Inside SoftBank's Struggle to Turn Around Sprint
Two years after takeover, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son struggles to overhaul the U.S. carrier — Billionaire Masayoshi Son asked to speak with U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy right away one Saturday last year.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-arc in SoftBank's U.S. adventure: Masayoshi Son had made Sprint the flagship of the investment agenda he and then-lieutenant Nikesh Arora were promoting in interviews just months earlier [[a:829270]], and two years in the WSJ finds the overhaul stalled — so stalled that Son was calling the U.S. ambassador on a Saturday, a sign the turnaround had become as much a Washington problem as an operational one.
The coverage that follows confirms the struggle compounded rather than resolved: within eighteen months SoftBank was weighing renewed merger talks with T-Mobile even at the cost of ceding control of Sprint, and by late 2017 sources said the deal had died over valuation, control, and regulator opposition [[a:923797]]. By 2019, CNBC was framing the team taking over WeWork largely through its disappointing record running Sprint — evidence the failure had become the reference point for judging Son's next rescues.
First-order effects
- Sprint remains subscale against larger U.S. rivals while its losses compete with Arora's investment plans for SoftBank's capital, forcing Son to treat regulatory goodwill in Washington — hence the Caroline Kennedy appeal — as a core turnaround input.
- Every month the standalone fix fails narrows Son's realistic options to consolidation rather than organic recovery.
Second-order effects
- A merger revival flips negotiating leverage to T-Mobile's side on exactly the points that later killed the deal — controlling stake, valuation, and regulator risk.
- Sprint's persistent weakness hands its larger U.S. competitors room to press their scale advantage on pricing and network investment without a credible fourth-force challenger.
Third-order effects
- The Sprint record becomes the template for evaluating every subsequent Son intervention — the same executives were measured against it when they took over WeWork — raising the credibility price of each new big bet.
- If acquisition-driven turnarounds keep failing, SoftBank drifts from operating its purchases toward defending confidence in the portfolio itself, the position Son found himself in during the 2020 turmoil that forced share buybacks [[a:952331]].
The trend: Son's playbook of buying distressed scale assets is colliding with integration reality, pushing SoftBank from standalone turnarounds toward consolidation deals and repeated emergency interventions across its portfolio.