Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of the telecommunications group SoftBank and perhaps Japan’s most successful example of an American-style entrepreneur, has made a career out of beating the odds. He casts himself in the mould of his hero, Soichiro Honda, an outsider who began making motors for bicycles and ended up building one of the world’s leading car manufacturers. Mr Son loves to recall how Honda defied Japan’s state planners, who wanted to restrict carmakers to a few national champions such as Toyota. Honda had to take on the establishment as well as his competitors.
身为亿万富翁，电信集团软银(Softbank)的创始人孙正义(Masayoshi Son)是经过艰苦奋斗成就一番事业的，他或许也是全日本最成功的“美式企业家”。孙正义崇拜本田宗一郎(Soichiro Honda)，视他为榜样。本田宗一郎从制造自行车的马达起家，最终打造起了一家全球领先的汽车制造商。孙正义喜欢回顾本田宗一郎是如何对抗日本的国家规划者的。政府当局原本只想让丰田(Toyota)等少数几家全国性龙头汽车企业得到发展，本田宗一郎不得不同时应对当局和竞争对手。

Like Honda, Mr Son is a disrupter. He once playfully threatened to torch regulators’ headquarters if he did not have his way. He did (have his way, that is, not set the communications ministry ablaze). After acquiring Vodafone’s Japanese arm in 2006, he threw Japan’s staid telecoms monopoly into turmoil – much to the benefit of consumers.
与本田宗一郎一样，孙正义是一个“搅局者”。他曾经开玩笑说，如果他达不到目的，就放火烧掉监管机构的总部大楼。他最终达到了目的（也就没有一把火烧了交通部）。2006年收购沃达丰(Vodafone)日本子公司以后，他打破了日本电信业一潭死水的垄断局面，其结果对消费者是很有利的。
SoftBank started a price war. It also introduced new services and products, including Apple’s iPhone, which years before anyone else Mr Son realised would upend Japan’s sophisticated but isolated market.
软银发起了价格战，并引入了新的服务和产品，包括苹果公司(Apple)的iPhone。孙正义比所有人提前许多年意识到，iPhone将颠覆日本较为高端但封闭的电信市场。
As an investor too, Mr Son has had moments of inspiration. Among the duds for which he has paid outlandish sums are some veritable gems. Most dazzling was his $20m punt 14 years ago on Alibaba, the Chinese ecommerce giant that was then just a twinkle in Jack Ma’s eye. SoftBank today finds itself with a 37 per cent stake in a company whose initial public offering later this year could value it at $130bn or more.
孙正义还是一位投资家，时不时会迸发灵感。在他那些出资金额听起来离谱的投资中，有一些是真正的宝石。最令人叫绝的是14年前他拿出2000万美元投资阿里巴巴(Alibaba)的事例，当时马云还只有初步想法，如今阿里巴巴已发展成中国电商巨头。现在软银持有阿里巴巴37%的股权，而后者今年晚些时候上市后，市值可能达到1300亿美元以上。
Now Mr Son is at it again, entangled in perhaps the biggest gamble of his life. He is taking on America. Last year SoftBank paid $22bn for a majority stake in Sprint, the third-largest US mobile provider. The aim is to “do a Vodafone” by using an also-ran carrier as a vehicle to disrupt an entire sector. This month, though, those plans ran into trouble. In the face of intractable opposition from US regulators, SoftBank withdrew its plan to combine with T-Mobile, the fourth-biggest carrier, a merger that was central to its strategy.
现在孙正义再次出手，而且这或许将是他毕生中最大的赌博。他要进军美国市场。去年软银以220亿美元收购了美国第三大移动通信运营商Sprint的多数股权。其目标是“打造一个沃达丰”，即利用一家并非顶尖的运营商来搅动美国整个移动通信行业。然而，这项计划在本月出了岔子。由于美国监管机构坚决反对，软银取消了与美国第四大运营商T-Mobile合并的计划，而这次合并对其战略至为关键。
Mr Son is not giving up. He has appointed a new Sprint chief executive, Marcelo Claure to try to reverse the haemorrhaging of Sprint customers, hundreds of thousands of whom have defected in the past year.
孙正义没有放弃。他任命马塞洛•克劳尔(Marcelo Claure)为Sprint新首席执行官，以期扭转该公司用户大量流失的局面——在过去一年里流失了几十万用户。
This week the contours of a new strategy began to emerge. Together with the Japanese company Sharp, SoftBank has developed a near-frameless cheap smartphone. Sprint will offer the Aquos Crystal handset with 100 free pre-installed apps, along with contracts allowing unlimited downloads. To underline Mr Son’s global ambitions, in July SoftBank poached Nikesh Arora, Google’s head of business operations, as group vice-chairman and chief executive of a US-based unit aimed at executing his disruptive strategy.
一项新战略在上周开始显形。软银和日本夏普公司(Sharp)联手，开发出了一款近乎无边框的低端智能手机。Sprint将为Aquos Crystal提供100款预装的免费应用，以及允许无限量下载的合约。今年7月，软银挖来谷歌(Google)负责商业运营的尼克什•阿罗拉(Nikesh Arora)，请其出任集团副总裁兼美国某子公司的首席执行官，旨在执行其颠覆战略——孙正义的全球抱负从中可见一斑。
There is a lot riding on Mr Son’s US adventure, and not only for SoftBank. Japanese manufacturers have a strong, if fading, record of challenging competitors on their own turf. Non-manufacturers have not fared so well. Nomura’s bold attempt to turn itself into a global investment bank failed. Efforts by pharma groups to expand abroad, including Daiichi Sankyo’s disastrous $4.7bn acquisition of Ranbaxy, an Indian generics maker, have not inspired confidence. Mr Son could do wonders by pulling off a victory.
孙正义进军美国市场的成败至关重要，这不仅仅是对软银而言。日本制造企业在挑战竞争对手方面战绩斐然（现在可能稍为逊色）。非制造业企业则表现不是那么好。野村证券(Nomura)转变为全球投行的大胆计划失败了。日本制药集团海外扩张的努力——包括第一三共株式会社(Daiichi Sankyo)以47亿美元灾难性地收购印度仿制药生产商Ranbaxy——也没有带给人鼓舞。如果孙正义在美国市场取得成功，他将创造一个奇迹。
On the face of it, his US challenge looks similar to the one SoftBank undertook in Japan. Sprint is a David taking on two Goliaths, or Verizon and AT&T as they are known in the US. Both have roughly twice the number of Sprint’s subscribers. Like Japan-before-SoftBank, US mobile prices are high and speeds relatively slow. At a recent technology conference, Mr Son joked that foreigners’ experience of US internet services led them to wonder: “Oh my God, how can Americans live like this?”
表面看来，孙正义在美国遇到的挑战，与软银在日本经历过的挑战颇为相似。Sprint好比与两个巨人对抗的大卫——Verizon和美国电报电话公司(AT&T)。这两家公司的用户数量都是Sprint的两倍左右。与软银出现之前的日本一样，美国移动通信不只资费高昂，而且速度相对缓慢。在最近的一次科技会议上，孙正义开玩笑地说道，外国人在体验过美国的互联网服务之后会说：“天啊，美国人怎么会过这样的生活？”
In truth, though, the US will be a much tougher nut to crack. Not only are Verizon and AT&T dominant, they have access to more spectrum than Sprint is ever likely to grasp. In Japan SoftBank was able to outflank competitors by simultaneously building an acceptable network and offering cheaper tariffs. In the US, although Sprint is making valiant efforts to upgrade its patchy network, it will be hard to catch the two market leaders. They have better coverage and ample cash flow with which to fund investment. If anything, T-Mobile, which has been gaining subscribers faster than Sprint has been losing them, looks like the successful upstart. “Sprint has a mountain to climb,” says Benedict Evans, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
然而，进军美国市场实际上要困难得多。Verizon和AT&T不仅在市场上占据主导地位，而且它们可以利用的频谱远广于Sprint。在日本，软银能够通过铺设让用户满意的网络和提供更便宜的资费来阻击竞争对手。而在美国，尽管Sprint在竭尽全力对自身不完善的网络进行升级，但要赶上那两个市场领军者还是非常困难的，后者的网络覆盖范围更广，而且有充足的现金流可以进行投资。如果说有什么区别的话，T-Mobile看起来是成功的新贵，它赢得用户的速度超过Sprint流失用户的速度。风险投资公司Andreessen Horowitz的合伙人班尼迪克•埃文斯(Benedict Evans)表示:“Sprint面临着严峻的挑战。”
Mr Son has taken knocks before. In the dotcom crash of the late 1990s, SoftBank’s shares lost most of their value and Mr Son is said to have suffered a paper loss of $70bn. That would have bankrupted most billionaires many times over, but not Mr Son. Time and again he has come back from the dead. “Nothing stops him,” says one telecoms analyst. “There’s no such thing as impossible for this guy.”
孙正义以前受过挫折。上世纪90年代末，在互联网泡沫破灭期间，软银的绝大部分市值都蒸发掉了，据说孙正义个人的账面损失达到700亿美元。大多数亿万富翁要是损失这么大，都够破产好几次了，但孙正义没有。他一次又一次地东山再起。一位电信业的分析师表示：“任何事都阻止不了他，对他来说，没有什么是不可能的。”
Nevertheless, even Mr Son concedes that, without T-Mobile, Sprint cannot muster the firepower to take on the industry leaders over the long haul. Before the deal was scuppered by regulators, he said that, without T-Mobile, Sprint lacked the scale for anything but a “pseudo fight”. Certainly, he has every chance of improving Sprint’s poor performance through innovation and network improvement. But to really shake the US market as he shook the Japanese one will take a change of heart from regulators. And they may be flame-proof.
然而孙正义自己也承认，如果没有T-Mobile，Sprint无法长期集中火力挑战行业中的领军者。在监管机构否决这项并购交易之前，孙正义曾表示，如果没有T-Mobile，Sprint只能打一场“伪战斗”。当然，他完全有可能通过创新和改善网络来提升Sprint的糟糕业绩。但是，要像撼动日本市场那样真正撼动美国市场，除非让监管机构改变主意——这些监管机构可能不怕火。