Softbank Corp. might sell a roughly 67 percent stake in smaller cellphone service provider eAccess Ltd. to South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. and 10 other companies as early as this month, sources said Saturday.
The telecom giant's plan to reduce its stake and voting rights in eAccess to less than a third is in line with the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry's rules on allocating frequency bands to mobile phone carriers. Softbank is expected to reap several billion yen by offloading the shares.
Softbank, whose business has surged in recent years on the back of Apple Inc.'s iPhone, turned eAccess into a wholly owned subsidiary via an equity swap on Jan. 1. But the ministry has judged the acquisition as running counter to its policy of allocating frequency bands fairly to cellphone service providers.