A phoneless vision

摘要

MENTION SOFTBANK and most Japanese people, understandably, think of tele-coms-it is Japan's third-largest wireless carrier. The company hopes to weaken that association. SoftBank is listing its tele-coms arm; shares in the unit were due to begin trading on December 19th, after The Economist had gone to press. SoftBank Group was expected to raise ¥2.6trn ($23.4bn) by selling off just over a third of the company. It is selling 1.76bn shares for ¥1,500 each, making it Japan's biggest-ever initial public offering and only just shy of the record set by Alibaba, a Chinese e-com-merce titan in which SoftBank Group owns a stake of about 29%, in 2014.