Shares in SoftBank Group Corp. plunged in Tokyo on Tuesday after it unveiled its ¥3.3 trillion takeover of chip designer ARM Holdings PLC, a deal that marks founder Masayoshi Son's biggest gamble so far on the future of technology.
The shares dropped as much as 11.3 percent to ¥5,329 as of 10:26 a.m. in Tokyo, heading for their biggest single-day decline since 2012. That followed a 5 percent fall in shares of SoftBank's U.S. unit Sprint Corp. in New York trading on Monday on concerns it would get less support from its parent company.
Son forged a career out of betting early on some of the pivotal technology trends of his time. Now he has made the biggest bet of his life on a nascent concept known as the "internet of things." His wager on ARM — the linchpin of the mobile revolution — is predicated on the notion that succeeding generations will grow reliant on appliances and gadgets that talk to each other and function free of much human intervention. For that to work, each of them must come with a microchip, and Son's betting it will be an ARM design.