"中國攪局者"孫正義的美國賭局

Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of the telecommunications group SoftBank and perhaps Japan’s most successful example of an American-style entrepreneur, has made a career out of beating the odds. He casts himself in the mould of his hero, Soichiro Honda, an outsider who began making motors for bicycles and ended up building one of the world’s leading car manufacturers. Mr Son loves to recall how Honda defied Japan’s state planners, who wanted to restrict carmakers to a few national champions such as Toyota. Honda had to take on the establishment as well as his competitors.

身爲億萬富翁，電信集團軟銀(Softbank)的創始人孫正義(Masayoshi Son)是經過艱苦奮鬥成就一番事業的，他或許也是全日本最成功的“美式企業家”。孫正義崇拜本田宗一郎(Soichiro Honda)，視他爲榜樣。本田宗一郎從製造自行車的馬達起家，最終打造起了一家全球領先的汽車製造商。孫正義喜歡回顧本田宗一郎是如何對抗日本的國家規劃者的。政府當局原本只想讓豐田(Toyota)等少數幾家全國性龍頭汽車企業得到發展，本田宗一郎不得不同時應對當局和競爭對手。

Like Honda, Mr Son is a disrupter. He once playfully threatened to torch regulators’ headquarters if he did not have his way. He did (have his way, that is, not set the communications ministry ablaze). After acquiring Vodafone’s Japanese arm in 2006, he threw Japan’s staid telecoms monopoly into turmoil – much to the benefit of consumers.

與本田宗一郎一樣，孫正義是一個“攪局者”。他曾經開玩笑說，如果他達不到目的，就放火燒掉監管機構的總部大樓。他最終達到了目的（也就沒有一把火燒了交通部）。2006年收購沃達豐(Vodafone)日本子公司以後，他打破了日本電信業一潭死水的壟斷局面，其結果對消費者是很有利的。

SoftBank started a price war. It also introduced new services and products, including Apple’s iPhone, which years before anyone else Mr Son realised would upend Japan’s sophisticated but isolated market.

軟銀髮起了價格戰，並引入了新的服務和產品，包括蘋果公司(Apple)的iPhone。孫正義比所有人提前許多年意識到，iPhone將顛覆日本較爲高端但封閉的電信市場。

As an investor too, Mr Son has had moments of inspiration. Among the duds for which he has paid outlandish sums are some veritable gems. Most dazzling was his $20m punt 14 years ago on Alibaba, the Chinese ecommerce giant that was then just a twinkle in Jack Ma’s eye. SoftBank today finds itself with a 37 per cent stake in a company whose initial public offering later this year could value it at $130bn or more.

孫正義還是一位投資家，時不時會迸發靈感。在他那些出資金額聽起來離譜的投資中，有一些是真正的寶石。最令人叫絕的是14年前他拿出2000萬美元投資阿里巴巴(Alibaba)的事例，當時馬雲還只有初步想法，如今阿里巴巴已發展成中國電商巨頭。現在軟銀持有阿里巴巴37%的股權，而後者今年晚些時候上市後，市值可能達到1300億美元以上。

Now Mr Son is at it again, entangled in perhaps the biggest gamble of his life. He is taking on America. Last year SoftBank paid $22bn for a majority stake in Sprint, the third-largest US mobile provider. The aim is to “do a Vodafone” by using an also-ran carrier as a vehicle to disrupt an entire sector. This month, though, those plans ran into trouble. In the face of intractable opposition from US regulators, SoftBank withdrew its plan to combine with T-Mobile, the fourth-biggest carrier, a merger that was central to its strategy.

現在孫正義再次出手，而且這或許將是他畢生中最大的賭博。他要進軍美國市場。去年軟銀以220億美元收購了美國第三大移動通信運營商Sprint的多數股權。其目標是“打造一個沃達豐”，即利用一家並非頂尖的運營商來攪動美國整個移動通信行業。然而，這項計劃在本月出了岔子。由於美國監管機構堅決反對，軟銀取消了與美國第四大運營商T-Mobile合併的計劃，而這次合併對其戰略至爲關鍵。

Mr Son is not giving up. He has appointed a new Sprint chief executive, Marcelo Claure to try to reverse the haemorrhaging of Sprint customers, hundreds of thousands of whom have defected in the past year.

孫正義沒有放棄。他任命馬塞洛•克勞爾(Marcelo Claure)爲Sprint新首席執行官，以期扭轉該公司用戶大量流失的局面——在過去一年裏流失了幾十萬用戶。

This week the contours of a new strategy began to emerge. Together with the Japanese company Sharp, SoftBank has developed a near-frameless cheap smartphone. Sprint will offer the Aquos Crystal handset with 100 free pre-installed apps, along with contracts allowing unlimited downloads. To underline Mr Son’s global ambitions, in July SoftBank poached Nikesh Arora, Google’s head of business operations, as group vice-chairman and chief executive of a US-based unit aimed at executing his disruptive strategy.

一項新戰略在上週開始顯形。軟銀和日本夏普公司(Sharp)聯手，開發出了一款近乎無邊框的低端智能手機。Sprint將爲Aquos Crystal提供100款預裝的免費應用，以及允許無限量下載的合約。今年7月，軟銀挖來谷歌(Google)負責商業運營的尼克什•阿羅拉(Nikesh Arora)，請其出任集團副總裁兼美國某子公司的首席執行官，旨在執行其顛覆戰略——孫正義的全球抱負從中可見一斑。

There is a lot riding on Mr Son’s US adventure, and not only for SoftBank. Japanese manufacturers have a strong, if fading, record of challenging competitors on their own turf. Non-manufacturers have not fared so well. Nomura’s bold attempt to turn itself into a global investment bank failed. Efforts by pharma groups to expand abroad, including Daiichi Sankyo’s disastrous $4.7bn acquisition of Ranbaxy, an Indian generics maker, have not inspired confidence. Mr Son could do wonders by pulling off a victory.

孫正義進軍美國市場的成敗至關重要，這不僅僅是對軟銀而言。日本製造企業在挑戰競爭對手方面戰績斐然（現在可能稍爲遜色）。非製造業企業則表現不是那麼好。野村證券(Nomura)轉變爲全球投行的大膽計劃失敗了。日本製藥集團海外擴張的努力——包括第一三共株式會社(Daiichi Sankyo)以47億美元災難性地收購印度仿製藥生產商Ranbaxy——也沒有帶給人鼓舞。如果孫正義在美國市場取得成功，他將創造一個奇蹟。

On the face of it, his US challenge looks similar to the one SoftBank undertook in Japan. Sprint is a David taking on two Goliaths, or Verizon and AT&T as they are known in the US. Both have roughly twice the number of Sprint’s subscribers. Like Japan-before-SoftBank, US mobile prices are high and speeds relatively slow. At a recent technology conference, Mr Son joked that foreigners’ experience of US internet services led them to wonder: “Oh my God, how can Americans live like this?”

表面看來，孫正義在美國遇到的挑戰，與軟銀在日本經歷過的挑戰頗爲相似。Sprint好比與兩個巨人對抗的大衛——Verizon和美國電報電話公司(AT&T)。這兩家公司的用戶數量都是Sprint的兩倍左右。與軟銀出現之前的日本一樣，美國移動通信不只資費高昂，而且速度相對緩慢。在最近的一次科技會議上，孫正義開玩笑地說道，外國人在體驗過美國的互聯網服務之後會說：“天啊，美國人怎麼會過這樣的生活？”

In truth, though, the US will be a much tougher nut to crack. Not only are Verizon and AT&T dominant, they have access to more spectrum than Sprint is ever likely to grasp. In Japan SoftBank was able to outflank competitors by simultaneously building an acceptable network and offering cheaper tariffs. In the US, although Sprint is making valiant efforts to upgrade its patchy network, it will be hard to catch the two market leaders. They have better coverage and ample cash flow with which to fund investment. If anything, T-Mobile, which has been gaining subscribers faster than Sprint has been losing them, looks like the successful upstart. “Sprint has a mountain to climb,” says Benedict Evans, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

然而，進軍美國市場實際上要困難得多。Verizon和AT&T不僅在市場上佔據主導地位，而且它們可以利用的頻譜遠廣於Sprint。在日本，軟銀能夠通過鋪設讓用戶滿意的網絡和提供更便宜的資費來阻擊競爭對手。而在美國，儘管Sprint在竭盡全力對自身不完善的網絡進行升級，但要趕上那兩個市場領軍者還是非常困難的，後者的網絡覆蓋範圍更廣，而且有充足的現金流可以進行投資。如果說有什麼區別的話，T-Mobile看起來是成功的新貴，它贏得用戶的速度超過Sprint流失用戶的速度。風險投資公司Andreessen Horowitz的合夥人班尼迪克•埃文斯(Benedict Evans)表示:“Sprint面臨着嚴峻的挑戰。”

Mr Son has taken knocks before. In the dotcom crash of the late 1990s, SoftBank’s shares lost most of their value and Mr Son is said to have suffered a paper loss of $70bn. That would have bankrupted most billionaires many times over, but not Mr Son. Time and again he has come back from the dead. “Nothing stops him,” says one telecoms analyst. “There’s no such thing as impossible for this guy.”

孫正義以前受過挫折。上世紀90年代末，在互聯網泡沫破滅期間，軟銀的絕大部分市值都蒸發掉了，據說孫正義個人的賬面損失達到700億美元。大多數億萬富翁要是損失這麼大，都夠破產好幾次了，但孫正義沒有。他一次又一次地東山再起。一位電信業的分析師表示：“任何事都阻止不了他，對他來說，沒有什麼是不可能的。”

Nevertheless, even Mr Son concedes that, without T-Mobile, Sprint cannot muster the firepower to take on the industry leaders over the long haul. Before the deal was scuppered by regulators, he said that, without T-Mobile, Sprint lacked the scale for anything but a “pseudo fight”. Certainly, he has every chance of improving Sprint’s poor performance through innovation and network improvement. But to really shake the US market as he shook the Japanese one will take a change of heart from regulators. And they may be flame-proof.

然而孫正義自己也承認，如果沒有T-Mobile，Sprint無法長期集中火力挑戰行業中的領軍者。在監管機構否決這項併購交易之前，孫正義曾表示，如果沒有T-Mobile，Sprint只能打一場“僞戰鬥”。當然，他完全有可能通過創新和改善網絡來提升Sprint的糟糕業績。但是，要像撼動日本市場那樣真正撼動美國市場，除非讓監管機構改變主意——這些監管機構可能不怕火。