Japan: A bridge too far?

The bridge loan Softbank has taken out to acquire Vodafone in Japan is enormous, negotiated on onerous terms and costly by Japanese standards.

By Chris Wright

Vodafone chief executive Arun Sarin 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

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