Is there a future for the sharing economy?
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Economic Observer Observer” (ID :eeoobserver), author Chen Yongwei.
Sun justice old horse is hoofed
In June 2016, the consistently stable Sun Justice and his Softbank suddenly opened the “sell and sell” model.
At the beginning of the month, Softbank, which has always been a “strong holder of Ali stocks”, announced the sale of Ali shares. From June 1st to 3rd, the amount of planned sales was adjusted three times in just three days, from the initial plan to sell $7.9 billion to the last $10 billion.
Almost at the same time, Softbank also sold 16.34% of GungHo shares in its hands for $685 million, ending the mother-child relationship with the Japanese game developer. Within a few days, Softbank sold all the shares of Supercell held in its hands to Tencent.
Softbank’s substantial reduction in the shares of the companies it invested in caused a lot of speculation at the time. Many people believe that this should be the action that Softbank has to take in order to cope with the huge funding gap after the acquisition of Sprint; but some people have already vaguely felt that behind the big sell-off, the wily Sun Justice may be planning what is big. action”.
It’s not a problem. Soon after, this “big move” came. In October 2016, Sun Zhengyi announced that it will launch the largest private equity fund in history, the Vision Fund.
According to the plan, the fund’s fundraising will be as high as $100 billion, which is about 1.6 times the size of all VC funds in the world at that time. Corresponding to the huge volume is a huge ambition. Sun Zheng expects that this billion-dollar fund will eventually reshape the global technology industry by investing in the most promising technology companies.
In May 2017, the Vision Fund completed the first round of fundraising, raising a total of $93 billion. The sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as giant companies such as Apple, Foxconn and Sharp, have all injected capital into them, and Softbank itself has injected as much as $28 billion into the fund.
The funds are in place, and Sun Zhengyi immediately switched his work mode to “casting and voting”. The original bill of 100 billion yuan