Japan: A bridge too far?

By Chris Wright

Vodafone’s Sarin: chose Softbank’s bid of $15 billion because it required no further scrutiny of assets

M&A has never looked like this before, particularly in Japan. Softbank’s leveraged buyout of Vodafone KK, the Japanese operations of the Vodafone group, is a landmark for a host of reasons, not all of them all that encouraging. For a start, there’s the sheer scale of the deal. The ¥1.8 trillion ($15.3 billion) purchase price is funded in the main through a ¥1.28