SoftBank ‘to spend $21bn on 5G and 6G’ in 10 years, CEO announces
News

SoftBank ‘to spend $21bn on 5G and 6G’ in 10 years, CEO announces

Ken Miyauchi SoftBank CEO.jpg

SoftBank increased its income by 6% in the first three quarters of the financial year, and it expects the increase to be 5.4% over the whole year, the company announced today.

Ken Miyauchi (pictured), the president and CEO of SoftBank, who is set to become chairman on 1 April, said that income rose in every segment of the company, which growth driven by its Yahoo operations and its enterprise business.

The company plans to invest 2.2 trillion yen (US$21 billion) in 5G and 6G over the next 10 years, it announced. “We are steadily expanding our 5G service areas, with the aim of realizing a population coverage of over 90% by the end of FY2021,” SoftBank announced.

In the smart city field, one of the focus areas, the company will expand its business to other companies and cities, utilising our new corporate headquarters, which is designed as a smart building that utilizes AI, IoT, and 5G.”

The group, which last month decided to re-invest in the UK/India OneWeb satellite project, revised up its full-year forecasts, saying it expects revenue of 5.1 trillion yen ($48.4 billion), an increase of 200 billion yen on earlier forecasts.

Then company has benefited from the Covid-19 lockdown, it said, as well as from its digitisation programme.

However, it is planning to expand its non-telecommunications business. “In response to growing cloud demand, we opened a data centre — one of the largest in Tokyo — in December 2020,” said the company this morning. “Growth in the enterprise segment was driven by business solution and others including cloud, IoT and security.”

It noted that revenue of the enterprise segment increased by 8% and segment income increased by 21% year on year.

SoftBank said it will promote its programme of digitisation to end users with client companies — which it calls its B2B2C — business-to-business-to-consumer — business model. “We will fully utilise the strengths of Japan’s largest customer touch points, from telecommunications to social media within the group.”

 

Gift this article