Inside SoftBank’s Struggle to Turn Around Sprint

Two years after SoftBank bought Sprint Corp. for $22 billion, billionaire Masayoshi Son seems stuck with a chronic fixer-upper. The Overland Park (KS) company just slipped into last place in subscribers among the four major US mobile operators. Sprint needs a massive network overhaul to stay competitive. And its shares have lost about half their value since the SoftBank takeover, the biggest ever by one of Japan’s best-known CEOs. Despite the pileup of problems, Son made a surprise appearance on Sprint’s quarterly earnings call to tell investors he remains committed to the “historical turnaround” at Sprint and doesn’t intend to sell it. He left out one telling detail: No one wanted to buy the struggling carrier. Within the past year, Son and another top SoftBank executive floated the idea of a sale to cable-television giant Comcast Corp. and European telecommunications company Altice SA, apparently. It went nowhere.

Son says he has been working for months with his 100 top network engineers seven nights a week from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. to come up with a new fix-it plan for Sprint. But there is growing competition for his attention. “I should go back to where I was focused,” he says in a reference to the Internet side of SoftBank, which turned a $20 million bet on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. into a $70 billion windfall when the Chinese e-commerce giant went public in 2014. The Internet revolution “continues to explode, and I should get back to where my passion still has a lot,” Son says. For now, Son’s strategy at Sprint centers on patching up the carrier’s network without sinking much more of SoftBank’s money into what has become an increasingly difficult fight for customers. His hopes for resuscitating a merger with brash rival T-Mobile US Inc., dashed by regulators last year despite the CEO’s charm offensive, are on hold at least until after the presidential election in 2016.