitely only sell their own brand mobile phones to the public. No matter how good Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and other brand mobile phones are, they can never enter the sales channels of operators.

After entering the era of smart phones, Apple mobile phones and Honor Mate series mobile phones have been very popular in many countries, and for a long time, people in Japan are still using local brand feature phones.

Japan's feature phones are more developed than any other country in the world. They have super large screens, flip mobile TVs, and extremely rich Internet services provided by operators... This is a closed mobile Internet system in Japan, and it has been working well for many years.

Under the propaganda of these operators, the Japanese people generally believe that traditional feature phones can already meet the needs of users well, and the use of smart phones is too complicated.

SoftBank Group has existed as an industry disruptor since its inception.

As early as 2001, Sun Zhengyi's SoftBank Group entered the broadband market that had long been monopolized by Japan.

At that time, Japan's PC Internet market was dominated by the old state-owned enterprise NTT. The cost of Internet access for the public was very expensive and the Internet speed was not fast.

NTT is a long-established state-owned enterprise in Japan, and its political and economic status in Japan is unmatched.

Sun Zhengyi was also very courageous at the time. He took the risk and rushed into the office of the Ministry of General Affairs of Japan with gasoline and lighters, forcing officials to negotiate with him - asking the government to amend the law to prevent NTT, which has long monopolized Japan's fixed-line Internet market, from monopolizing the fiber optic business.

Finally, Sun Zhengyi's adventure paid off. After negotiations, the Japanese government allowed SoftBank Group to enter the market. Therefore, Sun Zhengyi's SoftBank Group gained a huge market share through a low-price strategy and became an important network operator in Japan.

Later in March 2006, SoftBank Group entered the mobile communications market again.

They announced that they would acquire Vodafone's Japanese subsidiary for 1.75 trillion yen (about 11.87 billion US dollars) and officially enter the mobile communications business.

At that time, SoftBank Group did not have so much money, and they took on a huge debt of 1.9 trillion yen for this.

Later, SoftBank Group also used a low-price strategy to fight a price war and continuously increase its market share, becoming one of the three major mobile operators in Japan, along with NTT DoCoMo and KDDI.

As mentioned earlier, the main way for people in Japan to buy mobile phones is to buy them through the channels of mobile operators.

Therefore, after becoming the main mobile operator in Japan, SoftBank Group has subverted the mobile phone industry in Japan - they introduced Apple phones and Honor Mate series phones into the Japanese domestic market.

As early as when the Apple mobile phone was still under development, Sun Zhengyi had taken the initiative to go to the United States to meet with Steve Jobs, and finally obtained the sales rights of the iPhone in Japan.

After the launch of the Honor mobile phone, SoftBank Group was also the only communication operator in Japan willing to take over the sales rights of the Honor mobile phone.

Initially, because the Japanese people generally use feature phones, other operators in the industry were very pessimistic about SoftBank's move, believing that the Japanese people did not have the habit of using smart phones, so his move would eventually end in failure.

But the final result was surprising. SoftBank Group succeeded again. Apple mobile phones and Honor Mate series mobile phones were very popular in Japan. Young people bought them one after another and were proud to use Apple mobile phones and Mate series mobile phones. The market share of these two mobile phone brands continued to rise, becoming the brand with the highest sales volume in Japan.

Of course, the sales of IPhone mobile phones and Honor Mate series mobile phones have enabled SoftBank to achieve a win-win effect. The introduction of these two touch-screen smartphones has greatly increased the attractiveness of SoftBank Group, and a large number of fashionable young people in Japan have flocked to SoftBank Group's network.

The monthly data traffic expenses of these people on iPhone and Mate series phones are quite staggering. The monthly data traffic expenses of smartphones are more than ten times that of feature phones, which also makes SoftBank Group the first operator in Japan whose data revenue exceeds voice revenue.

In fact, whether it was when Barron acquired O2 Telecom and used a low-price strategy, or later acquired T-Mobile USA and impacted the American telecommunications market with a low-price strategy, they more or less referred to Sun Zhengyi's successful method in the Japanese telecommunications market.