Friday, 15 November 2024, 9:30am HKT at CVA 1022 and on Zoom
Venture capital (VC) firms in the Silicon Valley have long enabled digital enterprises from Meta to Google. This study investigates SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate whose Softbank Vision Fund (SVF1) is the world’s largest tech investment fund since its initiation in 2017. Led by Masayoshi Son, SoftBank has profoundly shaped AI-powered platform economies the world over, especially ‘unicorns’ such as Uber and Alibaba. With capital formation from East Asia (Japan and China) and West Asia/Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE), SoftBank has disrupted the high-tech VC business globally. How does Softbank represent a peculiar model of Asian platform capitalism? Why, despite its problems and critics, has Softbank managed to grow into the ‘Softbank Empire’? Drawing from news archives, corporate documents, and primary materials, this study examines the case of SoftBank through a critical political economy perspective. After reviewing the contemporary trajectories of SoftBank’s empire-building, we trace back to Japan’s mobile internet boom around the turn of the century, to the developmental state model of the 1950s-1980s, and to Japanese settler colonialism and war-economy ‘planning’ in the 1930s Manchukuo, to better understand varieties of digital empire-building and the historical origins.
JACK QIU is Chair and Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Author of more than 120 articles and chapters, he has published numerous books in both English and Chinese including Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (U of Illinois Press, 2016), World Factory in the Information Age (Guangxi Normal U Press, 2013), and Working-Class Network Society (MIT Press, 2009). Jack is an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA) and a recipient of the C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy. He is also a Past President of the Chinese Communication Association (CCA).
Light refreshments will be served
To attend in person, please click here to register:
To attend on Zoom, please click here to register:
For enquiries: cmcr@hkbu.edu.hk
Organised by:
- Research Postgraduate Studies Programme
- Centre for Media and Communication Research (CMCR), School of Communication
