- General
- October 13, 2020
- 6 minutes read
SoftBank Eyes Own SPAC
Masayoshi Son, CEO, SoftBank. “Masayoshi Son” by Danny Choo is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 The SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund is looking to capitalize…
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The SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund is looking to capitalize on this year’s boom of publicly-traded special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and launch its very own SPAC, as first reported [paywall] by Bloomberg. Rajeev Misra, the head of the SoftBank Vision Fund, teased the company’s SPAC plans in a Bloomberg interview at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference which was held virtually this year. The target size of the Vision Fund’s planned SPAC isn’t yet determined and the company is expected to seek outside funds and possibly contribute its own capital for the SPAC, reports Bloomberg.
Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), or blank-check firms as they’re called, refers to a shell company that has no operations but is taken public with the intent of acquiring or merging with an existing company utilizing the proceeds of its public listing. It’s such that this year has been a record for the debut of SPACs with nearly $40 billion in collective gross proceeds so far in 2020, compared to about $14 billion in the whole of 2019.
SPACs have particularly found good use in the tech industry, with many companies from the industry having clinched deals to go public by the way of mergers with SPACs. Such companies include the likes of Clover Health, a health insurance upstart; Hims, a telehealth upstart; AppHarvest, an indoor farming upstart; and ChargePoint, an electric vehicle charging infrastructure provider.
That SoftBank is looking to launch its own SPAC isn’t quite startling, given that it’s a prolific and major investor in technology companies. The Japanese technology conglomerate may be looking towards a new way of proving its investment prowess and by the way of its own SPAC in this case.
